Juan Cole's Latest Post On the Pope Is Just As Dumb and Ignorant As All His Other Ones (Not Getting the Argument Edition)
Who is this guy? When he's not falling into feel-good Leftist bromides he's condescending to people for not making sense when he just plain out and very evidently does not understand their arguments, the basis for their arguments, or the significance of their arguments. And of course, the entire thing is layered with a pretentious air of satisfaction and superiority.
(1) Mindless Leftist feel good imbecility -
It is always better to put forward the virtues of your tradition on their own, without attempting invidious comparisons with, and put-downs, of others. If Christianity is superior, that can be perceived without it being necessary to brand Islam inferior.
Here's the thing about words that are comparisons (better, superior, worse, inferior): you actually need two things to compare. you can't just have one. Then it wouldn't be "superior" to anything, it would just be "good". And the whole point of religion is to demonstrate that joining a faith provides a superior way of living (or knowing) than other faiths. That's why we have systems of thought. Yes, it would be really nice if everybody was as good as everybody else and everything was as good as everything else. But back here, where we don't live in the idiot affirmation 1980s, that's not how things work.
(2) Pretentious and incoherent philosophy -
The problem with the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that it laid out three intellectual traditions as unchanging, undifferentiated essences and then contrasted them with one another, to the edification of his own position. There aren't any essences.
If you're keeping a spreadsheet, this part goes under "the amateur walking into a debate and figuring out the one, easy, obvious thing that everybody else missed". If only Pope Benedict would have known that "there aren't any essences", we could have avoided this whole ugly mess to begin with. Except, of course and obviously, Cole has ascribed to the Pope the position that he'd like the Pope to have - not the one the Pope does have. The Pope's position, of course and obviously, is the exact opposite of what Cole thinks it is - it's not that there are essences in religion, but rather tensions and forces that make it likely to go in one direction or another. This is actually a philosophical error - Cole doesn't understand that what the Pope is dealing with here are styles of thought that are historically developed, not any "essence" of a religion. For the same reason - that he's two arrogant to consider the possibility that maybe there are at issues in play that he doesn't understand - Cole thinks that he's being oh-so-clever by pointing to counterexamples:
(3) Counter-examples that actually prove the Pope's point -
Nor have all Christian theological streams concluded that human reason can comprehend God's reason. There have been times and places where Islam was more tolerant than Christianity. And significant Muslim theological traditions, though not the majority, have held a vision of God as in accord with human reason very similar to the one embraced by the Pope. Look at the Mu'tazili school, which has been extremely influential in Shiite Islam, and which has been favored by modernist reformers such as the Egyptian Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1905).
This, you will not now be surprised, is the Pope's point. That the initial texts of Islam (and the way that the texts tell readers to read them) make it unlikely that theological traditions like the Mu'tazili school or the Egyptian reformers will succeed or survive. Which they haven't. Which is the Pope's point.
Look, this guy is either dense or intentionally missing the point, and it's getting really hard trying to untangle which is which. The Pope's point was about the resources that particular theological traditions provide scholars who are trying to move them in one direction or another (this morning Dr. Donuhue referred to this as the amount of "wiggle room" in a religion). People who want to reform Judaism or Catholicism and make them modern find a lot of resources in their tradition - so many resources that historically they've actually be able to pull off long-lasting reforms. People who want to reform Islam find very few resources in their tradition - which is why the vast majority of the Muslim world seems to have significant trouble modernizing. Condescendingly pointing out that the Pope refuses to recognize that there have been efforts at reform and Enlightenment in the Muslim world (this is the second or third time that Cole has brought up the Mu'tazili school) spectacularly misses (and kind of proves) the Pope's point.
Cole's got a bunch of "blog expert" awards on the left side of his blog. It's a good thing that he already knows so much, because he's obviously concluded that there's nothing left for him to learn from anybody else - and that it's a waste of his time to even try to understand what other people are saying.
(1) Mindless Leftist feel good imbecility -
It is always better to put forward the virtues of your tradition on their own, without attempting invidious comparisons with, and put-downs, of others. If Christianity is superior, that can be perceived without it being necessary to brand Islam inferior.
Here's the thing about words that are comparisons (better, superior, worse, inferior): you actually need two things to compare. you can't just have one. Then it wouldn't be "superior" to anything, it would just be "good". And the whole point of religion is to demonstrate that joining a faith provides a superior way of living (or knowing) than other faiths. That's why we have systems of thought. Yes, it would be really nice if everybody was as good as everybody else and everything was as good as everything else. But back here, where we don't live in the idiot affirmation 1980s, that's not how things work.
(2) Pretentious and incoherent philosophy -
The problem with the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that it laid out three intellectual traditions as unchanging, undifferentiated essences and then contrasted them with one another, to the edification of his own position. There aren't any essences.
If you're keeping a spreadsheet, this part goes under "the amateur walking into a debate and figuring out the one, easy, obvious thing that everybody else missed". If only Pope Benedict would have known that "there aren't any essences", we could have avoided this whole ugly mess to begin with. Except, of course and obviously, Cole has ascribed to the Pope the position that he'd like the Pope to have - not the one the Pope does have. The Pope's position, of course and obviously, is the exact opposite of what Cole thinks it is - it's not that there are essences in religion, but rather tensions and forces that make it likely to go in one direction or another. This is actually a philosophical error - Cole doesn't understand that what the Pope is dealing with here are styles of thought that are historically developed, not any "essence" of a religion. For the same reason - that he's two arrogant to consider the possibility that maybe there are at issues in play that he doesn't understand - Cole thinks that he's being oh-so-clever by pointing to counterexamples:
(3) Counter-examples that actually prove the Pope's point -
Nor have all Christian theological streams concluded that human reason can comprehend God's reason. There have been times and places where Islam was more tolerant than Christianity. And significant Muslim theological traditions, though not the majority, have held a vision of God as in accord with human reason very similar to the one embraced by the Pope. Look at the Mu'tazili school, which has been extremely influential in Shiite Islam, and which has been favored by modernist reformers such as the Egyptian Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1905).
This, you will not now be surprised, is the Pope's point. That the initial texts of Islam (and the way that the texts tell readers to read them) make it unlikely that theological traditions like the Mu'tazili school or the Egyptian reformers will succeed or survive. Which they haven't. Which is the Pope's point.
Look, this guy is either dense or intentionally missing the point, and it's getting really hard trying to untangle which is which. The Pope's point was about the resources that particular theological traditions provide scholars who are trying to move them in one direction or another (this morning Dr. Donuhue referred to this as the amount of "wiggle room" in a religion). People who want to reform Judaism or Catholicism and make them modern find a lot of resources in their tradition - so many resources that historically they've actually be able to pull off long-lasting reforms. People who want to reform Islam find very few resources in their tradition - which is why the vast majority of the Muslim world seems to have significant trouble modernizing. Condescendingly pointing out that the Pope refuses to recognize that there have been efforts at reform and Enlightenment in the Muslim world (this is the second or third time that Cole has brought up the Mu'tazili school) spectacularly misses (and kind of proves) the Pope's point.
Cole's got a bunch of "blog expert" awards on the left side of his blog. It's a good thing that he already knows so much, because he's obviously concluded that there's nothing left for him to learn from anybody else - and that it's a waste of his time to even try to understand what other people are saying.
