Religious Vs. Political Dialogue

The dialogue of religions is that of calling on scriptural sources to discern how to approach current concerns. Of course, in many cases, ancient scriptural writings are less than crystally clear in their modern application. Such discussions reach their height in Judaism’s Talmud tradition of “on the one hand, on the other hand” exploration of alternative paths of understanding, usually ending with a strong leaning toward practicality and future openness toward emergent unknowns. Papal pronouncements, by nature, are more authoritative and directed. Nonetheless, in either case of Western religious tradition, the result is similar, favoring a decency in our dealings toward each other, the core immutable teaching of Western religions that we deserve the consideration of being G-d’s creation and only thus can we approach G-d’s purpose.

The nature of political dialogue often, also, calls on revered sources of political philosophers. But, there being so many, none so hallowed as G-d’s word or the biblical prophets or disciples, and so much less in agreement with each other or universally revered, such political searches for the right way carry less weight with most, and are more subject to manipulation for more immediate temporal advantages than transcendent ones.

Historically, in the West, religious disagreements have degenerated into physical violence between opposing schools of thought. However, in recent centuries, political man ascendant over religious man, leaders have not relied upon scripture to brutalize each others’ peoples. Western religions’ teachings of decency have, in effect, been freed of its once overly intimate involvement in statecraft’s more immediate demands.

The Pope’s speech at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he once taught (in full here, excerpted here) has raised the hackles of many Muslims for challenging in the Western religious tradition the continuation in Muslim leaders’ of historical language and behaviors that condone violence against those of different faiths, and of those in the West whose secularism for immediate political goals supercedes principle.

Instead, what the Pope clearly intended was to reassert the requirement of reasonable decency that the learnings, both scriptural and historical, upon which Western civilization rests in its prosperity and comparative peace among Western nations be embraced by Muslim leaders as well to similarly advance.

In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

Those who criticize the Pope demonstrate either an attachment to “we’ll kill you rather than dialogue peacefully,” or to civilizational irrelevancy for the West.