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.
Satan clearly got into the publishing house the day before the printing and fudged his figures.
Clearly.
The Pope is the Tom Cruise of the religious world. Whenever he says/does anything that’s stupid and/or funny (but in a sad way), it’s immediately front-page, above-the-fold news.
Also, wasn’t the Palaeologos family the last ruling dynasty of Constantinople? I think that old Manuel’s son was the last Emperor. Maybe Manuel should have learned to choose his friends more carefully, instead of devoting his time to insulting Persians.
fh’s apparent apologetics notwithstanding we do need to keep something very important in mind. Prior to being elected Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger headed the Vatican’s arbitrary and authoritative dogma enforcement agency: the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. He was not your everyday professor of theology, but rather just another official Torquemada in a long line of them. He was responsible for excommunicating a number of Catholic priests; no, not for their sexual proclivities, but for believing in liberation theology and creation spirituality. Pope Benedict VI as grand inquisitor makes his remarks not only inappropriate, but decidedly hypocritical.
The “sweeping statement” mentioned by sumit in comment #23 may just be Sean’s post title, “No true believer”.
Is it possible to truly believe in anything that is so vague and undefined as a mysterious dogma with no hard facts?
Because no religion gives hard facts, it follows that no religion can be truly believed by anybody using plain old, down-to-earth common sense. Religious zealots must suspend their common sense, which means that their “belief” is always forced and therefore is always insincere, and untrue.
The punishing of heretics and the promise of heaven to recruit believers is a forced, corrupt, immoral and cynical carrot-and-stick, so it follows that such ideology selects only insincere and untrue believers.
No wonder religion is in crisis generally.
One thing that is true : it doesn’t make sense to talk about “the” real religion.
There is very clearly no “one true religion” in the world. There is “one true science,” in the sense that all scientists agree on many things and generally agree on the methodology and standards of evidence. (It’s just that sometimes things are complicated enough or ambiguous enough that different scientists rationally reach different conclusions.)
With religion… different people have different religions. And, who knows whether any or all of them are “false” ; religion done right isn’t really subject to the methodology of science. (If it is, then it’s not really religion per se.) Faith, really, is by and large a personal thing, nonwithstanding all the organized religions out there with tremendous political power. That is a political thing, and they manipulate the language of faith to their ends. But faith itself is something for each person, which may or may not provide comfort, inspiration, etc. It also sometimes provides ignorance, which is the case when many use their faith to deny the knowledge of modern science.
There is no “the” religion. There are Muslims and there are Mulims; some are violent in the name of their faith, some are peaceful in the name of the faith. Likewise with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. Every religion will have in its history ugly episodes, becuase it’s part of human history, and human history is replete with ugly episodes.
-Rob, who knows that trying to talk about religion as anything other than a childish delusion on this blog only invites scorn
Nice post Professor. I guess all I can say is… amen to that 🙂
NM
I agree with Prof. Knop that religion is by-and-large a personal and subjective concern; but what the entry deals with here is the ecclesiastical authority of over half-a-billion persons (if my figure is anything to go by; I don’t know the exact count) making an unwarranted and thinly-veiled attack on the faith of another community, while he himself selectively forgets to (or more likely intentionally decides not to [my hunch only]) mention the historical role of *his own* institution (i.e. the Papacy) in advocating ruthless cruelty and intolerance towards those outside the fold of Roman Catholicism (including other sects of Christianity, e.g. Protestantism, etc.)
Furthermore, if he is supposedly an advocate of universal reason (over dogmatic religious doctrinces) he probably shouldn’t have been the primary enforcer of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”; this doesn’t seem quite readily compatible with his current position…
Lastly, as for the web-links I provided: I think it’s time to set the record straight: the whole *enterprise* of experiment-oriented study and investigation of nature and natural phenomena was founded and cultivated within the philosophical modus operandi of Islamic scholarship (before that there really was no such enterprise, although it may be noted that Archimedes was one such person who did carry out experiments during his investigations, e.g. Archimedes’ Principle; (however, throughout his life he was derided and osticized by his peers exactly for that reason!)). So, the Pope doesn’t seem to mention these (contradicting) little facts when he opines on Islam…
(Doesn’t suprise me though… just look through Church-sponsored depictions of Islam and Mohammed throughout its institutional history.)
p.s. If you want to know more on this, please read Roger Bacon’s writings on “Arabic sciences”… the most fun part is where he tells (at times even urges) his Cambridge contemporaries to adopt the practice of “Arabic scientists” when investigating natural phenomena instead of Aristotlean scholasticism.
Sumit
I suspect that every reader and writer here knows about the Arab role in protecting the Greek legacy from the European dark ages (i.e., catholicism). We are also well aware of the Arab contribution to mathematics, although not much physics of that era has seemed to survived the test of time.
Clearly, anything a scientist says has no moral weight, because after all they gave us the nuclear bomb, and poison gas and high explosives and anthrax and guided missiles and so on and so forth – ever more efficient ways of killing each other in large numbers. What is sauce for the Pope is sauce for the scientists as well. History doesn’t shine kindly on scientists either.
Arun — that argument is made a lot, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair.
Yes, it is true that the advance of science includes the advance in the understanding of military technology. You could even go farther and point to global warming, which is a consequence of industrialization, which depends on various bits of science.
However, the difference is that the enterprise of science itself is by and large neutral to these things. The motivation behind the use of all these bad things was cultural and political. Science enabled it just because knowledge isn’t inherently all “good”, but it wasn’t the scientists pushing the use of these things.
In contrast, it was the religious authorities pushing the Crusades and the Inquisition. It is religious leaders driving the civil war in Iraq, and that was driving the civil war in northern Ireland. Etc.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge; if you learn more, you may be able to use it for good and bad things. A very strong argument can be made that the good things vastly outweigh the bad things, and thus we should continue the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
As for religion — one may also be able to make the same argument, but it’s not relevant to this. Organized religion is much more like a political entity, and it’s got crimes aplenty.
This is a statement of the same order as: all muslims are suicide bombers, all catholics are hypocrites, all jews are miserly, and so on. Try to keep the discussion free of such generalities.
PK,
The thesis of my post was to illustrate the following: modern *experiment-oriented* science owes its *very existence* to scholarship persued within the broader theological compass of Islamic doctrines (hence the reference to the text above). Christian scripture is directly antithetical to scientific scholarship as we know and practice today: hence the perennial bifurcation between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ within Western intellectual culture; Islam – on the other hand – actively encourages Man – as God’s Viceroy on Earth – to investigate and learn of Creation through his intellectual faculties: so that Man may come to know and understand the Creator better.
The idea being promoted by the Pope is that Islam is incompatible with reason (while Christianity is) is amusing and comical to say the least!; in fact it’s been the reverse if my history classes taught me anything. However, as (I assume) all of us will readily accept, religion can (and has!) been misused by many for great evil and inhumanity… it’s not just within Islam or Christianity…
The issue being raised here is his selective use of quotations.
Manas Shaikh,
Wrote: “many people in the east think Islam does not endorse violence” , but they do know that many of its preachers and their charities do! As Sean, remarked, all religions get defined by what their practitioners do.
Chinmaya,
In the overwhelming instances where we witness violence (from muslims) there we also note an underlying political reason: if the US was not so adamantly supportive of Israel, while the bulk of the Palestinian people were rotting in front of our TV sets every night, maybe the phenomenon of jihad would not have received such grassroots support. I really fail to see how the US (or even Israel) can go about bombing the living daylights out of mostly civilians around the world without tangible justification – and it’s a debatable issue! – while the receiving parties are pre-judged as “terrorists” and “enemies of freedom” should they rightfully retaliate. (If you don’t agree with what I present then by all means allow (even invite if necessary!) the US military to bomb your house and country indiscriminately – and should you retaliate you will become a “terrorist” – that’s your prerogative.
Number of people Islamic terrorism has killed in the East is enormous. Of course they always have a nobel cause (haha…).
It may be misleading to claim that science flourished under Islam. As I read the evidence, Islam was as hostile to free thought as Christianity. It’s just that in the first couple of centuries of Arabic domination, the dead hand of Christian orthodoxy was removed from the exercise of science, philosophy, and mathematics by invaders who didn’t much care about such matters. As time went by and Islam became entrenched, the faithful gradually became less and less tolerant, which is perhaps why there wasn’t very much interesting philosophy after Averroes and Ibn Khaldun and not much science either.
sumit,
I am not talking about the Israel and the media issue; the media bias is too obivous, I should’ve been more detailed. Saudi charaties have funded extremism and terrorism in India. Add to that whats has gone on in Sudan.
Taking human life is never noble. Taking life through justification(s) based entirely on lies and deception is even worse…
Jim,
Firstly:
May I know the sources from which you came to learn of this?
Secondly:
Scholarship within the West regarding Islam has not been the most objective it could have been: many of the works of historians of science – such as Duhem, Sarton, etc. – are considered grossly obscure/distorted and pathologically biased against Islam and its contributions to world history (but that has been, still remains, and will likely remain an issue when it comes to the study of Islam in the West); current scholars – such as A. I. Sabra – usually refer to original sources for their information.
from your post:
“…Islam was as hostile to free thought as Christianity.”
Comment: Please privide documentary evidence.
“It’s just that in the first couple of centuries of Arabic domination, the dead hand of Christian orthodoxy was removed from the exercise of science, philosophy, and mathematics by invaders who didn’t much care about such matters.”
Comment: the concept of a “University” – a centre of higher learning open to both laypersons and religious clerics alike – has its roots in the Islamic world, e.g. Al-Azhar University – the world’s first “true” institution of higher learning. Also refer to Roger Bacon and other early Christian “secular” thinkers for further reference.
sumit, I find it hard to believe that people like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton were influenced by Islam’s scientific tradition, except in a very indirect way. Also, with very emotional issues like this it is very hard to get a good gauge of the Western scholars’ bias. To be honest, from the people I know, I’d be surprised if there is a significant bias in the serious scholarly community these days.
sumit, are you saying in #38 that all Islamic terrorism is retaliation?
While I think it’s true that for much of its history, Christendom was the unwashed barbarian fringe on the edge of Eurasian civilization, and later owed much to Arabic civilization, I think it’s possible to go overboard in defending the latter. My impression is also that Islamic thinking grew more rigid sometime after 1000 CE; one source might be Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, which talks a lot about early Islamic freethinkiers (Faylasufs).
As for the first university, see Wikipedia on “University”, with two or three Indian and one Byzantine universities said to be founded before Al-Azhar. The history of experimentation I don’t know about, but I know that for much of history the advanced part of the world was China and India, with their inventions diffusing or being re-invented in the West, and it would be easy for Arab historians to ignore China as for European historians to ignore Islam, though I think traditional Arab and Iranian historians were more aware of what they owed to India, e.g. “Arabic” numerals.
I think an “objective” history of humanity with limited resources might well be one of China and India, with occasional digressions — early ones to the Fertile Crescent, late ones to the invention spree of 1500s+ Europe, plus ones in the middle for the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, among others. But the majority of the people and inventions were in China and India, AFAIK.
Dear Sumit,
I have a great deal of respect for a number of Islamic philosophers, some of whom I’m quite familiar with. Indeed, I raise the question of whether Islam per se had much to do with intellectual productivity because of the way in which popular Muslim religiosity inspired the persectution of people like Averroes. After the triumph of Christianity, a great many Greek-inspired scientific, mathematical, and philosophical people relocated to the East, many of them in Syria and Persia. That’s why individual knowledgeable about Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Strabo, Euclid and other classical authors were available during the period when translations into Arabic and Syriac were made. What the philosophical activity of the period had to do with Islam, per se, is less clear to me, though it is evident that philosophy had quite an effect on how Islam eventually defined itself, a process that was underway during this same period.
I’m not raising these questions rhetorically or polemically. My doubts about the standard story of science in the Muslim world are real questions, i.e., I don’t claim to have the answers. At a guess, I think that a serious account of the relationship of Islam and reason would, like the corresponding account of the relationship of Christianity and reason, conclude that the faith has sometimes sponsored and sometimes impeded thought but that, sociologically speaking, a deep-seated popular anti-intellectualism has usually dominated.
The direction this thread of comments has taken is fairly indicative of the passion found in human religiosity. We have sumit pleading with us to accept that islam is something qualitatively greater than he assumes we think it is (at least historically); we have those who hold science as a liberating epistemology from our millenia of religious based credos; we have those who are expressing their displeasure with a Pope meddling in world politics furthering divisiveness through hypocrisy and arrogance. Well, geeez, go figure.
If sumit so desires us to acknowledge his islam’s contribution to science, he also needs to acknowledge that islam garnered a great deal of that from indian and chinese primary sources (and that includes the notion of higher education). Much of this was taken by the bow and sword.
Science, as a process of acquiring knowledge of the physical universe, is not political, it is amoral; and as such, the knowledge, particularly the reliable predictability of it, has been used by humans to do terrible things to one another, and to do amazingly wonderful things to alleviate suffering across the spectrum of species and creeds.
Religion, the normative and descriptive properties of which are of great value to study, provides human beings with deeply-binding collective organizational frameworks and structures, that themselves demand protection and expansion. The indigenous tribal people of New Guinea connect with their divine order prior to killing and eating their human enemies. The Holy Roman Empire launched deadly crusades against people who failed to believe as they demanded. Islamic caliphs spanned across much of Asia and North Africa slaughtering those who resisted conversion. China’s faith in Maoism has led to the mass execution of millions of people who put belief before Mao’s vision. The US is currently being led by people who simultaneously value deity and economic capital as the highest form of faith, guiding them to take on empire building for the sake of control over resources and markets.
Yet, homo religioso also leads to kindness and compassion, to striving for the alleviation of suffering, for the welfare of the Earth, for the caring for creation. These are powerful motivators and have, throughout history, provided enormous benefits (funding health initiatives, reducing poverty, raising voices against human inhumanities, and so forth).
All of this reminds me of the old line about women: you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. Religion isn’t much different.
Well, he apologized.
The damage has already been done: As with the cartoons of Muhammed, there are too many people itching for a riot because they feel disenfranchised.