Commentary on Pope's Comments on Jihad

With the controversy of Pope Benedict's talk in Germany now reaching stupid purportions, two things have immediately stood out to me:

1) How the media has failed to look at Pope Benedict's comments in their proper context. We are so driven in this country for quick sound bites and brief summaries of things, that we fail to take the time to actually absorb the full meaning of anything. I remember seeing a quote just a few days ago that stated Pope Benedict "Goes on vacation after Slamming Islam." Well that is just terrible journalism and just plain lazy if you ask me. The more I observe the way the media works, the more I realize that most media outlets, like the shameful New York Times, are completely useless and far from being trustworthy.

2) I have great respect for Islam. I greatly admire their call to prayer and their fasting. However, Islam must accept its own history, just as we in Christianity have. What do I mean? Well, Islam must realize that for most of their history, particularly in the western world, they were the ones forcing conversion by the sword. In particuler, I would encourage the reader to look up the practices of the Ottoman Empire, who forced Christians in their lands to give up one of their male children to the service of the Sultan. The Janissaries, as they were known, became famous for their military skills, but also because they were staffed by youths conscripted from Christian families in the Balkans. After the conscription they were defined as the property of the sultan, and practically all of them were compelled to convert to Islam. (Now often some will point to the Crusades as Christian aggression, however, it is essential that when one looks at the Crusades to remember that the prior 400 years marked Islamic aggression into Christian lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe!)

The Church has in the past repented for those members who have committed sins in the name of the Church. It is time for Islam to do the same! Either Islam is a religion of peace or it isn't. I would just prefer someone to clear that up for me instead of the continued shadows and smoke that cloud this issue. And really, isn't all this burning of pictures and flags getting a bit old and tiresome? Doesn't this whole episode just prove the necessity for both Faith and Reason? Is that not what our Holy Father was talking about to begin with?

Below is some interesting analysis from Vatican insider John Allen:
I have written before that Benedict XVI is not a PC pope. By that, I don't mean that he sets out to give offense; on the contrary, he's one of the most gracious figures ever to step on the world stage. Instead, he simply does not allow his thinking to be channeled by the taboos and fashions of ordinary public discourse.

For example, any PR consultant would have told the pope that if he wanted to make a point about the relationship between faith and reason, he shouldn't open up with a comparison between Islam and Christianity that would be widely understood as a criticism of Islam, suggesting that it's irrational and prone to violence. Yet that is precisely what Benedict did in his address to 1,500 students and faculty at the University of Regensburg on Wednesday, citing a 14th century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian.

News headlines immediately focused upon the pope's use of the term jihad and its implied swipe at Muslim-influenced terrorism, shaping up as something of a replay of the Danish cartoon controversy.

Promoting conversation through imagery and symbols.Yet he brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally. He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason.

The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," ran to almost 4,000 words (more than a half-hour of speaking time), and its main concern was with what Benedict sees as an artificial truncation of human reason in the West. Since the Reformation, he argued, Western thinkers have come to regard theology and metaphysics as unscientific.
That is problematic, Benedict said, on two counts.

First, it leaves reason mute before the great questions of life and death, questions about why we are here and how we should act.

"This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity," the pope said, "as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."
Second, its logically self-defeating for science itself, which depends upon the assumption of order and reason in the universe, but cant explain why things should work that way in the first place.
"The question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought to philosophy and theology," the pope said. "For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding."

Ultimately, Benedict argued, a form of reason which rejects religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other cultures.

"In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid," he said. "Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."

Whatever the merits of Benedict's argument, it is a subtle and carefully modulated analysis of Western intellectual history head and shoulders above the standard fare most leaders offer on the stump. Of course, that's not what the world is talking about right now, raising the question of whether Benedict could do with a dash more sensitivity to how wires in today's hair-trigger world are tripped.