The impossible has happened - the BN has lost its two-thirds majority for the first time since 1969, and the Opposition controls 5 states and all Parliamentary seats for the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur (which is not a State).
The DAP, PAS and Keadilan will, operating as a loose coalition, form the State Governments of Penang, Kedah, Perak, and Selangor. In addition, PAS will rule Kelantan with a much stronger majority than it obtained in the last election in 2004.
As President Musharraf discovered much to his dismay when he decided to Kill All the Lawyers - figuratively speaking - Abdullah Badawi's BN has realised, too late, what happens in any functioning society which wants to maintain at least a semblance of democracy: when you find yourself trying to put down (well, at least ignore or denigrate) street protests mounted by lawyers, you are at the deep end of the pool and will drown in the next election.
A tip for politicians in future elections: be careful how you treat the professional class. You start dumping them in jail, it's a good leading indicator that you will fare poorly at the next (honest) polls.
For a better idea of what I'm talking about, go here and here.
And of course, Mr Shakespeare's famous line about Killing All the Lawyers, which when read in context was actually a Major Compliment to the Legal Profession, can be found here (Act IV, Scene 2, Henry VI Part 2).
One compliment to the ruling party though; the Malaysian elections were by and large, free and fair, and allegations and fears of rigging were basically unfounded, going by all currently available evidence.
Unfortunately, as Musharraf discovered in Pakistan, if you rig the vote you lose the elections no matter what the official outcome may be, and if you don't rig the vote then you lose the elections fair and square - either way, you lose.
Like I said, don't put the lawyers down, or you are looking at losing the next polls.
Now, some will say the BN hasn't actually lost the polls, at least not in the way that Musharraf was wiped out in Pakistan. Musharraf wasn't actually up for election; his party lost big and lost all control of Pakistan whereas Badawi WAS up for election, and the BN managed to retain all of East Malaysia and the southern and eastern regions of Peninsular Malaysia. But I say the BN very obviously lost in the sense that despite having gerrymandered election seats over many years in its favour, lopsided media coverage, the devotion of massive resources to a PR campaign, and the detention without trial of its most extreme recent critics (Manoharan & company, of HINDRAF), the BN received an absolute whopping in states it had considered reasonably safe - Selangor, Perak, Kedah - and in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, previously divided between Opposition and BN but as of yesterday TOTALLY Opposition (bar 1 seat). AND the BN lost Penang, was wiped out in Kelantan, AND lost its 2/3 majority - the holy grail of Opposition politicians. The Barisan Nasional has NEVER been beaten so badly since Independence. In Malaysian terms, it counts as a certain defeat.
For the first time in all recorded history, we have 5 Opposition Menteris Besar - one each from Keadilan and the DAP, and 3 from PAS. My congratulations to them all. I just hope they don't waste the chance to Just Change It!
and, for good measure: MAKKAL SHAKTI!!!
- Lawman -
LawMan's Dogs
Killer Beasts Doing Breakfast
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Saturday, December 02, 2006
TODAY'S EDITORIAL
November 29, 2006
Defenders of the six outraged imams removed from a Minneapolis flight last week want people to think that airline officials overreacted by removing them from the plane -- that all the imams were doing was trying to pray. But listen to what they did. It wasn't just praying.
The imams left their assigned seats shortly before takeoff in violation of the rules -- and then formed the same seating pattern that al Qaeda uses to test in-flight security. They switched "to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin," Audrey Hudson reported in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times. In the course of this episode they prayed loudly -- this is the part the imams are now focusing on -- shouting in voices that even the gate agents outside the plane heard. But the praying isn't the issue.
The provocative seat-switching is. Now, there's a chance that it wasn't a deliberately provocative act. There's also a chance that pigs might fly, or that beer might fall from the heavens. We've never heard of a Muslim religious tenet that requires worshippers to occupy the entry and exit routes of an airliner. That's because there isn't any.
Was this an orchestrated ploy to intimidate airlines -- to exploit American civil-rights law? We can't peer inside the hearts and minds of these six men. But considering the details unearthed this week, that's where the evidence points.
To hear these imams' defenders, you would think that the freedom to pray is the issue. Here's Mohammed Abu Hannoud of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy group: "I think we should be smart enough to distinguish between peaceful Muslims and terrorists."
The imams should be smart enough -- we certainly think that they are smart enough -- to know that if they engage in seating maneuvers that mimic al Qaeda's, they will be under immediate suspicion and will be removed from the airplane.
There is no civil right to disobey airline seating rules, occupy the exits and entries of an airplane and shout loudly. Not for Muslims or Christians or anyone else.
OK OK I know : infringement of copyright here. Material reproduced without any permission whatsoever from the Washington Times. Lack of a profit (or a profit motive) and clear attribution are not a carte blanche to infringe. But I just couldn't resist. If you want to, visit the Washington Times yourself for more.
LMT
November 29, 2006
Defenders of the six outraged imams removed from a Minneapolis flight last week want people to think that airline officials overreacted by removing them from the plane -- that all the imams were doing was trying to pray. But listen to what they did. It wasn't just praying.
The imams left their assigned seats shortly before takeoff in violation of the rules -- and then formed the same seating pattern that al Qaeda uses to test in-flight security. They switched "to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin," Audrey Hudson reported in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times. In the course of this episode they prayed loudly -- this is the part the imams are now focusing on -- shouting in voices that even the gate agents outside the plane heard. But the praying isn't the issue.
The provocative seat-switching is. Now, there's a chance that it wasn't a deliberately provocative act. There's also a chance that pigs might fly, or that beer might fall from the heavens. We've never heard of a Muslim religious tenet that requires worshippers to occupy the entry and exit routes of an airliner. That's because there isn't any.
Was this an orchestrated ploy to intimidate airlines -- to exploit American civil-rights law? We can't peer inside the hearts and minds of these six men. But considering the details unearthed this week, that's where the evidence points.
To hear these imams' defenders, you would think that the freedom to pray is the issue. Here's Mohammed Abu Hannoud of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy group: "I think we should be smart enough to distinguish between peaceful Muslims and terrorists."
The imams should be smart enough -- we certainly think that they are smart enough -- to know that if they engage in seating maneuvers that mimic al Qaeda's, they will be under immediate suspicion and will be removed from the airplane.
There is no civil right to disobey airline seating rules, occupy the exits and entries of an airplane and shout loudly. Not for Muslims or Christians or anyone else.
OK OK I know : infringement of copyright here. Material reproduced without any permission whatsoever from the Washington Times. Lack of a profit (or a profit motive) and clear attribution are not a carte blanche to infringe. But I just couldn't resist. If you want to, visit the Washington Times yourself for more.
LMT
Thursday, November 30, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061121/ts_nm/religion_iran_azerbaijan_dc_1
This is the reason for my extreme displeasure. Whatever happened to Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance? The clerics - the ones who (one would hope) would be the best equipped to reply in a rational manner - word for word, point for point, intellectual to intellectual, concept to concept, fact for fact - have instead called for death.
All this fellow did, like Salman Rushdie, was to write. He did not kill or incite anyone to kill anyone, Muslim or otherwise. But his detractors haven't bothered to meet him on the battleground of ideas; instead, they have decided that he should be silenced with extreme prejudice.
This makes me wonder: perhaps they want him killed because their own ideas are intellectually and morally bankrupt, perhaps his views are more valid than theirs, and they know that they cannot prove otherwise. Therefore their reaction is to kill him, so as to preserve their own monopoly on spiritual knowledge and prevent any better view from gaining the upper hand. A sort of "If you can't beat him, then kill him" approach.
I wonder when they'll issue a fatwa against me?
LMT
This is the reason for my extreme displeasure. Whatever happened to Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance? The clerics - the ones who (one would hope) would be the best equipped to reply in a rational manner - word for word, point for point, intellectual to intellectual, concept to concept, fact for fact - have instead called for death.
All this fellow did, like Salman Rushdie, was to write. He did not kill or incite anyone to kill anyone, Muslim or otherwise. But his detractors haven't bothered to meet him on the battleground of ideas; instead, they have decided that he should be silenced with extreme prejudice.
This makes me wonder: perhaps they want him killed because their own ideas are intellectually and morally bankrupt, perhaps his views are more valid than theirs, and they know that they cannot prove otherwise. Therefore their reaction is to kill him, so as to preserve their own monopoly on spiritual knowledge and prevent any better view from gaining the upper hand. A sort of "If you can't beat him, then kill him" approach.
I wonder when they'll issue a fatwa against me?
LMT
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The Pope's Visit to Turkey
Pope Benedict XVI is visiting Turkey. Today. Or, well, yesterday, since it is already 1am local time.
This is going to be interesting to watch.
The Pope will fight for the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.
He will confront Muslim thinkers about that arm of their religion that genuinely believes that violence against non-believers (and of course, for this particular arm the category of "non-believers" is very wide) is sanctioned by God.
He may attempt a closer relationship (a reconciliation?) between the Greek and Latin Churches, a schism which predates the Protestant Reformation.
I for one am happy to see a Pope who doesn't mince his words, doesn't toe the politically correct line, and who says what needs to be said.
Where fighting for minority rights is concerned, he is not advocating some fresh Crusade, nor does he support religious bigotry. Instead, he is simply being honest about the experience that Christians and other non-Muslims have living in modern-day Muslim-majority countries (we are not talking history here, just modern-day reality). He is asking the Muslim majority-countries for the kind of treatment towards their non-Muslim minorities that Muslims in the minority in the secular West have received and come to take for granted, nay, demand, from their host governments. He is not afraid to annoy and offend, he is only concerned to speak the truth. That's the way it should be.
Where violence by Muslims who explicitly justify their actions by reference to their God is concerned, the Pope, I hope, will be asking some very hard questions of the "Ulama" (term used very loosely here) who wrote that letter explaining the Islamic position to him after he made his now famous (or notorious, of course, depending on your point of view) speech at Regensburg. Why is it that such a significant number of Muslims - perhaps a majority of the total "Umah" in some countries - do NOT behave as might be expected if, as the Muslim scholars claimed, Islam is essentially a peaceful and tolerant religion? Why did these Muslims - followers of a peace-loving religion, it is claimed - feel entitled to commit murder, arson, and vandalism in the name of protecting the "dignity" of their religion, when all that the Pope did was to make a speech in a faraway land where a majority of the population are no longer really Christian, nor anti-Muslim? Did Christians burn their mosques, kill their women and children, destroy their livelihoods on the basis and as a consequence of the Regensburg address?
And finally - on the issue of reconciliation with the Greeks - it is good that the various denominations are finding common ground, as there are bigger fish to fry. It is time for Christians of all stripes, pre- and post- Reformation, to unite and confront the Islamic extremist - both the out-in-the-open Al Qaeda/Taliban variety and the more insidious "quiet Islamist" attempting to slowly drive currently secular countries such as Malaysia into becoming "Islamic" kingdoms or republics. It is time to "fight the good fight" - the Christian JIHAD - by which I mean "STRUGGLE, NOT WAR" which may be "NON-VIOLENT as well as violent" - yep, I can borrow from the Muslim lexicon as well as anyone - to show that non-Muslims are not, for the sake of political correctness, going to back down in the face of increasingly arrogant and unreasonable demands from their Muslim compatriots.
LMT
This is going to be interesting to watch.
The Pope will fight for the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.
He will confront Muslim thinkers about that arm of their religion that genuinely believes that violence against non-believers (and of course, for this particular arm the category of "non-believers" is very wide) is sanctioned by God.
He may attempt a closer relationship (a reconciliation?) between the Greek and Latin Churches, a schism which predates the Protestant Reformation.
I for one am happy to see a Pope who doesn't mince his words, doesn't toe the politically correct line, and who says what needs to be said.
Where fighting for minority rights is concerned, he is not advocating some fresh Crusade, nor does he support religious bigotry. Instead, he is simply being honest about the experience that Christians and other non-Muslims have living in modern-day Muslim-majority countries (we are not talking history here, just modern-day reality). He is asking the Muslim majority-countries for the kind of treatment towards their non-Muslim minorities that Muslims in the minority in the secular West have received and come to take for granted, nay, demand, from their host governments. He is not afraid to annoy and offend, he is only concerned to speak the truth. That's the way it should be.
Where violence by Muslims who explicitly justify their actions by reference to their God is concerned, the Pope, I hope, will be asking some very hard questions of the "Ulama" (term used very loosely here) who wrote that letter explaining the Islamic position to him after he made his now famous (or notorious, of course, depending on your point of view) speech at Regensburg. Why is it that such a significant number of Muslims - perhaps a majority of the total "Umah" in some countries - do NOT behave as might be expected if, as the Muslim scholars claimed, Islam is essentially a peaceful and tolerant religion? Why did these Muslims - followers of a peace-loving religion, it is claimed - feel entitled to commit murder, arson, and vandalism in the name of protecting the "dignity" of their religion, when all that the Pope did was to make a speech in a faraway land where a majority of the population are no longer really Christian, nor anti-Muslim? Did Christians burn their mosques, kill their women and children, destroy their livelihoods on the basis and as a consequence of the Regensburg address?
And finally - on the issue of reconciliation with the Greeks - it is good that the various denominations are finding common ground, as there are bigger fish to fry. It is time for Christians of all stripes, pre- and post- Reformation, to unite and confront the Islamic extremist - both the out-in-the-open Al Qaeda/Taliban variety and the more insidious "quiet Islamist" attempting to slowly drive currently secular countries such as Malaysia into becoming "Islamic" kingdoms or republics. It is time to "fight the good fight" - the Christian JIHAD - by which I mean "STRUGGLE, NOT WAR" which may be "NON-VIOLENT as well as violent" - yep, I can borrow from the Muslim lexicon as well as anyone - to show that non-Muslims are not, for the sake of political correctness, going to back down in the face of increasingly arrogant and unreasonable demands from their Muslim compatriots.
LMT
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Kidnap of 150 at Baghdad institution
http://f332.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.rand=fneqh61op28e6
http://article.wn.com/view/2006/10/01/Gunmen_Kidnap_26_Workers_in_Baghdad_s/
This must be the saddest thing. Academics - who could be more harmless? And yet, this war is all about ideas. The ideas of an unenlightened, Dark Ages mentality attempting to return the entire Arab and Muslim (including sizable non-Muslim population - but since they are something less than human it's ok to ignore them) world to some mythical Golden Age that never existed, against the ideas of modern day 20th Century nations (including sizable - yes, very sizable - non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Caucasian populations. I don't see your average ethnic Tamil, Japanese or Chinese looking very "Whitey", do you?
Removal from the human gene pool in a violent, permanent and highly prejudicial manner appears now to be the only practical solution for the kidnappers and their ilk, once caught. We can hope for neuron-synapse-brain-wave-altering technology, but the current state of the art in this area just isn't there yet.
LMT.
http://article.wn.com/view/2006/10/01/Gunmen_Kidnap_26_Workers_in_Baghdad_s/
This must be the saddest thing. Academics - who could be more harmless? And yet, this war is all about ideas. The ideas of an unenlightened, Dark Ages mentality attempting to return the entire Arab and Muslim (including sizable non-Muslim population - but since they are something less than human it's ok to ignore them) world to some mythical Golden Age that never existed, against the ideas of modern day 20th Century nations (including sizable - yes, very sizable - non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Caucasian populations. I don't see your average ethnic Tamil, Japanese or Chinese looking very "Whitey", do you?
Removal from the human gene pool in a violent, permanent and highly prejudicial manner appears now to be the only practical solution for the kidnappers and their ilk, once caught. We can hope for neuron-synapse-brain-wave-altering technology, but the current state of the art in this area just isn't there yet.
LMT.
Monday, November 06, 2006
There is No Compulsion in Religion. Amen.
.... and so, it is ok to create a reasonable apprehension of violence to Indian children about to take their first Holy Communion. I guess we should all look on the bright side: the police, for once, were on the side of the good guys, the ones with any sense at all in this, and the Pious, God-fearing, Self Righteous, "We-Shall-Be- Saved-and-You-Shall-Burn" Muslim Heroes of Ipoh attempting to save their fellow co-religionists from Apostasy by, if necessary, violence, and against those co-religionists' free will to boot, were taught a lesson in humility, not to mention actually getting their basic facts right.
The Star Online: Print Edition < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Monday November 6, 2006 Cops to probe baptism SMS By CHAN LI LEEN IPOH: The police are investigating a rumour which spread like wildfire through SMS, claiming that a group of Muslims will be baptised at a church here. As a result, a large crowd gathered at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Silibin from 7.30am yesterday to protest against the alleged baptism only to find out that it was actually the first Holy Communion for 98 Indian children. State police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Aziz Bulat said the police would verify how the SMS had started. “There could be some people out there who have a personal agenda to create disharmony among the races,” he said when met at the church. DCP Aziz said the police had also received the text message and had, therefore, placed the Federal Reserve Unit on standby since 7am. He advised the public to be wary of such messages. “Don't accept everything you read or hear as total truth,” he said, adding that he would call on all involved parties to help with the investigation. The protesters, who included members of opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, gathered for some four hours and refused to disperse initially despite warnings from the police. They finally started to leave at 11.20am after Deputy OCPD (II) Supt Lai Yong Heng issued a stern warning. Perak Religious Department director Datuk Jamry Sury, who was present to monitor the situation, said the department would also investigate the incident. “We will take action against the culprit,” he added. Perak Pusat Khidmat Islam secretary Mohd Nazri Sahad said he was there to check if there was any truth to the message. The police were still on standby at the church last night. Father Fabian Dicom, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Penang, which covers Perak, said the church was extremely concerned that a group of people had been sowing ill-will through rumours. “We are concerned as to how others have come to believe these rumours,” he added. He noted that the incident had also infringed on the church members' right to worship. “The Catholic Church has always believed that dialogue is the best platform to resolve issues and as such is extremely disappointed that there was no attempt whatsoever for dialogue,” he said. < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Copyright 1995-2006 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
The Star Online: Print Edition < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Monday November 6, 2006 Cops to probe baptism SMS By CHAN LI LEEN IPOH: The police are investigating a rumour which spread like wildfire through SMS, claiming that a group of Muslims will be baptised at a church here. As a result, a large crowd gathered at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Silibin from 7.30am yesterday to protest against the alleged baptism only to find out that it was actually the first Holy Communion for 98 Indian children. State police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Aziz Bulat said the police would verify how the SMS had started. “There could be some people out there who have a personal agenda to create disharmony among the races,” he said when met at the church. DCP Aziz said the police had also received the text message and had, therefore, placed the Federal Reserve Unit on standby since 7am. He advised the public to be wary of such messages. “Don't accept everything you read or hear as total truth,” he said, adding that he would call on all involved parties to help with the investigation. The protesters, who included members of opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, gathered for some four hours and refused to disperse initially despite warnings from the police. They finally started to leave at 11.20am after Deputy OCPD (II) Supt Lai Yong Heng issued a stern warning. Perak Religious Department director Datuk Jamry Sury, who was present to monitor the situation, said the department would also investigate the incident. “We will take action against the culprit,” he added. Perak Pusat Khidmat Islam secretary Mohd Nazri Sahad said he was there to check if there was any truth to the message. The police were still on standby at the church last night. Father Fabian Dicom, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Penang, which covers Perak, said the church was extremely concerned that a group of people had been sowing ill-will through rumours. “We are concerned as to how others have come to believe these rumours,” he added. He noted that the incident had also infringed on the church members' right to worship. “The Catholic Church has always believed that dialogue is the best platform to resolve issues and as such is extremely disappointed that there was no attempt whatsoever for dialogue,” he said. < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Copyright 1995-2006 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Freedom of Speech
I have always thought that it is important not to give in to bullies.
When someone wants to shut off all debate on an issue because of some perceived or alleged (meaning it has not actually happened) threat to society's general wellbeing, I get a little worried. I cannot help but suspect that the rush to shut the debate down before it has even begun is happening not so much because of any threat to society but because of a threat to the establishment and the established order, and vested interests who do not wish things to change - not for any high moral reason, but because they are gaining too much from the status quo.
IN other words, killing debate in many instances serves the bullies who are in power and who know that their position cannot be defended by rational argument. Rather than be proven wrong on the level playing field of rational debate, they decide to strong-arm a solution from a position of physical strength.
In recent history this has included certain American politicians trying to employ the war on terror as a flag to kill off proper and important debate on the limitations to individual freedoms; and the Hindu religious chauvinists mentioned in this article from the Sun,Malaysia, below.
LMT.
--- Article Information ---
This article was printed from Welcome to Sun2Surf
Article's URL: http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=15714
---------------------------
Preserve the right to free expression
By: Jacqueline Ann Surin (Thu, 05 Oct 2006)
The UK's Daily Telegraph recently ran an article headlined "Hindus threaten cinemas over film exposing plight of India's 'City of Widows'."
The film is Indian-born director Deepa Mehta's Water which highlights the cruel Hindu tradition of treating widows as social outcasts. According to this tradition, it is a widow's bad karma that caused her husband's demise.
As a result, many of India's 40 million widows are cast out of family and society, and have to fend for themselves. They are forced to shave their heads and dress in white.
About 10,000 seek sanctuary in Vrindavan - the City of Widows - a holy town in northern India where they rely on charity. Those not fortunate enough are forced into prostitution and begging.
The film is being nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, but it is not being nominated by India, but by Mehta's adopted homeland, Canada.
See, Mehta has received death threats for her film and had to finish making it abroad. Protesting mobs attacked her film set and no cinema in India will show her film for fear of reprisals.
Hindu nationalist groups have accused the filmmaker of "insulting" Hindu culture, and of a "conspiracy to tarnish India's image".
The Daily Telegraph quotes World Hindu Council national convenor Prakash Sharma as declaring, "We will not tolerate a screening under any circumstances. We will attack cinemas if necessary."
The furore over Mehta and her film in India should resonate in Malaysia.
Sure, the context and actors may be different, but it wasn't too long ago when protesting mobs tried to prevent two Article 11 forums on Malaysians' constitutional rights from proceeding. Unfortunately, with the government ban on any other Article 11 forum, the use of threats and mob rule has proven highly effective in Malaysia.
And, wasn't it just last month that death threats against Muslim lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar circulated on the Internet, purportedly in the name of defending Islam - a great religion that seeks peace and justice, and that has a rich tradition of diversity and consultation.
Groups like Sisters in Islam and public intellectuals such as Farish Noor, who speak out against unjust practices committed in the name of religion, are also constantly accused of "belittling" and "insulting" Islam. They, too, have been labelled and threatened in attempts to suppress and silence.
Freedom of expression is a necessary prerequisite of any thinking, thriving democracy. Freedom of expression ensures that different voices, representing a plurality of interests that is inevitable in any human society, have the space to be heard and the opportunity to engage in public discourse.
It ensures that injustices such as the inhumane ostracisation of Hindu widows can be highlighted and addressed, rather than left to perpetuate and fester.
We know that it's not just in religion that strong threats against freedom of expression exist in Malaysia.
Movies, most recently Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, numerous publications and theatre performances are repeatedly and arbitrarily banned or censored in Malaysia.
Academics and students, meanwhile, are effectively prevented from speaking up publicly, for example, through the media, by the Universities and University Colleges Act and the Aku Janji pledge.
Those who would want to silence the people who speak out against the wrongs in our society - be they cultural or religious practices or in institutions like universities - are asking us to acquiesce to ongoing injustices.
You can usually tell when that happens from the arguments that they use, whether they be in India, Malaysia or any other part of the world.
To speak out is to "tarnish", "insult", "attack", "disparage" or "undermine" the sanctity of a religion, an institution, "Asian values" or whatever notion of social harmony is being promoted.
We would all do well to remember these arguments. It's usually an effective test to discern if freedom of expression is being suppressed to our collective detriment.
LAST month, to commemorate International Right to Know Day on Sept 28, the Freedom of Information (FOI) Coalition launched a campaign to advocate for a FOI Act in Malaysia.
The call for "No More Secrets" is long overdue, and the 10 principles for the FOI campaign (see www.cijmalaysia.org/info_cafe) are crucial and commendable.
What was highly disappointing, however, was the poor turnout at the launch.
Although the FOI Coalition comprises more than 32 organisations, none of their representatives, except for the Centre for Independent Journalism, turned up.
No political party representative or MP turned up either, despite being invited. In fact, only 10 people turned up, two of whom were foreigners.
"People must like their secrets very much," one foreign observer remarked.
It was hard to dispute that especially since coalition members themselves could not be present to show support for a campaign they want the public to embrace.
Jacqueline Ann Surin believes that you cannot be neutral on a moving train. She is an assistant news editor at theSun. Comments: feedback@thesundaily.com
--- end ---
When someone wants to shut off all debate on an issue because of some perceived or alleged (meaning it has not actually happened) threat to society's general wellbeing, I get a little worried. I cannot help but suspect that the rush to shut the debate down before it has even begun is happening not so much because of any threat to society but because of a threat to the establishment and the established order, and vested interests who do not wish things to change - not for any high moral reason, but because they are gaining too much from the status quo.
IN other words, killing debate in many instances serves the bullies who are in power and who know that their position cannot be defended by rational argument. Rather than be proven wrong on the level playing field of rational debate, they decide to strong-arm a solution from a position of physical strength.
In recent history this has included certain American politicians trying to employ the war on terror as a flag to kill off proper and important debate on the limitations to individual freedoms; and the Hindu religious chauvinists mentioned in this article from the Sun,Malaysia, below.
LMT.
--- Article Information ---
This article was printed from Welcome to Sun2Surf
Article's URL: http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=15714
---------------------------
Preserve the right to free expression
By: Jacqueline Ann Surin (Thu, 05 Oct 2006)
The UK's Daily Telegraph recently ran an article headlined "Hindus threaten cinemas over film exposing plight of India's 'City of Widows'."
The film is Indian-born director Deepa Mehta's Water which highlights the cruel Hindu tradition of treating widows as social outcasts. According to this tradition, it is a widow's bad karma that caused her husband's demise.
As a result, many of India's 40 million widows are cast out of family and society, and have to fend for themselves. They are forced to shave their heads and dress in white.
About 10,000 seek sanctuary in Vrindavan - the City of Widows - a holy town in northern India where they rely on charity. Those not fortunate enough are forced into prostitution and begging.
The film is being nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, but it is not being nominated by India, but by Mehta's adopted homeland, Canada.
See, Mehta has received death threats for her film and had to finish making it abroad. Protesting mobs attacked her film set and no cinema in India will show her film for fear of reprisals.
Hindu nationalist groups have accused the filmmaker of "insulting" Hindu culture, and of a "conspiracy to tarnish India's image".
The Daily Telegraph quotes World Hindu Council national convenor Prakash Sharma as declaring, "We will not tolerate a screening under any circumstances. We will attack cinemas if necessary."
The furore over Mehta and her film in India should resonate in Malaysia.
Sure, the context and actors may be different, but it wasn't too long ago when protesting mobs tried to prevent two Article 11 forums on Malaysians' constitutional rights from proceeding. Unfortunately, with the government ban on any other Article 11 forum, the use of threats and mob rule has proven highly effective in Malaysia.
And, wasn't it just last month that death threats against Muslim lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar circulated on the Internet, purportedly in the name of defending Islam - a great religion that seeks peace and justice, and that has a rich tradition of diversity and consultation.
Groups like Sisters in Islam and public intellectuals such as Farish Noor, who speak out against unjust practices committed in the name of religion, are also constantly accused of "belittling" and "insulting" Islam. They, too, have been labelled and threatened in attempts to suppress and silence.
Freedom of expression is a necessary prerequisite of any thinking, thriving democracy. Freedom of expression ensures that different voices, representing a plurality of interests that is inevitable in any human society, have the space to be heard and the opportunity to engage in public discourse.
It ensures that injustices such as the inhumane ostracisation of Hindu widows can be highlighted and addressed, rather than left to perpetuate and fester.
We know that it's not just in religion that strong threats against freedom of expression exist in Malaysia.
Movies, most recently Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, numerous publications and theatre performances are repeatedly and arbitrarily banned or censored in Malaysia.
Academics and students, meanwhile, are effectively prevented from speaking up publicly, for example, through the media, by the Universities and University Colleges Act and the Aku Janji pledge.
Those who would want to silence the people who speak out against the wrongs in our society - be they cultural or religious practices or in institutions like universities - are asking us to acquiesce to ongoing injustices.
You can usually tell when that happens from the arguments that they use, whether they be in India, Malaysia or any other part of the world.
To speak out is to "tarnish", "insult", "attack", "disparage" or "undermine" the sanctity of a religion, an institution, "Asian values" or whatever notion of social harmony is being promoted.
We would all do well to remember these arguments. It's usually an effective test to discern if freedom of expression is being suppressed to our collective detriment.
LAST month, to commemorate International Right to Know Day on Sept 28, the Freedom of Information (FOI) Coalition launched a campaign to advocate for a FOI Act in Malaysia.
The call for "No More Secrets" is long overdue, and the 10 principles for the FOI campaign (see www.cijmalaysia.org/info_cafe) are crucial and commendable.
What was highly disappointing, however, was the poor turnout at the launch.
Although the FOI Coalition comprises more than 32 organisations, none of their representatives, except for the Centre for Independent Journalism, turned up.
No political party representative or MP turned up either, despite being invited. In fact, only 10 people turned up, two of whom were foreigners.
"People must like their secrets very much," one foreign observer remarked.
It was hard to dispute that especially since coalition members themselves could not be present to show support for a campaign they want the public to embrace.
Jacqueline Ann Surin believes that you cannot be neutral on a moving train. She is an assistant news editor at theSun. Comments: feedback@thesundaily.com
--- end ---
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Pope must NOT apologize, Part II
So the intimidation, violence, and other forms of suppression of freedom of speech, life and liberty, continue. Such are conditions in majority Muslim communities for minority Christians. Sadly. Many Muslims are simply NOT interested in what the Pope actually said. They will read it their way no matter what is said or done. There is nothing we can do about it. We just stick to our line, and whether or not they choose to use their God-given brains to receive it is really entirely up to them.
Lawman.
Note: my own comments and asterisks added to the following:-
Catholic Palestinians downplay Muslim attacks on Christian churches
By Judith Sudilovsky
9/19/2006
Catholic News Service
JERUSALEM (CNS) – Christian Palestinians tried to downplay the significance of Muslim attacks on seven Christian churches in the West Bank and Gaza in protest of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam in Germany.
Just after the Sept. 16 shooting attack on St. John the Baptist Church in Nablus, West Bank, Melkite Father Youssef Saadeh, the parish priest, told a journalist Christians were no longer safe and would not be able to live in Nablus if the situation continued. The church's door was set afire in the attack.
However, in a Sept. 18 telephone interview, Father Saadeh made light of the situation, saying things were quiet, although it was impossible to know what would happen.
Father Saadeh skirted a question about fear that the attacks had instilled in the Christian community and instead pointed out that Muslim religious leaders and municipal leaders had visited Christian churches to signify solidarity.
No arrest had been made in connection with the attacks aimed at four Nablus churches, he said.
"Now we want to be strong and quiet," said Father Saadeh. "We don't know how it will be in the future, but like all people Muslims and Christians hope (the problems) are finished here."
His daughter, Rita Saadeh, who was at the church during the incident, was shaken up by the attacks and spoke out more strongly.
"When we saw the fire and smoke at the door we were afraid. The inside of the church is wood and we didn't have the key. We had no way to put out the fire," Saadeh, 33, said in a telephone interview. She described how the gunmen tried to kick down the door and ignited it with gasoline, then shot bullets into the church as she and her brother watched in terror.
She said she was not sure whether the violence had ended.
*** She added that the Muslim reaction was "very wrong" and carried out without having knowledge of what the pope actually said. ***
In an address Sept. 12 to scholars in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict quoted a medieval text, a historical criticism of Islam, which he later said did not reflect his personal opinion.
*** "Why if the pope ... says this ... must we pay? We are angry at what has happened here. It is not clear until now what the pope said. He was comparing knowledge and faith in religion," she said. "If (Muslims) say anything about the church we don't do anything (to them.) They also say we are terrorists, but we never react in the same way." ***
She said she was more relaxed two days after the attack and was able to go to work, where Muslim colleagues tried to put her at ease and reassure her.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh condemned the attacks.
Church officials were careful in their wording about the incidents, and no official condemnation was issued against the attackers.
Christians make up less than 2 percent of the population of about 3 million in the Palestinian territories and generally talk of unity and brotherhood. However, privately some Christians complain about tensions between the two groups.
A group of Muslims also meant to attack Holy Family Catholic Church in Nablus, said the parish priest, Father Jalil Awwad, but mistook a nearby door as the church's entrance and threw firebombs at it instead. (o my goodness, these guys can't even pick the correct door to attack. Talk about dumb and dumber...)
Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches in Nablus also were attacked, as were Greek Orthodox churches in Gaza, and Tulkarm and Tubas in the West Bank. No attacks on churches were reported in Israel.
"It is not scary, they didn't hurt anybody; they did only damage to material things," said Father Awwad. "Nobody agrees with these actions, not even Muslims."
He said there has been more security around churches following the attacks.
Latin-rite Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem, accompanied by Lutheran and Anglican bishops, attended a prayer service at a Nablus Anglican church Sept. 17.
In a Sept. 15 statement, the patriarch said Pope Benedict used the quote by Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus to "explore the question of faith and the mind."
The pope's remarks were only partially quoted, Patriarch Sabbah added, and whoever brought the remarks to the attention of the Arabic press may have had the intention of bringing strife between the Muslim and Christian communities.
"Our reaction (to the comments) must be according to the concepts of the lecture (which) was only about faith and mind and not about Islam," he said.
In the statement Patriarch Sabbah expressed hope that the recent shock waves through Islamic communities would serve as a catalyst to put Christian-Muslim dialogue on a new track and would lead to greater understanding on both sides.
Father Majdi al-Siryani, director of the patriarchate schools, said area Christians were "not frightened ... even if a couple of incidents happened here or there."
"There are bad people and good people," he said. "The bad people are a very small minority. When we talk to our people we are not happy about it, and the large majority of Palestinian Muslims and Christians are not happy with what was said (or with) what the reaction has been."
"I know this is not what the pope meant. When he commits a mistake we (forgive) him. He is a human being after all. It happened but he was humble enough to apologize," said Father al-Siryani. "He won't be a politician. He will be a Christian and we will find a way to mend it."
He said several processions honoring Mary in largely Muslim villages Sept. 16-17 were not disturbed.
- - -
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Member of Catholic Press Association
Lawman.
Note: my own comments and asterisks added to the following:-
Catholic Palestinians downplay Muslim attacks on Christian churches
By Judith Sudilovsky
9/19/2006
Catholic News Service
JERUSALEM (CNS) – Christian Palestinians tried to downplay the significance of Muslim attacks on seven Christian churches in the West Bank and Gaza in protest of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam in Germany.
Just after the Sept. 16 shooting attack on St. John the Baptist Church in Nablus, West Bank, Melkite Father Youssef Saadeh, the parish priest, told a journalist Christians were no longer safe and would not be able to live in Nablus if the situation continued. The church's door was set afire in the attack.
However, in a Sept. 18 telephone interview, Father Saadeh made light of the situation, saying things were quiet, although it was impossible to know what would happen.
Father Saadeh skirted a question about fear that the attacks had instilled in the Christian community and instead pointed out that Muslim religious leaders and municipal leaders had visited Christian churches to signify solidarity.
No arrest had been made in connection with the attacks aimed at four Nablus churches, he said.
"Now we want to be strong and quiet," said Father Saadeh. "We don't know how it will be in the future, but like all people Muslims and Christians hope (the problems) are finished here."
His daughter, Rita Saadeh, who was at the church during the incident, was shaken up by the attacks and spoke out more strongly.
"When we saw the fire and smoke at the door we were afraid. The inside of the church is wood and we didn't have the key. We had no way to put out the fire," Saadeh, 33, said in a telephone interview. She described how the gunmen tried to kick down the door and ignited it with gasoline, then shot bullets into the church as she and her brother watched in terror.
She said she was not sure whether the violence had ended.
*** She added that the Muslim reaction was "very wrong" and carried out without having knowledge of what the pope actually said. ***
In an address Sept. 12 to scholars in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict quoted a medieval text, a historical criticism of Islam, which he later said did not reflect his personal opinion.
*** "Why if the pope ... says this ... must we pay? We are angry at what has happened here. It is not clear until now what the pope said. He was comparing knowledge and faith in religion," she said. "If (Muslims) say anything about the church we don't do anything (to them.) They also say we are terrorists, but we never react in the same way." ***
She said she was more relaxed two days after the attack and was able to go to work, where Muslim colleagues tried to put her at ease and reassure her.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh condemned the attacks.
Church officials were careful in their wording about the incidents, and no official condemnation was issued against the attackers.
Christians make up less than 2 percent of the population of about 3 million in the Palestinian territories and generally talk of unity and brotherhood. However, privately some Christians complain about tensions between the two groups.
A group of Muslims also meant to attack Holy Family Catholic Church in Nablus, said the parish priest, Father Jalil Awwad, but mistook a nearby door as the church's entrance and threw firebombs at it instead. (o my goodness, these guys can't even pick the correct door to attack. Talk about dumb and dumber...)
Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches in Nablus also were attacked, as were Greek Orthodox churches in Gaza, and Tulkarm and Tubas in the West Bank. No attacks on churches were reported in Israel.
"It is not scary, they didn't hurt anybody; they did only damage to material things," said Father Awwad. "Nobody agrees with these actions, not even Muslims."
He said there has been more security around churches following the attacks.
Latin-rite Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem, accompanied by Lutheran and Anglican bishops, attended a prayer service at a Nablus Anglican church Sept. 17.
In a Sept. 15 statement, the patriarch said Pope Benedict used the quote by Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus to "explore the question of faith and the mind."
The pope's remarks were only partially quoted, Patriarch Sabbah added, and whoever brought the remarks to the attention of the Arabic press may have had the intention of bringing strife between the Muslim and Christian communities.
"Our reaction (to the comments) must be according to the concepts of the lecture (which) was only about faith and mind and not about Islam," he said.
In the statement Patriarch Sabbah expressed hope that the recent shock waves through Islamic communities would serve as a catalyst to put Christian-Muslim dialogue on a new track and would lead to greater understanding on both sides.
Father Majdi al-Siryani, director of the patriarchate schools, said area Christians were "not frightened ... even if a couple of incidents happened here or there."
"There are bad people and good people," he said. "The bad people are a very small minority. When we talk to our people we are not happy about it, and the large majority of Palestinian Muslims and Christians are not happy with what was said (or with) what the reaction has been."
"I know this is not what the pope meant. When he commits a mistake we (forgive) him. He is a human being after all. It happened but he was humble enough to apologize," said Father al-Siryani. "He won't be a politician. He will be a Christian and we will find a way to mend it."
He said several processions honoring Mary in largely Muslim villages Sept. 16-17 were not disturbed.
- - -
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Member of Catholic Press Association
What the Pope Actually Said
For those of you who are wondering just what the Pope actually said and how, when and where he said it, the full text of the speech is here, republished without any permission whatsoever from the copyright holder:
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG
(SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
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.
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. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.
This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, 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.
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. 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. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet 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. 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. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
***
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.
© Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG
(SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
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.
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. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.
This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, 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.
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. 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. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet 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. 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. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
***
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.
© Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Saturday, September 16, 2006
The Pope should NOT apologize for his remarks
There has apparently been a chorus of criticism of the Pope over what many in the popular press - especially the Middle-Eastern Islamic popular press - have been saying are "anti-Islamic" remarks.
The Pope should not apologize.
The reason is very simple indeed: his remarks have been totally taken out of context and mis-interpreted. And, going by the manner in which the out-of-context misinterpretations have been consistently performed especially in Islamic countries, quite deliberately so.
The Islamists have twisted the Pope's speech for their own ends; they WANT a "clash of (religious) civilizations" to develop; they WANT inter-religious strife and violence on the planet; and they KNOW that they will win in either one of two ways: if they can force an apology for what are essentially unprovocative remarks, they demonstrate their power to force unreasonable concessions from those who do not agree with them, and reduce their enemies' credibility; alternatively, they can hope to increase their standing as defenders of their faith against "aggressive", "unrepentant" infidels, where their more moderate colleagues have kept quiet and refused to respond to "provocation".
Since either way the Pope gains no ground, he should not apologize. He should simply clarify what he said, and repeat that clarification ad infinitum. Violence, subtle persecution, discrimination, and propaganda warfare against Christians in countries with majority Muslim populations is endemic. It has not disappeared and will not disappear until the Second Coming. The Islamists would have used something - anything - else, as an excuse to keep the anti-Christian bigotry burning even if the Pope had never made his speech.
It will not be a coincidence that the Islamists will always try to make comparisons between the spread of Islam by the sword and the spread of Christianity by the sword.
What the Islamists don't want to emphasize is that they picked up the sciences, much of their technology and some of their art from pagans and infidels. Essentially, a backward tribe in the desert conquered and appropriated Byzantine architecture as their own (that's why the domes and minarets look so similar in Moscow, Constantinople and Mecca); inherited the Greeks' knowledge of the sciences and mathematics - these fields of knowledge were not introduced to the world by Islam, but preserved and in some respects improved upon for the use of future generations - and failed to invent much that can be claimed as entirely their own that is of relevance to daily survival in the modern world.
Christian missionaries, at least, brought disease-fighting medicine and surgical techniques to the Third World, albeit on the back of what was admittedly much White Man's Burden racist prejudice. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, basically all of the great social and scientific revolutions leading to the betterment of human society over the last 4 centuries - were Judeo-Christian, Euro- and North American-centric, not Islamic, in origin. These revolutions gave all of us residents of the modern world, Christian and non-Christian alike, such basic amenities as quick, motorized public transport and telecommunications, to name just 2 modern-day innovations that owe their existence to the very largely Christian, or at any rate non-Muslim, West. Now - this is going to sound inflammatory - but what has Islam given us modern-day Christians in return? I don't mean to bash, but it's time to stop making unfair comparisons. Christians took the Da Vinci Code reasonably well; it's time Muslims learnt to engage in rational debate and propaganda (as opposed to actual) warfare. It would do the world a whole lot of good.
END
The Pope should not apologize.
The reason is very simple indeed: his remarks have been totally taken out of context and mis-interpreted. And, going by the manner in which the out-of-context misinterpretations have been consistently performed especially in Islamic countries, quite deliberately so.
The Islamists have twisted the Pope's speech for their own ends; they WANT a "clash of (religious) civilizations" to develop; they WANT inter-religious strife and violence on the planet; and they KNOW that they will win in either one of two ways: if they can force an apology for what are essentially unprovocative remarks, they demonstrate their power to force unreasonable concessions from those who do not agree with them, and reduce their enemies' credibility; alternatively, they can hope to increase their standing as defenders of their faith against "aggressive", "unrepentant" infidels, where their more moderate colleagues have kept quiet and refused to respond to "provocation".
Since either way the Pope gains no ground, he should not apologize. He should simply clarify what he said, and repeat that clarification ad infinitum. Violence, subtle persecution, discrimination, and propaganda warfare against Christians in countries with majority Muslim populations is endemic. It has not disappeared and will not disappear until the Second Coming. The Islamists would have used something - anything - else, as an excuse to keep the anti-Christian bigotry burning even if the Pope had never made his speech.
It will not be a coincidence that the Islamists will always try to make comparisons between the spread of Islam by the sword and the spread of Christianity by the sword.
What the Islamists don't want to emphasize is that they picked up the sciences, much of their technology and some of their art from pagans and infidels. Essentially, a backward tribe in the desert conquered and appropriated Byzantine architecture as their own (that's why the domes and minarets look so similar in Moscow, Constantinople and Mecca); inherited the Greeks' knowledge of the sciences and mathematics - these fields of knowledge were not introduced to the world by Islam, but preserved and in some respects improved upon for the use of future generations - and failed to invent much that can be claimed as entirely their own that is of relevance to daily survival in the modern world.
Christian missionaries, at least, brought disease-fighting medicine and surgical techniques to the Third World, albeit on the back of what was admittedly much White Man's Burden racist prejudice. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, basically all of the great social and scientific revolutions leading to the betterment of human society over the last 4 centuries - were Judeo-Christian, Euro- and North American-centric, not Islamic, in origin. These revolutions gave all of us residents of the modern world, Christian and non-Christian alike, such basic amenities as quick, motorized public transport and telecommunications, to name just 2 modern-day innovations that owe their existence to the very largely Christian, or at any rate non-Muslim, West. Now - this is going to sound inflammatory - but what has Islam given us modern-day Christians in return? I don't mean to bash, but it's time to stop making unfair comparisons. Christians took the Da Vinci Code reasonably well; it's time Muslims learnt to engage in rational debate and propaganda (as opposed to actual) warfare. It would do the world a whole lot of good.
END
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