Missing the Irony

I would comment on the Muslim outrage over Pope Benedict XVI's recent comments about Islam, but I really couldn't say it better than Chuck Colson did yesterday: Proving His Point

Colson says:

Muslims are outraged over Pope Benedict’s recent speech, in which he denounced violence as a means of bringing about religious conversion. How did they demonstrate their anger? Ironically, with violent protest—even murder.

It's remarkably reminiscent of the Danish cartoon flap, about which Ann Coulter stated:

In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.

A satirist couldn't make this up. Every time someone suggests Muslims are prone to violence, they riot to show how wrong that person is.

If you haven't read the Pope's actual address, which has been grossly misinterpreted as usual, please read it here. The media outlets, as usual, carefully selected the quotes that would provoke the strongest reaction, then published them out of context. It's a safe strategy in a country with freedom of expression, but deadly in countries prone to religious violence. To an angry, overreacting, and generally non-reading mob, the simple message was lost: We want to discuss our religious differences without you getting mad. The Pope's address was an appeal to reason together, to talk honestly about our religions' teachings and acknowledge our respective failures to live up to them. You want to bring up Hitler? Fine. We won't kill you for doing so. You question my religion, I'll question yours, we'll search for the truth together.

Since the press missed them, here are a few key points:

The decisive statement in [Byzantine Emperor Manuel II's] argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.

The scientific ethos, ... is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. ... We will succeed in [overcoming the rift between science and reason] only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable.

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.

'Not to act reasonably (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.

Them ain't fightin' words.

You can understand why the Pope was upset that his words were misused to inflame the very conflict he wants to help resolve. Warmongering mullahs and their accomplices in the media deserve the blame for the bloodshed and are the ones who should be apologizing.