27 Sep 2006

Athens and Jerusalem

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Lee Harris, in the Weekly Standard, interprets the Pope’s recent speech (which so thoroughly upset the Saracens) as a message to the modern rationalist secular community of the West.

To the modern atheist, both (the Christian and the Islamic) Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.

Ratzinger wishes to challenge this notion, not from the point of view of a committed Christian, but from the point of view of modern reason itself. He does this by calling his educated listeners’ attention to a “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.” In particular, Ratzinger focuses on a passage in the dialogue where the emperor “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.'”

Ratzinger’s daring use of this provocative quotation was not designed to inflame Muslims. He was using the emperor’s question in order to offer a profound challenge to modern reason from within. Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion? Can a committed atheist avoid taking the side of Manuel II Paleologus when he says: “God is not pleased by blood–and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. . . . 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.”

Modern science cannot tell us that the emperor is right in his controversy with the learned Persian over what is or is not contrary to God’s nature. Modern reason proclaims such questions unanswerable by science–and it is right to do so. But can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot take the side of the emperor in this debate, if it cannot see that his religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

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Thomas Savino

Lee Harris posits that secular reasoning can’t mount a legitimate argument for why religious violence is wrong. He argues that to answer this question one reasoning needs to be informed by faith.
He reached this conclusion by setting up a straw-man argument pitting a secular reasoning that is naïve and blinded; limited by a rigid sense of the burden of proof required by hard science. He compares this to the supposed wisdom of a sanctified, faith-guided reason.

There are several problems with this. For one, secular reasoning can and does say why violence is wrong. The reasons are simply not based upon an ultimate authority like god. This, however, does not mean the position is without a valid ground unless one starts with the premise that a value must be divine based to matter in the first place.

I believe what Harris really intends to target is one particular type of secularism — the silly, academic pragmatism that results in PC idiocy, NPR profundities and University tenure.

Against this is arranged a Catholism that ignores both it’s own bloody history and the violence that fairly screams from the pages of the book that informs its world view.

I’m glad the pope has blinders on in this respect and in that case, hypocritical Catholicism wins by the exact extent of its hypocrisy.



Kathy

Why must you always go against Catholicism? Do you fear belief?



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