Was the Pope..

[shinRaiden 0]

Which, to follow up on what Avon quoted and Denoir commented on, makes what the pope said about the critical need to maintain reason as an integral part of faith all the more essential. In fact, the ingnorant, unsubtantiated, and willfully subversive response among the militant leadership of the Islamic community perfectly illustrates the pope's point he was trying to make.

The whole idea he was trying to make was that in our day and age it's especially unsafe to, but dogmatically his arguement is that it's always been spiritually unsafe to have an unthinking knee-jerk reactionary faith.

And in defense of Islam, the pope further cautioned his audience - senior academics steeped in analytical methods - that their methodologies of faith are not shared universially, and in order to have more peaceful dialogue with those of other faiths, they will need to understand that Greek Reason not only is not applied in other religions, but may be rejected outright.

The real insult was that here the pope was trying to teach the classical Catholic leadership how to reach out and understand the different theological methods of differing faiths to better foster dialogue, and some people chose to ignore and distort that and use it for their own demogogary. What the world needs is the pope having more great insights like that and sharing them, not less.

Incidently, espectro's innocent goof is further illustration of that mindset. The human mind easily get's distracted and skips around until our eyes catch on something that catches our attention, like my username to certain others here on religious or US political discussions Then our own latent biases kick in and we've 'had' enough, even though if we'd ended up reading someone else's opinions we might have discovered we agreed more with them than we expected.

I'll admit, the text of what the pope said is not easy reading, but he was speaking to seasoned Catholic academics in their own language. That's why I've been waiting for the commentary of our own resident expert who iirc is buried under a mountain of dusty tomes. Somebody go yank Aristotle's chain, his ps3 needs to go wii.

[Necromancer- 0]

In most European countries, you can choose not to work, not to learn the language and not to integrate into society while maintaining a pretty good quality of life.

That will of course change after the next elections. It changed here in The Netherlands at least.

[JdB 151]

Yeah, seeing all these non-integrated people that don't even recognise the culture of the country they live in getting fairly large monthly amount on their bankaccount for doing nothing or being involved in crime, and at the same time allowing their entire families to come and live here is not exactly good for the stability of the country/goverment

Of course that is not only related to religion, as I recently saw a documentary about people from the Dutch Antilles that are not muslim, but that said themselves "why work, we already receive enough money from the goverment".