<p>“In any case, I don’t think that some words, whether calculated or casual, are an excuse to make death threats or murder innocent nuns.”</p>
<p>Absolutely…on this I agree with you SJmom…wholeheartedly. But my point is in your choice of words. Calculated, imho, is the perfect description of the content and timing of the Pope’s speech. I don’t think the intent was malicious; in fact, I do believe that by ‘pushing back’ the Church is hoping to force moderate Muslim leaders to take control of their faith and congregants. There is a certain element of orchestration in this whole series of events that is unmistakable.</p>
<p>My worry is that Muslims are not like Catholics. There isn’t one authority who can stand up and direct or control the masses.</p>
<p>driver - no need for kid gloves. Sometimes it’s hard to properly ‘hear’ the intended tone or inflection here. My mistake. I do appreciate the link.</p>
<p>To paraphrase: the saddest thing is when good people do nothing. So why aren’t the “good” muslims screaming to stop this? They tell their friends that they don’t support it? Please! (Many good Germans didn’t support Hitler, either, and look what happened!) Interesting coverage I saw yesterday. One of the food shows was filming in Beirut right after the Lebanese muslim gentleman and gourmand was explaining how things have gotten so good - that people live well together and it doesn’t matter if someone is muslim or Christian. They are respected in Lebanon, expecially now that Syria is out. The murder of their former ruler unified everyone even more than they previously were. While walking, we heard machine gun fire in the background (on a quiet, beautiful, sunny, day). They ascertained it was a few streets away. Then, cars with Lebanese license plates, started driving past, honking and waving the Palestinian and Lebanese flags with young boys and men hanging out shouting for joy that they had kidnapped some Israeli soldiers! The muslim hung his head and the comment was made that “we would all pay for this.” Did anyone in the streets tell the kids to stop? Were there protests over this? No. And this was supposedly in a tolerant mideast country.
Interesting that many seem to think that it is good to have a muslim former ruler come to H and “discuss so we can learn from him or try to change his mind.” And you can bet he didn’t say anything nice about the Jews or … yet, the Pope says something as a serious discourse (such as the one at H) and many of those same people feel that he shouldn’t have insulted the muslims. So we pick and choose who we are supposed to be tolerant with - radical, terrorist muslims and no one else.
There was a BBC special on a couple weeks ago in which a convert, white Brit has become a mullah and he was interviewed. The reporter flat out asked where in Koran does it state that it is OK to kill innocent people. Response: No one killed on 9/11 or in any of the bombings was innocent. All non-believers are the spawn of Satan and it is the duty of Islam to wipe us all out for the glory of Allah. Even the baby is not innocent. And if a muslim happened to be on the plane or the World Trade Center? Well, they are being rewarded by Allah now, and died a martyr, even though an unconscious one. So even if a muslim didn’t want to die in the cause, they are taking the person’s name and twisting their roles to give credence to the actions.</p>
<p>"“In any case, I don’t think that some words, whether calculated or casual, are an excuse to make death threats or murder innocent nuns.”</p>
<p>I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve discovered that words have consequences. When Colin Powell goes before the United Nations (and on international tv) and lies in such a way that he is found out within 48 hours, and then war is waged based upon what he says, tens of thousands of innocent people get killed. When the leader of the so-called “free” world goes about calling other countries the “axis of evil”, and then surrounds them with 200,000 aggressive troops, it isn’t surprising when the people in that country want nuclear weapons to defend themselves. </p>
<p>The difference is that, while I expect little out of our own “axis of evil” in Washington, DC, I do expect better from religious leaders who make claims among millions of people’s souls. He had literally thousands of ways to talk about, and thousands of examples to cite regarding the intersection of religion and violence, and he could have started with Jesus. He made an ill-considered decision and he simply should apologize for it, and move on.</p>
<p>Excuse for violence? Not in the least. But if his stature as a voice for peace is diminished, and his usefulness as a spokesperson for the cause of peace is severely curtailed, he has only himself to blame.</p>
<p>No more reason to discuss it than the sayings of Jesus, the justification of “Christian” soldiers, or our Prez’s belief that “God speaks through me, or I couldn’t do my job.”</p>
<p>“The question is whether the emperor is justified in what he said. His main thrust was at least partly justified. There is a real problem about the teaching of the Koran on violence against the infidel.”</p>
<p>Just substitute “New Testament” for Koran, and the problem remains the same. Of course, most Christians can’t see it. Just as most Muslims can’t see it with “Koran”.</p>
<p>That’s why leaders who claim a mantle of peace need to be careful in what they have to say. As to what Ratzinger happens to believe, well, since he won’t say so, we are unlikely to know.</p>
<p>(And if much of the European world today rejects 1,700 years of Christian experience leading up to the Holocaust, maybe it’s because Christianity on the whole is on the decline, as folks are dimly aware that the teachings of Jesus - rightly or wrongly interpreted - led to the ovens.)</p>
<p>mini, when was the last time Christians used suicide bombs or hijacked airliners to murder innocent people, in the name of God? I’ve said that Christianity has a few things to answer for in its past, but to the best of my knowledge there isn’t anything equivalent to a jihad going on in the Christian world. </p>
<p>By the way, when Cardinal Ratzinger became the head of the Catholic Church he became known as Pope Benedict XVI. Your insistence on using his birth name just strikes me as one more way to convey your disdain of him and the Church.</p>
<p>When God called George Bush to bomb the people of Iraq, he had more weapons available than suicide bombers. Instead of flying planes into targets, he dropped bombs from them. More elegant, same effect. </p>
<p>I know, you don’t see them as equivalent. That’s fine. Many folks in the Muslim world don’t see them as equivalent either.</p>
<p>It wasn’t the teachings of Jesus that led to the ovens, but the fallibility of human beings in not being able to live the teachings-- with no faith strong enough. Most humans are not especially noble or brave.</p>
<p>Some did live their faith: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, leader of a small Protestant resistence movement in Germany, “The Confessing Church” - hanged in a concentration camp in Flossenburg on April 9, 1945, as were the rest of his group.</p>
<p>Pope Benedict is the Pope. This is his title. He is not a Cardinal any more. </p>
<p>I call my neighbor Rabbi Weiss rather than Mr. Weiss or by his first name, Sam, despite him not being my teacher or a leader of my faith. Again it’s a title.</p>
<p>Easy way out, isn’t it? Yes, I know all about Boenhoeffer, and how his refusal to follow the teachings of Jesus AS HE HIMSELF SAW THEM likely lengthened the War by 14 months by preventing Hitler’s overthrow by a close coterie of generals. Profound man, though.</p>
<p>Either Jesus came to bring a sword into the world, or he didn’t. 1700 years of Christian history says he did. 300 years of Christian history (the first 300 years) says that violence even in self-defense is prohibited, and Christian soldiers are “like dogs who eat their own vomit.” You can make your own interpretation as you choose.</p>
<p>Courtesy to whom? Lucian Pulvermacher?</p>
<p>By the way, in my tradition, we call EVERYONE by their first name, and use no titles - it is thought to be worse than discourteous to use them. Karl is okay with me. Don’t mind Benedict either. Lots of folks change their names.</p>
<p>Yes, I know. No bombs were aimed at Iraqis. They just happened to be under them.</p>
<p>mini - do you know who wrote the following? And do you agree?</p>
<p>"I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery… </p>
<p>I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learned nothing else.</p>
<p>By what would you have me replace the Christians’ picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity, and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the ‘why’ of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable."</p>
<hr>
<p>The above was written by Hitler…in addition to the following:</p>
<p>“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.” </p>
<p>So personally, I take issue with the notion that some perverted version of Christianity somehow played a part in causing in the Holocaust. Only Satan could be responsible for such an unspeakable tragedy.</p>
That’s what the Bull Connors types said when Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammed Ali, and they kept calling him “Clay.” Whatever gets you through your angry day, I guess.</p>
<p>Hitler also said this: (He constantly used his “faith”:Christianity, false or not, as a way to rally the people around his ideas. It is a familiar method).</p>
<p>“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows.”</p>
<p>-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922</p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p>“We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls… We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.”</p>
<p>-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928,</p>
<p>When Adolf Hitler is held up as a model of Christianity, I lose all hope for the possiblity of civilized discourse.</p>
<p>I’ve offered several posts which I thought clarified the point of view of Pope Benedict XVI and therefore the Catholic Church, as mini asked.</p>
<p>Somehow, that information has been distorted and used against the Church – the Crusades, the Holocaust and Hitler are used to justify the violence in the middle east in response to a speech. </p>
<p>I offered the idea that words, even insults, don’t justify violence, and mini seems to disagree – I’ve yet to hear him condemn the threats of assassination against the leader of 1 billion Catholics, or the murder of an innocent nun. </p>
<p>If anyone feels that a verbal disagreement justifies violence, I really can’t say anything more to you – it is a notion that is so far removed from my belief system that I can’t imagine what to say to change your mind. So, I won’t try. “There are none so blind as those who will not see; none so deaf as those who refuse to listen.”</p>
<p>allmusic - Yes those are public speeches intended to manipulate the masses. The source of this manipulation, the evil in Hitler’s soul, is not Christianity, nor any version thereof. Hitler’s true feelings about Christianity are reflected in his private conversations with those whom he trusted most. He became increasingly anti-Christian and pro-pagan after he became Chancellor of Germany. Once he had the power, he didn’t need to woo the masses. In fact, he came to believe he himself was a messiah and had no use for Christianity or the Christian Messiah. (OSS documents revealed he severed his personal relationship with the Catholic Church after WWI.)</p>
<p>It is apparent how he revealed his true feelings over time…</p>
<p>"It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament, for a religious Folk who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched Folk strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs. </p>
<p>It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German Folk should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo jumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole heap of people have found opened to them lines of religious thought which — particularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and somewhat melancholy meditation — as often as not turned them into religious maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realizes why movements such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages in Germany." Adolph Hitler (comments recorded between July 1941 and June 1942)</p>
<p>sjmom - don’t worry, no one is holding Hitler up as a model of Christianity. There are some who believe Hitler was a practicing Catholic/Christian when in fact that is not the case.</p>