Reason Vs. Power

Christopher Chantrill has written the best essay I have so far on the battle over Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam.

Here's an excerpt:


... it is clear from the events of the last week that dhimmitude is here right now.

I’d never had much time for Oriana Fallaci, the outrageous Italian interviewer and journalist, but appreciated her diatribes against Islam in the years since 9/11, and wrinkled my nose on learning that she was being sued for insulting the faith. But the head of the Italian journalists’ union marked her death last week by saying that she was a

“great, courageous and scrupulous journalist but also an intellectual whose most recent views were unacceptable and in many respects dangerous.”

What can you call that but dhimmitude?

Then there is the flap over the Pope’s remarks at the University of Regensburg. In a scholarly speech on September 12, 2006 that primarily defended the idea of Jesus Christ as the living God, Pope Benedict XVI raised the question that ought to be the central question that Christians ask of Muslims. What is with all this holy war stuff? He quoted the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus:

“Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”

The Christian God is a reasonable God, he asserts, the Word made flesh.

“But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent,”

independent of reason or anything else.

Since it is merely a couple of weeks since two Fox News staffers were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam—without a peep of outrage from the moderate Muslim community—I’d say that it was the Pope’s duty to raise the question of jihad with the Muslim world. If the head of the Catholic Church won’t do it who will?

But the international media was united in condemning the Pope’s remarks as a gaffe, an insult to Islam.

Now liberals are united in protecting Muslims from insult and tossing away our tradition of free speech. The only thing that matters is to make westerners—or Christians, or Americans—take the blame, to make them into dhimmi, second-class citizens afraid to stand up for the Christian God, the rule of law, and the bounty of the market.

If you read the Pope’s speech at Regensburg carefully you can appreciate the radicalism of the Christian message. The idea that God is a rational God, who invites us to discover His nature through an exploration of reason, is radical. It makes the claim that, in the end, we will find out that the universe makes sense.

It is the same claim that western science makes, that we can understand the universe by discovering its laws. Both Christianity and science are grounded in the same faith, that there are indeed laws that describe the universe.

But Islam and western postmodernism make a different claim. For them there is no “In the beginning was the Word,” the logos of reason.

There is only power: divine power or secular power.


Yes, that's right. The Western tradition is that reason should prevail, which will lead to progress. The Leftist tradition, and the Muslim tradition say that power always prevails, so it is a matter of which power wins.

I say, may the more reasonable power win.