posted September 18, 2006 04:32 PM              

Let's remember the chronological order of events here, kids. What came first? Acts of terror against Western targets, or the current coalition's 'War on Terror'? Well, obviously, the former came first, no?

posted September 18, 2006 04:38 PM              

quote:

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Let's remember the chronological order of events here, kids. What came first? Acts of terror against Western targets, or the current coalition's 'War on Terror'? Well, obviously, the former came first, no?

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Yes lets.

posted September 18, 2006 04:40 PM              

It doesn't mention how many non US coalition forces have been killed in the war on terror. And, shouldn't we start with the 3000 killed on 9/11? What about the Canadians? 4 more killed today. What about all the Brits? etc?

And how are we to know how many "civilians" killed in Afgan & Iraq were not in fact just your average civilian, but rather, insurgants or members of the taliban? We don't have any mention of those stats either.

posted September 18, 2006 04:57 PM              

You refuse to see the entire picture.

So I'll leave it at that.

posted September 18, 2006 05:10 PM              

The extremists are the cause of this negative impression. It's not fair, and it's not accurate. So, they should have to answer to the Muslim world at large.

posted September 18, 2006 05:39 PM            

Of course, truthfulness isn't your forte or goal. Propaganda is.

posted September 18, 2006 05:47 PM              

you oppress people enough, you have things like 9-11 happen. not saying its right but not saying what has been done to them is right either. you cant cut the cords from the throats of people, and not expect them to use their hands.
your ignorance feels like utter bliss doesnt it, lioneye?

------------------
"WHATEVER the soul longs for, WILL be attained by the spirit"

"Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation"

posted September 18, 2006 06:18 PM              

Why do I keep getting called "ignorant"?
Explain what I'm ignorant about please.

I thought I was making perfect sense. I'm talking about the world's negative impression of Islam and how to counter it. It's just, in my opinion, the thing that is missing from the equation. That's why it's unbalanced.

posted September 18, 2006 06:42 PM            

Imagine. The Pope notes the historical truth that Mohammed expanded his influence through the sword and Muslims are upset. Pakistanis marched in protest, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood demanded an apology, and Morocco withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican. Even Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, thought of as a moderate, complained that Pope Benedict's comments were "ugly and unfortunate" and should be withdrawn.

Naturally, several Christian churches were attacked in the West Bank in protest. It brings to mind the endless caterwauling in Islamic countries over the publication in Europe of cartoons that placed the prophet Mohammed in, shall we say, an unfavorable light. (One drawing depicted him wearing a bomb, for instance.) Apologies were demanded from governments that -- in contrast to the dictatorships that rule most Islamic peoples -- do not control what their people print and say.

Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that the Pope's comments were unfair and that the cartoons were offensive. But no more unfair and offensive than the treatment of Christian images in Western nations in the 21st century. And, even more important, no more unfair and offensive than the treatment of Christians and Christian images in Muslim nations.

Indeed, most of the nations hosting vociferous mobs and demagogic politicians supposedly aggrieved by the West's blasphemous attacks on the prophet and his religion do more than just suppress any public display of Christianity; these countries actively persecute or acquiesce in the persecution of Christian believers.

In some nations the oppression is overt: try to worship publicly in Saudi Arabia, for instance. Try to share your faith in Iran. Try to hold a Christmas service in Iraq. In many other nations persecution is private but systemic, allowed if not encouraged by the authorities.

As I travel the globe, I keep looking for evidence that Islam is the religion of peace and Judaism and Christianity are using violence to advance their faiths. Strangely, I have yet to discover Christian converts filling a truck with dynamite and destroying a mosque. Or congregants at a Jewish temple torching a Muslim madrassah. I'm looking for cases of Mormons hijacking a plane to crash into downtown Islamabad, Hare Krishnas kidnapping and beheading Muslim aid workers, and Bahais taking over a cruise ship and tossing overboard a handicapped, elderly Muslim.

I'm still waiting.

In fact, the worst religious persecution comes in Islamic nations. In Indonesia I saw churches and a Bible school that had been destroyed by Muslim mobs. In March I met a Christian pastor whose wife lost a leg in a bombing at their church; their home was burned down the following year. A few years ago I walked through Christian neighborhoods in the town of Ambon burned down by Muslim mobs.

In Bangladesh I met a young Christian woman who fled her village after being kidnapped and forced into a marriage by a Muslim family. An aid organization, funded by the U.S. government, which helps abused women refused to aid her. I talked with Christians threatened with violence after their conversions.

In Pakistan I stayed with a Christian family in hiding after the father, a convert to Christianity, fled to America to escape death threats. His wife's relatives hoped to kidnap their children. Churches there have been bombed and congregants assaulted; Christians risk being prosecuted for blasphemy if they deny the essential tenets of Islam.

In all of these nations economic, legal, political, and social discrimination is rampant. Government services and benefits are denied to Christians. Even when public officials don't incite violence, they rarely attempt to prevent it. And virtually never are Muslim killers or rioters arrested, let alone punished.

The Pope didn't say any of this, but he could have. The problem of Islam and violence is not confined to the past. It is very much part of the present.

Islamic protests against the slightest Western criticism of or doubt about the religion of Mohammed ring hollow. It is sad that many Muslims appear unable to defend their faith through anything but intimidation. Moreover, so long as their religion is noted for its willingness to persecute and employ violence around the globe, they have little credibility to complain of offenses by others.

Does what we say in the West bother Muslims in the Mideast and elsewhere? I have trouble feeling guilty so long as Islamic states fail to recognize that people created by God in his image should be left free to decide whether and how to follow him. A coerced conversion yields no glory to God, even if his name is Allah.

How about a deal? We in the West won't talk about the unpleasant beginnings of Islam or publish nasty cartoons about Mohammed. In return, Muslim nations will stop killing and persecuting Christians. Further, they will give Christians the same freedoms that Muslims enjoy in the West.

Fair enough?

posted September 18, 2006 08:07 PM              

quote:

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The Pope means nothing to me and to most Muslims. Muslims shouldn’t be that surprised the Pope said those things like that ”Muhammad was evil and inhuman”

The Pope and the Church are not our friends.

We do not listen to the Pope....he is not our leader, not our prophet, not our god.

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Interesting. Substitute "Muhammed" for the "the Pope" and "Islam" for "the Church" and you have a worthy Danish defense.

posted September 18, 2006 10:04 PM              

quote:

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It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "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". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry...

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posted September 18, 2006 10:17 PM              

Tink,

that's not a defense.

That would be like someone calling another person a wh@re because they don't like that person.

posted September 18, 2006 10:48 PM              

Am I missing it because I don't see where the problem is from reading your excerpt.
(And I mean this sincerely.)
Quote: Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "

posted September 18, 2006 10:54 PM              

By quoting that 7th century emperor he seems to be implying that Muslims force conversion, that Islam was spread by the sword and that we don't listen to reason.

quote:

---

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

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posted September 18, 2006 10:57 PM              

------------------
"WHATEVER the soul longs for, WILL be attained by the spirit"

"Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation"

posted September 18, 2006 11:01 PM              

I really think the main point of the text was that we shouldn't mix violence with religion. I will concede his choice of a quote was a poor one but I don't know that he is infering all of those things about Muslims.

Honestly, if you hadn't printed part of the speech, I wouldn't have even read it. When the Pope speaks, I expect to hear .....blah, blah, blah........ and tune it out.

I think it's too bad the main point is getting lost in all of this because violence is a huge problem in the world, no matter who is on the receiving end of it. Those who say they speak for/act in the name of God, should walk in love, period.

posted September 18, 2006 11:22 PM            

quote:

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By quoting that 7th century emperor he seems to be implying that Muslims force conversion, that Islam was spread by the sword and that we don't listen to reason.

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Islam has forced conversions, and to a degree Islam WAS spread by the sword.

So was Christianity for that matter.

posted September 19, 2006 01:55 PM              

------------------
"WHATEVER the soul longs for, WILL be attained by the spirit"

"Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation"

posted September 19, 2006 03:43 PM              

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1875791,00.html