In which I don’t make fun of the Pope, exactly September 17, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Religion.trackback
Everyone’s on Ratz’s case for his recent comments about Muslims, and it won’t surprise my readers that I’m not interested in defending him. In fact, I’ve blasted him in the past. But I’m a bit confused about this criticism. It seems to me that all he’s guilty of is being an intolerant religious jerk. And that’s more or less in his job description. I mean, isn’t the first requirement to be Pope that you believe Catholics are right and other religions wrong?
Criticizing him for being bigoted against Muslims, then, strikes me as missing the point: why is everyone pissed at our favorite ex-Nazi religious leader for saying what he obviously believes? Or maybe the Pope’s view of the world just doesn’t hold up well for those of us who don’t think that the world divides neatly into “our religion” and “evildoers.”
I, for one, would like to encourage the Pope to continue to make stupid statements that illustrate what we all know to be true: once you’ve bought into the idea that you’re a member of the “right” religion, and others are wrong, of course you’re going to be an intolerant ass. To do anything else would simply make you a hypocrite.
Now that I’m not making fun of the Pope, stay tuned for my next post, where I make fun of the Pope.
My take is this: The Roamn Catholics have a deep history of spreading the word by the sword, so who is he to talk? Did he study the part of catholicism that fed the Spanish Inquisition? Does he also remember the crusades and the right of the church to slaughter millions in the name of God? “Their god”.
He had no right to say what he said. In fact, he was quoting a 14th century document. Poof positive that the Catholic Church has no intention of emerging from the dark ages.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise (i.e., you’ve committed the non-sequitur logical fallacy). For example, Muslims believe that their religion is the one true religion and others are false yet they may tolerate those who disagree with them.
Perhaps an illustration will help you see the point I’m making. As I’ve pointed out before you are a moral relativist and therefore you implicitly believe that anyone who disagrees with you is incorrect (I am working under the assumption that you are not violating the law of non-contradiction). However, just because you believe that those who are not moral relativists are incorrect does not necessarily mean that you are an intolerant ass.
Setting aside the very important fact that there is no Biblical justification for the Catholic Church’s past evildoings I’m curious if you apply the same critical bar to Islam. Surely you agree that the sheer scale of the monstrous acts of barbarism committed in the name of Islam (sawing people’s heads off, murdering innocent women and children, indoctrinating their children to become human bombs, etc) dwarfs that which is committed illogically in the name of Christianity, right?
What do you think about the notorious Muslim “Verse of the Sword” in sura 9:5 – “slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush”?
That is absurd. Under what criteria do you hold that to be true?
From http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/013192.php :
…we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech — surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts — and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By “we” I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News — Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary — “we’re pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence” — but in the days since the pope’s sermon, I don’t feel that I’ve heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.
All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it’s time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to “hate” Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn’t the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain’s chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them — simultaneously?
I’m sorry, I’m trying not to take the bait, but isn’t the idea that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong rather different from moral relativism?
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition.
Your first mistake was reading his comment, LQ. ;) It’s far more hilarious to simply not read them.
But if we’re looking for problems, besides the one you just mentioned, there’s also the large one that old joe here keeps forgetting that I’m not a moral relativist, and the only reason he thinks so is that he claimed I was.
So his argument is this: you’re a moral relativist because I say you are, and because you’re a relativist, you make absolute moral claims.
It’s really hilariously bad.
The idea is that anyone who believes that objective morality does not exist is a moral relativist.
Not so. I say that you are a moral relativist because you admitted to being one . To quote you: “I would like to begin by pointing out that what I’ve been asked for is ‘objective morality,’ but of course this no-one can provide.” Hence, you have taken the leap of faith to believe there is no such thing as an objective morality; this is the moral relativistic position.
Your readers don’t have to take my word for it, they can see the evidence for my position here .
[pardon the reposting, but this blog apparently filters out comments with >= 2 hyperlinks]
Not so. I say that you are a moral relativist because you admitted to being one . To quote you: “I would like to begin by pointing out that what I’ve been asked for is ‘objective morality,’ but of course this no-one can provide.” Hence, you have taken the leap of faith to believe there is no such thing as an objective morality; this is the moral relativistic position.
Your readers don’t have to take my word for it, they can see the evidence for my position on the 8/16 posting on my blog at josephnadir.wordpress.com.