Partial Transcendence

There are people who believe that debating the reasonableness of a notional supernatural being is a good use of their time in this world. I'm not one of them. Pope Benedict, on the other hand, clearly is. Aside from pushing the big red button marked Diss the Prophet, his speech last week sought to reassure the faithful that their God was more likely to behave rationally than Islam's Allah. Accordingly, another line he quoted therein was this: "But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

Now most people acquire their God as a result of a geographical accident that takes place long before they themselves have acquired the use of reason, so it strikes me that this kind of our God is better (or more rational) than yours argument is inevitably a kind of post-rationalisation.

And it's clear that the vast majority of committed believers just about anywhere never fully acquire the use of reason. As the un-reasoned are always going to think and act unreasonably, any effort an reaching 'understanding' with them is yet another way of wasting one's allotted time.

Ironically, rationalism gained a precarious foothold within the Western medieval mindset thanks in no small part to Thomas Aquinas, whose access to Aristotle and other Greek thinkers had been made possible by translations and commentaries by Islamic scholars. Over the centuries that foothold has been expanded, but along the way the Papacy murdered a great many people whose views would be considered very fine and reasonable by the majority of rational people today.

We have perhaps reached a point where a small minority of intelligent, educated believers can almost discount the relevance within the West of the seat of your pants kind of faith espoused by the majority, but at base Catholicism is really no more accommodating of human difference than its major competitor.

Pope Benedict has certainly been doing a stirling job recently as the living embodiment of our incomplete Enlightenment. His warm-up exercises prior to last week had included referring to Buddhism as "auto-erotic spirituality" and turning up to make a speech at Auschwitz in which he absolved ordinary Germans from the guilt of the Holocaust. (He will also have affronted Bono-worshippers when he described rock music as "the complete antithesis of the Christian faith in the redemption.") The Pontiff must surely have anticipated the fall-out from any statement calling into question the honour of Mohammed, who as a mere mortal, is presumably not as able to stand up for himself as the son of God.

We routinely thank the Greeks for our modern notions of personal freedom, yet it is from these same ancients that the West acquired its apparently irresolvable inner conflict between the principles of the individual and the collective, which may explain why our (uniquely) part-time rational kind of believers have ended up with their partially transcendent deity. And hence why the West can never really confront the likes of Islam as equal and opposite.