Silly Little Country

The Benedict Gefluffle

Let me start by reminding you that I am an atheist. So all of you religious guys can put out fatwas. Somehow I think not many would.

Joseph Ratzinger, who had as a Cardinal developed a terrible reputation among Catholics I knew as guardian of the doctrine, now that he is the Pope, strikes me to be doing quite a good job of making the case for his views (with almost all of which I disagree).

But this is a chalenge of our times - cna people respect the differing views others have?
And Benedict walked into a big problem here.
So first I ask anyone to read the actual speech he gave last week - here is one place to look. (Yeah some of the rendition in my browser is pretty goofy but I think I get it overall.)
It is very interesting:
a) at one level, the quotation from the 14th Century Byzantine emperor that produced most of the outbursts is rather glancing and hardly worth the emphasis the rest of the world has given it;
b) his main message is that Biblical scholarship, and study of the Jewish and Christian scholarship over the centuries, has emphasized that God should justify himself by 'reason' ('logos');
c) which means that conversion by force is against scripture and orthodoxy (he has to gloss over several parts of Christian history at least for this);
d) to say it slightly differently, you have to convert others by reason for it to be legitimate, and this unites all Christian history with the Greek history (so he says);
e) he does not disclaim the views he quotes from the 14th century. The response to this has made the point that may have been part of what he was getting at.

He presents his argument with great erudition - it blows me away in many elements. I have rarely seen such far-ranging arguments from a bureaucrat, which is what I consider him to be.

And the interesting first reaction of the Muslim world was to explode on a) and threaten violence, the whole point of which was to ask what Islam had added to Jewish and Christan views, other than the notion of 'jihad', which in the view of the quotation he cited replaced 'reason' by 'jihad', which is not 'reasonable argument'. What is ironic is that the reaction proved the case of that old Byzantine emperor in spades.

And is it true that is not what Benedict meant? I do not know.

But in the end:
a) he also has to argue from revelation and scripture and that is nonsense, just as it is wrt the Koran, whatver space he rhetorically leaves to science and empricism.
b) the track record of past Popes is not great on converting others or dealing with their failure to believe purely on the basis of reason;
c) on the other hane, their track record is sure better in the last 50 years than that of the Imams;
d) 'Christian Scholarship' and 'Islamic Scholarship' are, in my view, both utterly unproductive, as simple re-reading and annotation of texts with no reference to the outside world (NB: there are many academic disciplines today that function exactly in this manner, and in fact consider that a virtue to be defended, which I do not);
e) reading his speech, I am stunned at the amount of work he has put into understanding a broad variety of traditions - more than I would - I would not even bother to care about the different strands of revelation - Ratzinger is a very sharp guy, with the ability to absorb and integrate a very broad base of traditions. I would like to see one of the hysterical Imams come close to this, despite their nonsenical claims that Islam produced modern science.
f) I don't care much for any of these religions. Only one seems to be out to kill me today, though.

In any case - how on earth did this speech turn into an excuse to have riots over large parts of the Muslim world? Well, it is not for me to answer, but I doubt I will get an answer that will make me think highly of the rioters.

Did Benedict provoke it deliberately? Maybe. He is no fool.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:16 PM