Cloudy Thinking

George Weigel writes in The Los Angeles Times The Pope Was Right.

There has been much angst among Muslims about what the Pope had to say. But there’s a reasonable case to be made that his (admittedly strong!) remarks about radical Islam were on target.

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… Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

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The pope’s first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don’t think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things.

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The pope’s second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children “is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul.”

If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God’s purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.

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The pope’s third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West’s high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is “your truth” and “my truth” but nothing such as “the truth” — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won’t be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending.

A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.

We need more straight talk about the real dangers of radical Islam.

Thank you, Pope Benedict XVI

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under OpEd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.