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.
My my.. Didn’t mean to start a flame war here on a science blog. I guess you are willing to live with the fact that someday there will be A-bombs going off in our cities. You give your jihadi thugs a lot of credit to restrain themselves in the future. I guess that is the difference between us. I believe they will do it in a hearbeat, as they have promised. All they need is somebody to supply them with a few. Wonder who that could be? That sounds worse than Hitler to me. He couldn’t drop bombs on us.
Let’s just all come home and hope these idiots behave. Sounds like a great plan to me. Sounds like 1938.
Bye.
J
The whole “death at the hands of God is His holiness” and “the wrath of God is His justice” arguments are sheer lunacy and downright ignorant. Friends, there are two creative/superior entities addressed in the Bible. The first, the LORD God of Israel, otherwise known as Yahweh or Yehovah, is an incredible manipulator of people, of societies, he abhors women, he directs his ‘chosen’ to kill, steal and destroy other people, he says not to burn your children sacrificially in a fire yet we all know what happens with Abraham (and his son) and Jephthah (and his daughter) which shows the LORD to be a hypocrite (keep in mind that the son/boy was spared while the daughter/girl was burned), he can’t stand the thought of man becoming wise, he burns with jealousy and proclaims this often, he goes around boasting and roaring that he is god and that all should fear him and that if you do not he or his chosen will kill you, and he makes several physical appearances well noted and documented such as landing in the desert repeatedly in his “glory of the LORD” craft, wrestling (and loosing) with a man, argueing and bantering with a woman about her ability to get pregnant, and even warns and instructs his people about not defecating anywhere around the camp so that he/Yahweh wont’s step in their feces! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This god is no God! Yehovah of the Old Testament is not the omnipresent One and Creator of all that is all! Yeshua(Iesous/Jesus) came with a message of freedom – from who or what? The LORD God of Israel, that’s who! Yeshua told the Jews that their father is the devil. Who, dear friend, does the Bible tell us is the FATHER OF THE JEWS? The ancient Hebrew people, the descendants of Moses, then became the Jews of the New Testament, of course, and their god, their father, is Yahweh; the LORD God of the Old Testament! Yeshua said to the Jews that their father is a liar and that there is no truth in him. Once again, just who is it that Yeshua, the Christ, is talking about here? The god of the Jews, friend!
Behold – the greatest deception of human kind! The god of this world IS THE GOD being worshipped by all of the world’s religions, in all of the world’s churches, temples, and synagogues, and on all of the world’s religious television shows. Yeshua says to pray in secret to your Father who will visit you from His secret place. Yet the whole world prays in public and in a large segment of Christianity, shouts out loud, waves their arms, jumps up and down and performs nothing short of a circus of boastfullness and false piety! Behold; the whole world is in covenant with the Evil One! Yeshua went on to say, as did others, that the TRUE God, the One who sent the message of freedom, the Creator of all that is all, is pure love, is without wrath, jealousy, and vengeance, and HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN OR HEARD – AT ANY TIME! Well then, dear one, who in the world is it that has been seen, has been heard, and is widely known throughout the world? Answer: The very same god that the whold world preaches and teaches about, that’s who!
Look, the original, intact message of Yeshua (his name was not and is not Jesus – research this for truth), has been corrupted, perverted, and harnessed by the Church for purely political power and societal control. Further, the message of the Christ has been realigned and manipulated in order to appear as some sort of fullfillment of the plan of the LORD. How sick. The Jews pursued and repeatedly tried to stone Yeshua and eventually crucified him because that is precisely what Yehovah told them to do! All of you think that when Yeshua says “the scriptures speak of me” and “Moses wrote about me”, that this is referencing some sort of prophetic nonsense about being sent by “God” to save the world. Wake up! Deuteronomy 13:1-11 quite plainly tells us why the Jews were repeatedly trying to catch Yeshua and stone him. Also see Deuteronomy 17:1-7.
Yeshua told the whole world that if you are going to be in the truth, then you will hate (be completely detached) from your family, from the systems and chaotic manipulations of this world, and that you will be persecuted and practically alone. Behold: NO ONE belonging to any religion or the Church is alone, persecuted, or isolated. This then, is the evidence of your deceit – you are completely surrounded by other “believers.”
Hence, it is my position, then, that you are “dead,” “asleep,” and in serious need of an “awakening,” being “made to see,” or even “resurrection.”
Go on being in covenant with the creator of chaos and the cosmos (the systems of this world). For me, there is only Gnosis.