The Mandelbear's Musings

Here is a link, thanks to andyheninger, to the Pope's recent and controversial speech. The relevant passage is:

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 (*4V8,>4H - 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 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 (F×< 8`(T) 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 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.

Now, this is a pretty obscure reference, in a speech the main point of which is that Christian theology has a place in the university -- among the sciences, no less -- because it is based on rationality. I'll get back to that.

But at this point, it seems to me that the Pope could have picked any of a huge number of quotations to illustrate his main point, and that he may well have selected this one because it made a secondary argument "against violent conversion." I'll gladly give him credit for that much subtlety. But if he's that subtle and intelligent, he must have known how Muslim extremists view any kind of criticism of the Prophet.

It does little good, after setting up a bright red light in front of an angry bull, to argue that red is an internationally-known stop signal. The bull is going to see red, and charge ahead anyway.

The Pope goes on and returns to this same dialog in his conclusion:

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.

...to say that it "doesn't reflect his personal feelings" seems ingenuous at best -- the passage is central to his whole argument.

But it's an earlier part of the speech with which I, for my part, most strongly take issue:

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.

I am not a religious person, and I reject the Pope's implication that, because I do not believe in a deity -- any deity, but of course he means his deity in particular -- I am incapable of behaving ethically and indeed of developing a system of ethics. I reject his implication (and he's stated it explicitly on other occasions) that morality -- his morality -- is absolute and universal, and not culturally based. That there is some rational, provable basis on which to conclude that the Pope gets his ethics directly from God.

I disagree with the Muslim fundamentalists both in their motives and their methods, but I have considerable sympathy with their sense of moral outrage. They're not the only ones to have their beliefs insulted in this speech.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Muslim world divided over Pope's apology

Pope Benedict's admission that he was "deeply sorry" for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week - describing Islam as "evil and inhuman" - were not his own.

...but presumably he wouldn't have quoted them if they didn't say what he wanted to say.

Now, it is possible to argue -- and I've seen several attempts over the last couple of days -- that Muslim terrorism has a higher bodycount during the last couple of centuries than Christian. Possibly even if you omit 09/11 and the IRA. I'm not sure about the crusades. But the former head of the organization once known as the Inquisition is hardly in a position to cast stones, and he damned well ought to know better.

The Register asks the perfectly reasonable question: Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?

The answer, assuming triacetone triperoxide, is very clearly "no". Either we've been dealing with unbelievably stupid terrorist wannabes (always a distinct possibility), or some blatent misdirection.

From ravan comes a link to this little article by someone called electronpusher pointing out that triacetone triperoxide is actually quite difficult to make, and would probably not be very effective on an airplane. (I will note in passing that I was also badly mistaken about how easy concentrated H2O2 is to handle.)

The obvious conclusion, however, is not that the whole plot was a hoax, but that the triacetone triperoxide was either due to an overeager reporter looking up "peroxide" without reading the rest of the article, or possibly a deliberate smokescreen put up by the authorities to hide the real explosive. On the whole I lean toward the first explanation: we already know from other details that the explosive was a binary mixture one component of which was a powder. (Triacetone triperoxide has three components, all liquids: acetone, H2O2, and sulfuric acid.)

Another highly amusing take on the matter can be found in The Register under the title Yanks not impressed with UK terror emergency. Here they conclude that "either that US officials are quite underwhelmed by the UK's evidence of a feasible terrorist plot, or that the US government's casual indifference toward catastrophic loss of life and property, as exhibited when New Orleans was destroyed, is the new American attitude." They conclude:

Whether we're seeing the true Bushie callousness laid bare, or a healthy American skepticism toward HMG's repeated exhibition of a phony terrorist menace as a pretext to introduce the Kafka-esque legislation favored by Tony Blair and John Reid, will be answered by and by. There will be successful prosecutions, or there will be official excuses verging on an apology, but not quite amounting to one.

Boing Boing: Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists

In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University's John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism's risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage -- this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I've read since September 11th, 2001.

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel, you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

(PDF link)

This is something I've been saying for a long time. You're much more likely to be killed in a drive-by shooting than in a terrorist attack.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any group- ing of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the Sep- tember 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

And, let's face it, folks: nobody is going to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, ever again. Even unarmed, a planeful of enraged passengers is going to be more than a match for a handful of terrorists. The only thing gained by the "increased" airport security is to make people think the politicians are doing something about the terrorist threat, and to make that threat seem greater than it actually is. Their reasons for doing this are left as an exercise for the reader.