Pope Sticks to His 'Guns', Sort of. Pope Benedict XVI raised a ruckus by some indignant Moslems around the world in quoting from a fourteenth-century predecessor about some of the teachings of Islam. Protestors objecting to that earlier Pope's characterization of Islam as violent have instead added weight to the accusation, by demonstrating violently and burning churches. Stupid bastards.
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For his own part, the Pope has not issued a formal apology as such.

I trust that after the initial reaction, my words at the university of Regensburg can constitute an impulse and encouragement toward positive, even self-critical dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith," he added.

The whole world pretends to respect Islam, but in fact nobody does — not the Islam of the fanatics, the demonstrators, the fatwa-issuing censors who oppose freedom of speech and thought. No decent person anywhere on Earth respects that version of Islam. No one. Nor should anyone respect a religion that demands unquestioning obedience and cannot examine itself in the lite of reason and morality.
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Islam was spread by the sword, and beats down its adherents thru constant demands that they follow rigid daily rituals, practice a month of daytime fasting, etc., as keeps the mind busy and makes a person think that God is always watching and demands constant subservience. The rituals replace thought — compare obsessive-compulsive behavior that keeps people from thinking about and solving their underlying problems — and merely doing the ritualistic things required substitutes for thinking about ethicality and the deeper meaning, if any, behind their faith.
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My colleague in Northern England says that religions heavy on ritual are "orthopraxic", which apparently means that there is more stress on ritual than philosophy. That is the problem with Islam.
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He has also pointed out that altho the Koran does contain the same kinds of moral teachings as the Ten Commandments of Judaism (if not the Three Commandments of Christianity: Love God with all your heart and soul; Love your neighbor as yourself; and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), those teachings are not in one convenient location for ready reference but scattered throughout the book. It takes some effort to put them together. In between are so many other poetical, and thus imprecise and unclear, messages that all kinds of interpretations can be put to them by different readers (or the same reader at different times and under different conditions). That may explain why Islam seems so weak on morality, so heavy on morally empty ritual.
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Islam needs to clean up its act. It needs to decide if it is violent or antiviolent; if it frees the human mind and spirit or chains both; if it is modern or anti-modern; humane or inhumane; and on, an on. Praying five times a day is no substitute for thinking about the right and wrong of things.
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Islam needs a Pope. It once had one, the caliph ("successor" to Muhammed), then Ottoman Sultan, who was accepted as the ultimate authority on what Islam requires on any given issue. To that extent, perhaps we should indeed restore the Caliphate, not (necessarily) as a political entity but as a community of the faithful who adhere to agreed norms. That way the whole world could know what Islam is and is not.
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Right now, most people outside Islam have only conflicting messages, some from al-Qaeda, some from local firebrands, all too few from esteemed and moderate scholars.
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Islam needs a world convention of imams and scholars to set out for all adherents what Islam does and does not smile upon in morality. Then the world will know how to react.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,691 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:25 PM