Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 12:55am

Dialogue

Coexist

 

Pat Archbold has a barn burner of a post up at One Peter Five looking at the calls by the USCCB for dialogue with Muslims:

 

It is a curious conceit of an obtuse generation that it believes itself to be committed to modernity, embodied by devotion to science and reason, and yet is so irrevocably immutable to evidence.

The spiritual (but not religious) Mecca of modernity in the Catholic Church is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the headquarters of which would likely be a smoking ruin if we had a God quick to anger rather than slow.

The absurdity of this very modern institution is embodied perfectly in their recent USCCB statement on their “Commitment To Dialogue With Muslims.”

What is the bottom line? They are so committed to dialogue with Muslims, it seems, that they will persevere in useless dialogue until every last one of us Christians is dead.

“We understand the confusion and deep emotions stirred by real and apparent acts of aggression and discrimination by certain Muslims against non-Muslims, often against Christians abroad,” the bishops wrote. “Along with many of our fellow Catholics and the many Muslims who themselves are targeted by radicals, we wish to voice our sadness, indeed our outrage, over the random and sometimes systematic acts of violence and harassment—acts that for both Christians and Muslims threaten to disrupt the harmony that binds us together in mutual support, recognition, and friendship.”

In the face of a terrifying juggernaut of death and destruction that 50 years of dialogue have done absolutely nothing to stop and arguably encouraged, the USCCB is committed to more of the same. Everyone knows that dialogue with Islam is impossible since there is no monolithic Islam with which to dialogue, so we have endeavored to dialogue merely with its adherents. I think the most humble and unambitious goal of such interreligious dialogue would have been some sort of consensus that, in general, they shouldn’t try to kill us or anyone else. Even with the bar set so low, by any measurement, 50 years of dialogue has been a miserable failure.

Go here to read the rest.  The modern belief that words, ever more words, are solutions to all conflict is just as superstitious as a shaman muttering an incantation to summon a spirit to work his will.  We are seeing now in the Middle East just how effective calls for dialogue are in societies where Muslims are in the majority.  Not all Muslims of course are jidhadists, but those who are will ever be deaf to cries of “dialogue” that do not include in Arabic the phrase:  We surrender.

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the Old Adam
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 7:32pm

I’d love to see them (the Bishops) drive around in any Muslim country with that bumper sticker on their car.

Tamsin
Tamsin
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 8:12pm

“we wish to voice our sadness, indeed our outrage,…”

Sure, they could do that. They could say, “We are sad, we are outraged.” But they won’t, they can’t, they don’t.

Ben @ 2CM
Admin
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 8:29pm

I’ve always wondered how to negotiate with someone whose starting point is “I’m going to kill you.” How do you counter? Can you just kill me a little later, instead of right now?

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 8:51pm

Everyone knows that dialogue with Islam is impossible since there is no monolithic Islam with which to dialogue, so we have endeavored to dialogue merely with its adherents.

Anyone here read Jonah Goldberg’s Tyranny of Cliches? He makes almost this exact point (wait, was it in that book or in an article) that what the Islamic world has needed is not a reformation, but a Catholic church equivalent.

the word is catholic
the word is catholic
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 9:02pm

how about this one instead:
http://www.thewordiscatholic.com

Mary De Voe
Wednesday, August 27, AD 2014 9:47pm

COEXIST…for Whom?

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, August 28, AD 2014 4:05am

Prominent Muslims have expressed something very like distain for their fundamentalist brethren.

Fadela Amara, when she was Secretary of State for Urban Policies under President Sarkozy, described fundamentalism as something clung to by some people through ignorance and isolation in ghetto communities that will vanish when they are given better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences. “For this generation,” she declared, “the crucial issues are laïcité, gender equality and gender desegregation, based upon living together in harmony throughout the world, and not only in France” She hailed the insistence of the Jules Ferry laws on making education at every level free, obligatory and lay.

Her colleague, Rachida Dati, as Minister of Justice (garde des Sceaux) was an outspoken defender of the ban on the hijab in schools: “the laïcité of state schools is not restricted, in the case of pupils, to respect for their freedom of conscience: it imposes a duty of restraint on pupils in their behaviour, since they find themselves in a place pertaining to the public sphere. Pupils’ freedom of conscience – which is an internal freedom – in no way gives them ‘the right to express and manifest their religious beliefs’ in educational institutions, for that involves external acts which improperly introduce religion into the public domain of the school.”

As the two Muslims in the Cabinet, both frequently stressed that laïcité imposes no restriction on the private beliefs of individuals; it exclude their intervention in, or impact on, the relations between private individuals and public authorities and obliges individuals to respect common rules in these relations; they cannot exempt themselves from them for religious reasons. Both supported the attacks on multiculturalism by Sihem Habchi, president of the Muslim women’s movement, « Ni Putes Ni Soumises » [Neither Sluts nor Door-mats] who demands “No more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to be different and of respect toward those men who force us to bow our heads”

BobTanaka
Thursday, August 28, AD 2014 7:26am

“I’ve always wondered how to negotiate with someone whose starting point is “I’m going to kill you.” How do you counter?”

The starting point is to convince them that they can’t.

Brian English
Brian English
Thursday, August 28, AD 2014 11:05am

“Prominent Muslims have expressed something very like distain for their fundamentalist brethren.”

But that raises a related problem. The ISIS barbarians and their compatriots throughout the Middle East really don’t care that American and French politicians consider their actions to be out of place in the Modern World. Words of condemnation and words of conciliation are all just words in the end.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Thursday, August 28, AD 2014 11:23am

Prominent Muslims have expressed something very like distain for their fundamentalist brethren.

I would like those prominent Muslims to decide exactly what “the prayer really says”. What does it mean to be Muslim? What fundamental teachings are now out according to these prominent Muslims. How far do they go and still consider themselves Muslim?

Karl
Karl
Thursday, August 28, AD 2014 4:40pm

One cannot dialogue with a determined killer.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Friday, August 29, AD 2014 4:40pm

The USCCB has once again proven itself to be a collection of dufuses. Such remarks are worthless. The USCCB will NOT look at Catholic history. It will NOT recall the efforts of Pelayo, Charles Martel, King Alfonso the Avenger, the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the massacre of Otranto, Queen Isabel the Catholic, the Reconquest, the first siege of Vienna, Don Juan of Austria and Lepanto, the battle of Khotyn, the Battle of Vienna, the items seized by the Poles from the Turks still on display in the Warsaw museums……

Talk, talk talk. BS on talk. All the “dialouge” the USCCB wants to engage in will never change Islam, the radical seventh century Catholic heresy.

Mary De Voe
Saturday, August 30, AD 2014 7:24am

Penguins Fans: I am glad that you spelled “dufuses” correctly. Bishop Fulton Sheen once said: “God makes us human.”

Botolph
Saturday, August 30, AD 2014 12:15pm

The issue is not “dialogue” We are the religion of the Logos become flesh. That is a given [although some do not like that] The issue is what kind of dialogue, how substantial, how ‘truthful’ and ‘real’ is the dialogue.

The Vatican Secretariat for Dialogue among religions has given all the world religions a document calling on religions not persecuting those who do not believe the same, etc It is a Magna Carta of sorts, which is aimed ultimately at movements such as the various Jihadists. It is calling out ‘moderate’ Muslims to step forward and back up their claims to be a peaceful religion. If this does not happen, if they do not or can not, we will know with whom we are dealing once and for all. We are witnessing the ultimate and I believe the final battle for the ‘soul’ of Islam. Islam will never be the same again, one way or another.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, August 30, AD 2014 2:43pm

The “theory” was that the muslim terrorist was about one in a million. The fact is the Muslim that would feel pity for an infidel is the one in a million.
.
Every time I see one of them asinine, coexist bumper stickers, it calls to mind the fact that tens of millions of seriously stupid people are wrecking our country and destroying our way of life. They are our enemies, not the unwashed pagans who understand everything you need to know: it’s them or us.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Sunday, August 31, AD 2014 3:52am

Botolph

There have always been different trends and rival interpretations in Islam.

Bayazid Bastami (804-874) one of the founders of the Sufi tradition and known as “one of the six bright stars in the firmament of the Prophet,” when asked the question: “How does Islam view other religions?” His reply was “All are vehicles and a path to God’s Divine Presence.”

Like all Sufis, he stressed the unity, or rather, the unicity of God, according to which God alone is true being, while all things dwell in non-existence; being alone is non-delimited (muṭlaq), while everything else is constrained, confined, and constricted. Thus, he taught the annihilation (fanā’) of the self in the Divine, whereby the mystic becomes fully absorbed to the point of becoming unaware of himself or the objects around him. Every existing thing seems to vanish, and he feels free of every barrier that could stand in the way of his viewing the Remembered One. In one of these states, Bastami cried out: “Praise to Me, for My greatest Glory!”

The Sufis place great stress on the Hadith Qudsi, “Then, when I love him, I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.”

These teachings have been particularly congenial in the Indian sub-continent (there is an ancient shrine of Bastami in Chittagong, which he may have visited) where there is a long tradition of allegorical interpretation of the Qur’an through the hermeneutic of Hindu metaphysics. The Mughal Emperor, Akhbar the Great was very much in this tradition; he abolished the Jizya on non-Muslims, allowed Jesuits from Goa to establish a mission and gave them one of his sons to educate. His religious policy was continued by his son and successor, Jahangir.(Both are ancestors of mine)

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