The Blessed Balance Between Reason and Religion – part 2: Framing the whole thing

Posted on September 16th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Public Islam, Religion Other.

And yes, there we are: the Vatican has offered their apologies, but since he hasn’t done that himself it’s not enough for everyone. But let’s go back to the heart of the matter. The core of the pope’s message was:

[T]he 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.

In this he is attacking secularism with his exclusion of faith from the realm of reason but also Islam because of (in his view) the exclusion of reason from the realm of faith. This might partly be the case but his examples were not correct (not historical and not for the present) so in that view you can consider his speech as unjust, insulting and certainly stupid. What is more striking however, and I can imagine the Vatican is surprised by this, how this speech is immediately framed as either ‘anti-islam’ or ‘the truth about islam’. But in anyway related to Islam, so we can speak of Islamizing the Pope’s speech. (more…)

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