MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Maybe if we talk to radical Muslims, we'll be able to figure out how they really feel about Pope Benedict.

It's a common trick for people trying to sharpen our thoughts to put themselves in the place of argumentative opponents and try to think of what they might say. When we try to do this for advocates of interfaith dialogue - when we try to imagine an argument for why it might reduce global religious tension - we can think of literally not a single coherent argument. And so we looked around for the 20 or 30 readily available articles all advocating interfaith dialogue, but they just asserted that Benedict should embrace it. Even the vaunted and condescending New York Times didn't bother to actually explain why they think that the opportunity for interfaith dialogue is worth giving up the ghost on unifying the Catholic Church (must be a really good reason though!)

Where did this idea come from? More or less the same place that gave the international community the idea that Israel should negotiate with Palestinian terrorists as if the terrorists really wanted peace - so that the process that relied on two peace-seeking parties was supposed to work even without two peace-seeking parties. Because negotiations are good, because they lead to peace. Better not to think about how they only lead to peace when they're the result of two parties that already want peace - down that road lies the realization that Israel might have been forced to give away vast tracts of land and security for nothing.

And it's the same with interfaith dialogue. Who could object to dialogue, right? Dialogue causes understanding, understanding is good, etc etc. That you need two parties looking to actually gain from dialogue before it becomes productive is ignored - the focus is on the dialogue itself. Like any fetish that substitutes an object for the cause of the object, this kind of thinking can be reduced to simpering stupidity simply by describing it.

Let's assume that Benedict really believes that coherent Islamic doctrine requires a transcendent view of God or that 14th century Islam was somewhat less than a peacefully agrarian. No reason to assume that he doesn't - we know that the Catholic theology endorsed by Benedict heavily emphasizes the Kingdom of God as an interventions of the divine into time, rather than as a goal. We know that Benedict is deeply suspicious of religious ideologies that merge the secular and the sacred (anyone want to claim that there's not a 'political' element to Islam?) So what good would explaining that to more Muslims do? As it is, the Pope seems to have already reached a significant number of them. Please explain how having the Pope offer more proofs for God as logos is going to calm down the Arab street.

And let's assume that Muslims object to these points? Do you think anybody is under the impression that they're not? At this point, the only way they could be clearer involves trucks loaded with explosives.

There's a mistake that makes interfaith dialogue seem so good that it doesn't even have to be examined - and it is, of course, the idea that religions are just opinions that can be swapped like any other multicultural group therapy session. You have your view of art, we have our view of art, no reason for us to fight. But religions, of course, don't work that way. Rather than being opinions themselves (the result of sensibilities, thoughts, calculations, etc), they function as the sensibilities and prejudices that later on become opinions. They're just much deeper - they're not something like fashion sense, which every person has and every person can change. For truly devout people (or people who have literally nothing else to orient themselves other than religion), religion is not an opinion, it's the way of looking at the world that gives rise to opinions.

This also helps to explain why interfaith dialogue is at the very, very best a distraction when it comes to reducing anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not the result of misunderstandings about Judaism - it is the set of prejudices and assumptions that lead to those misunderstandings. People don't hate Jews because they believe that Jews flew planes into the World Trade Center - they believe that Jews flew planes into the World Trade Center because they already hate Jews for deeper, more pathological reasons. Deep prejudice is not the result of false beliefs - and so disabusing people of those false beliefs will have no effect on the prejudice. That's why you observe bigots who jump from one explanation to another to another when you push them on their beliefs - in the crudest sense, anti-Semitism and racism are prejudices in search of justifications. And anti-Semites and racists will find those justifications, no matter how many specific ones you identify and refute.

Now you can obviously have intellectual discussions between theologians of different faiths. And lay people can exchange ideas with each other, just on the level learning new things. But in those cases, there's already a generosity and an intellectual curiosity going into the conversation, and the conversation isn't really about faith per se. If the Muslim on the street thinks that Catholicism is a perversion of Allah's will, demonstrating all the ways that Catholicism is different from Islam is not going to make him more kindly predisposed to Rome. And demonstrating all the ways that Catholicism is similar to Islam will in the best case just create a situation where illusion is used to mask over genuine disagreements, since at bottom Catholicism and Islam have different conceptions of God (you don't think so? Well one of the best theologians on the planet has just explained why he thinks that is the case, and since he gets to decide what Catholicism is you're at a structural disadvantage here)

So again - how could it possibly be the case that someone could seriously suggest that clarifying how much they disagree with each other could bring Catholics and Muslims closer together? It's certainly not possible if you think that they hold these views as matters of utmost faith - the presumption is something along the lines of 'they'll modify their views if they just sit down and talk'. And that, gentle readers, is what we have after fifty years of the most unsophisticated kind of feel good, relativist, multiculturalism. And meanwhile, that New York Times editorial continues to frustrate our abilities to fully plumb its depths of incoherent and stupidity. We've reread it a couple of times, and we really can't get over the line "a doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue". It's just insane. No wonder these editors thought that the Fox reporters being forced to renounce their faith was the same as "unharmed".

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