Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Pope's lecture in Regensburg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_09_06_pope.pdf
In his lecture the Pope raised the long discussed subject of reason and faith. The controversial paragraph can be found already in the third paragraph (marked in red in the quote below). In order to, at least partly, understand the quote it's vital to read the preceding two paragraphs.
It's
very misleading to quote him out of context, because the context makes it quite
clear that Islam is non violent, (1) but
allows believers to choose violence, if they so wishes.
Each
individual Moslem can exercise his own free choice as to how, or if, he wants to
spread the belief of Islam to non believers.
In any case the Koran is only speaking about non believers, which means people who don't believe in the one universal, invisible God but in idols (2).
This means that there aren't any religions today whose followers are "infidels" or "unbelievers".
Some
despotic leaders of some non democratic countries, like
The Pope's main discussion is whether God is subject to man's reason. It's much more interesting, in my opinion to note his quotation, below, that, according to a French scholar, Arnaldez, God transcends human logic. (3)
This really seems an idea that the Moslem scholars need to deal with. Because it lies at the base of quite a few inhuman forms of behavior, like suicide bombers, cruel punishments etc that aren't compatible with normal human reason.
The
problem really isn't one of Islam but of some Moslem leaders who base their choice
of violence to solve political problems on this concept. This way they choose
violence and exploit the sincere, deep religious feelings of their Moslem
subjects to incite violence and enforce tyrannical rule, like Saddam Husein, Ahmadinajad and dictators
of other Moslem countries.
As we see from the war in
Excerpt from
the lecture:
"The
emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: (1)"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 (2)the
difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the
"infidels", he addresses his
interlocutor with a startling brusqueness 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. (4) 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 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. (3)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 Hazn 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 logos". This is the very word used by the
emperor: God acts, logically (T, 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
In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for
some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name
which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and
simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of
myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close
analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning
bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an
Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of
heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered
at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is
accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the
mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115).
Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to
accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks,
biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek
thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in
the later wisdom literature.
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