The Pope Apologizes

[spacemanspiff]

So I'm half-assed listening to the news this morning and I see where a bunch of Muslims are running amok, burning and shooting up churches and generally getting their panties in a wad, calling for Jihad and demanding that the Pope be hung. I'm wondering what he said that got them all upset, so I search on Google News and here's what I find.

Pope Benedict XVI apologized today for causing offense to Muslims with comments he made in a university lecture this week implicitly linking Islam to violence....

Instead of appologizing, why doesn't he say "See, that's exactly that I'm talking about."

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by spacemanspiff

Instead of appologizing, why doesn't he say "See, that's exactly that I'm talking about."

Hell yeah! Make "Jesus Christ, Inc." into the #1 target for religious fanatics, and maybe us poor, defenseless, terrorized and innocent people of the USA can finally live without fear!

El Pope is probably worried the church doesn't have enough knights in shining armor and sadistic priests acting in the name of a very angry God to survive a bloody masachre not started by Chatholic fanatics.

[Fonz]

He quoted one of the earlier popes who had said something bad about the muslims. But the current pope only made that quote in the context of "miscommunications like this (what the other pope said) should be avoided in the future".

And suddenly the entire middle east and every muslim community in Europe are going crazy...
I don't get these things.

Ah well, never thought I would participate in a thread about religion

[Jim]

I just don't get any of the popes. I mean, how many people have died in the name of Catholicism?

At least the last pope seemed to be able to speak in public without causing an uproar. They really could do so much good if they would get out of the past.

[SirMoby]

He was quoting a pope that helped sponsor the crusades when Christians were running around killing Muslims in the name of God on a scale that's much worse then Saddam's genocide. He should apologize.

The last pope promoted peace but I don't think this one feels the same way.

[spacemanspiff]

He was quoting from a transcript of a series of conversations between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian scholar.

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.

This is the part that pissed Muslims off

...he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

He then makes reference to the fact that at that time there were vast differences in what people believed to be Gods will as, evidenced by these transctripts.

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 Hazn 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.