It’s tough being a scholar sometimes. Just ask Pope Benedict. In the course of a long speech, he took the time to tell a little story about a 600-year-old meeting between two educated thinkers, one Christian and one Muslim. And now he has the whole Islamic world angry at him. His story went something like this:
The Pope’s speech quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the Pope said.
“He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.”
Benedict described the phrases on Islam as “brusque”, while neither explicitly agreeing with nor repudiating them.
Hey, this is a popular blogging technique! Just link to a story somewhere else, without giving any explicit endorsement. I wonder if Benedict has been reading Instapundit, or Little Green Footballs?
So now apparently Muslims are upset, as they don’t appreciate the linkage between Islam and violence. Personally, I find it unpersuasive to claim that the two are unconnected when so many people persist in connecting them. Also, if your goal is to insist that your religion is one of peace and tolerance? Probably burning the Pope in effigy is not the best way to get that message across.
The real problem with the Pope’s speech was his claim that violence had no place in true religion (you know, like Christianity).
“Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” the Pope said.
We all know that most big-time religions have many examples of terrible violence in their past, and Christianity is certainly no exception. Even putting aside the many recent incidents, it’s interesting to consider the record that is part of official Church doctrine, as recorded in Scripture. Steve Wells has done the hard work of going through the Old Testament and counting up the death toll for both God and Satan, taking care not to exaggerate by only including those examples for which specific figures are given. (Via Cynical-C.) The final tally:
- God: 2,270,365.
- Satan: 10.
This doesn’t include stuff like the Flood, for which reliable figures are unavailable. If violence is incompatible with the nature of God, He sure has a funny way of showing it.
To be serious for a second: my thing about religion is generally not that it’s bad, but that it’s false. The history of religion is far too complex to be summed up as “good” or “bad,” and there are obviously components of both. The Salvation Army, odious discrimination policies notwithstanding, does a tremendous amount of good. Religious people are generally better at donating to charity than non-religious ones (last I heard; I don’t have specific figures, so this could be wrong). And I like a lot of the art and architecture.
The overall effect of religion may be good or bad, I don’t know how to judge. But if you’re going to talk about it (which the Pope is definitely going to do, given his job description), you should at least be honest, including all the ugly parts. Pretending that either Islam or Christianity is all about non-violence and peaceful dialogue is patently false. You can try to say that the episodes of violence are aberrations, not reflective of the “real” religion, but that’s just the No True Scotsman fallacy. What a religion is, for all important purposes, is revealed by what its adherents actually do, for better or for worse. If Pope Benedict had said “We are all fallible human beings, and people of our faiths do not always act wisely, but we should all strive to promote peace over violence within our churches,” perhaps there would have been fewer effigies.
I’m convinced that religion’s record is bad enough to call it bad, regardless of any good works. Some people might say it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I’m pretty sure we’d still have good things in the world, and a lot less bad (or at least far fewer excuses for the bad).
I often hear that religious people on average give more to “charity” than non-religious people. In fact I just heard a story on NPR to that effect just last week. now I don’t have the numbers, but I suspect that these studies include the the religious peoples contributions (tithing) to their own churches as “charity.” But most churches actually spend very little of their overall budget on helping the poor or providing social services. Instead most of their budget goes to maintaining their facilities, paying the salaries of the ministers and the work of missionaries. I do not consider that real charity.
Thank you.
Well spoken.. or rather, typed 🙂
Now if only we could get this message out of a scientists’ blog, and into the minds of those gullible “believers”.. Talk about wastage of (human) resources.
Hey Sean, the Universe is supposed to be preposterous, remember?
Sure. But if you give to a gigantic charity like Reading Is Fundamental, an almost equal portion of your dollar goes to the director’s salary, facilities, and the work of outreach staff. Same dif.
Ministers have to eat, they need shelter. Missionaries need to eat, and need shelter. If you’re giving to that cause believing that you’re saving souls, well, the person giving likely thinks that is more important, or of equal importance to feeding the poor in terms of social service. However, some ministers also council families in need, run soup kitchens and daycare and such.
In any case, since we don’t know where “religious” people’s money is going, no point in putting pants on the straw man.
You seem to be forgetting about papal infalliblity!
In fact the popes lecture was remarkable. He touched upon a core issue of western cultures dialogue with other cultures: Is reason universal or merely cultural. In a society as reflective as ours this is a question that fundamentally shapes the way we engage with other cultures, and the Pope came down strictly on the side of universal reason.
You have strenously defended reason against it’s adversaries internal to western culture (and there would be plenty of room for disagreement with the pope there), but while the argument is clad in theological terminology, “we” are on the same side fundamentally.
Religion has slowed down the progress of our civilization. I explain on my blog using anthropic reasoning that this is why we find ourselves in a civilization where religion plays such an important role rather than an atheistic civilization. 🙂
http://www.deschner.info/index.htm?/en/work/kg/criminalhistory.htm
Anyone read these?
On the question of whether or not God can tell something false to man, or even lead them to idolatry, I have to observe that few parents are completely honest with their children and I would expect nothing different from God. The adults simplify things, fail to inform children of details, and sometimes tell them stories that deviate far from the truth. My latest tendencies towards this is to doubt His word on the status of special relativity as a principle that belongs in the foundations of physics.
Since Christianity would never have become more than just another cult without the swords of Constantine and his soldiers, it’s pretty rich for the Pope to intimate that Islam is illegitimate because its sucess depended upon military force.
Well rightly said that so many people link Islam with violence. So many people in the past also believed the sun goes round the earth too. A scientist should find out himself. On the other hand, so many people in the east think Islam does not endorse violence. And perhaps they have a better knowledge of it because they practice it.
The western press has a strange way of depicting the east. Believe me, there have been too many sane discussions on this issue, but they only publish pictures of burning effigies.
Why don’t you read a chapter (surah, i will recommend the third) in Qur’an and find out yourself?
I am not here to promote, but to defend.
From my Qur’an, Surah 3 verse 12:
Say to those who reject Faith:`Soon will ye be vanquished and gathered together and driven into Hell – an evil bed indeed (to lie on)!
Not necessarily. See above (“Pope” and “Christianity is all nice and peaceful”).
Sean,
Given the volatile global circumstances we live in these days the fact that the leading cleric of the Catholic church should try to present someone else’s faith with such scornful condescension (albeit in a scrupulously veiled manner) suggests that he understood quite well the reaction it would generate among muslims afterwards: (maybe he was hoping for someting like this to happen from the outset of his remarks). (And one may surmise that muslims are not as dim-witted as others may think them to be; they can understand the difference between “scholarly” commentaries and veiled insults.)
Moreover, imagine if you will, him giving a “scholarly” presentation of the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or the tireless efforts of countless Christian missionaries sent all over the African, Asian, American (North and South), and Australian continents to spread the “true” message of the Gospels to the wretched savages inhabiting this God’s Earth: I’m not so sure he would have been so keen to include allusions to various intellectual thinkers (one of whom being from the “receiving” community) reflecting over the nature of Christ’s message and its attendant effects on the lives of most (non-European) non-Christians…
As Desmond Tutu once said (and I paraphrase since I don’t know the exact words): The Europeans took away our freedom, and gave us Christianity in return.
Arun, do you know if the Vatican library keeps copies of those texts. After all the Pope is (I hear) a professor of theology…
The pope is a professor of theology, and, as a matter of fact, possibly one of the sharpest thinkers of our times, as even his strongest intellectual critics (within and outside the church) will admit.
Just a few years ago he engaged Jürgen Habermas (sort of like the German pendant to Chompsky, i.e. the leading sociologist, philosopher and intellectual) in a dialogue/debate.
The focus of his papacy so far has not been expansion of faith, he is not a missionary, he wants to focus on bringing a good and enriching life to the people within the church first, and not at the cost of others around.
He certainly is no one who denies history and the historicity of institutions like the catholic church, but at the same time, his actions and directions now are not bound to them. A violent history has implications for the present, but these are not always straightforward. 60 years after the Holocaust Olmert asks for German soldiers in Lebanon to defend and implement Israeli interests.
I wish those burning effigies of the Pope had also burned effigies of Osama bin Laden, or Mullah Omar, or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or President Bashir or al Sadr or any number of actual vicious killers – the Pope has no battalions and merely said something. I wish they were as protective of the right to vote, women’s right to education and to work, as they were of what someone says about their religion.
To PK
Yes, it basically warns the unbelievers, but does it say that ‘kill those who reject faith’? That is what people say Qur’an says.
Apart from that Qur’an also says- ‘Whoever believes in One God, does righteous deeds and is just and reasonable, whatever he may call himself, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim, he will be forgiven.’
To Charon
Point well taken. 🙂
No seriously, there is a need to foster positive ideas in many parts of Muslim world.
To Arun
Well I agree with you that these issues should be getting more importance than they are getting. Given that, these undue insults should be protested. Given that, it should not be a pretext for not being progressive.
Sean, I reiterate
If there is a God
what does God need armies or swords for
what does God need missiles or nuclear weapons for
Does God care
what flag you are wrapped in when you are dead
whether it be the stars & stripes (red & white)
whether it be blue & white stripes
These are the things of mortals & men!!!
—
If there is a God, then fear God not death
for only A God can bring you back to life, or cut you off.
—
“… the Pope has no battalions and merely said something. …” – Arun
The Pope should learn Orwell’s definition of Crimestop.
‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.’ – G. Orwell, 1984, Chancellor Press, London, 1984, p225.
In a film about Alan Turing’s life it was mentioned that religion makes you fear when there nothing to fear and gives you hope when there no hope. 🙂
It’s sort of funny that so many “scholars” in the West – who gladly proscribe the birth of science to Western minds (and *exclusively* to Western minds) – should fail to notice what most non-Western historians (and educated laypersons alike) seem to catch notice of quite readily / effortlessly. Look through the following before making sweeping statements regarding Islam or Mohammed I say:
The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (MIT Press), (ed.) Jan P. Hogendijk, (ed.) Abdelhamid I. Sabra
“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262194821/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added/104-1939686-1090340?ie=UTF8”
or
Muslim Heritage
“http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?TaxonomyTypeID=22”
I guess our learned professor just kinda’ missed these sources in his many years of intellectual explorations of Islam and Muslim thought.
I think the evidence is overwhelmingly against religion of all types. The belief systems are logically incoherent and unfalsifiable. I think arguing about their merits and faults is akin to arguing about who’s the better captain, Picard of Kirk. It’s a fun bar conversation but meaningless.
Unfortunately, a large portion of humanity appears to need a goal and/or idea larger than themselves to give their lives meaning. I propose (in the US at least) that public school curriculum include philosophy and rhetoric classes- the art of thinking combined with the skill of debate. It’s a shame that we ignore the development of our kids’ intellectual skills.
For me a least the imagining the fantastic things humanity can achieve sends shivers down my spine- mega structure, nanotech, bio-engineering, it’s awe inspiring. The thought of contributing to expanding human endeavors over mega-years or more dwarfs the paltry ambitions of the many religions.
sumit, you seem to be arguing with somebody, but I can’t tell who it is. What are the “sweeping statements regarding Islam or Mohammed” you are cautioning us against?