With the Muslim envoy going to see the Pope, do you think anything will be resolved?

Question

With the Muslim envoy to discuss with the Pope about his comments do you think they will get anywhere... Perhaps they could discuss the issue of a nice mid day meal of say a roast pork that even perhaps the pope can slice and serve them.. Washed down with some fine wine it is always best to work out poroblems on a full stomache. Afterwards depending on how things go perhaps the Pope can hear their confession?

Answer 1

There will be no after wards...those Muslims are going to assassinate him not discuss the issues. But the Pope being a smart man and all will serve them pork but say that is chicken. And it will be poisoned. So you see we can kill two birds with one stone on this one.

Answer 2

yup, ok funny. that sad part is that this pope just might do something that rude. If you were coming to my house as a guest and I knew you didn't like lamb I would not prepare a full course lamb dinner and just that for you. forget about religion for a second. The Pope was going to go to Istanbul the capitol of Turkey to talk about peace and understanding. Turkey is an ally. Turkey is mostly Muslim. And he makes a speech about the last Christian Emperor of that City When it was called Constantinople after Constantine the Roman Emperor. He deliberately insulted the Turkish government and a rival religion. He also campaigned to keep Turkey out of the EU because they were not Christians and he thinks that the Catholics should rule the Earth and especially Europe. So go ahead and joke, The Muslims are not the ones being rude and ignorant here.

ps When the Turks entered Constantinople the population (Christians) greeted them with joy. The Turks had no intent of sacking the place and were the only protection the people had against the Catholics who were intent upon sacking the city again just like they had done repeatedly before. The Turks defended the people of that City from the Roman Catholics and the Holy Roman Empire. History is lovely and the Papist apologist from Washington quoted above is to be respected for his ability to pick and choose his facts to avoid the true case.

Answer 3

First of all Muslims do not eat Pork, second I hope they can at least talk but this is a battle that has been fought for centuries and Muslims feel the only good Christian is a dead one.

Answer 4

chuckled at your joke about the pork, wine and confession. i dn't believe the muslems believe in any type of human interaction in regards to confession but i could be wrong.
i don't know if anything will be resolved - i pray they will go with the openness that is needed. if they are going only to try and fight with him, then no it will accomplish nothing. however, it already accomplished what PB16 wanted -- open conversation lines.
My prayers will be with them that the Holy Spirit fills their souls & minds as at Pentacost!

Answer 5

Nothing will be resolved because muslim clerics are always looking for an excuse to start confrontation.

Answer 6

Let's see. The Muslims aren't going to convert. And the Pope isn't going to convert.
So no, I don't think anything will change.

Answer 7

I doubt much will come of it. Just a publicity thing. And with attitudes of intolerance like the ones you suggest it would be better they not meet.

Answer 8

"Sorry for the long answer, thought you might want to read."
The Pope Was Right
In his controversial speech last week, Benedict set forth a bold agenda for the civilized world.
By George Weigel, GEORGE WEIGEL, a senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of "God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church."
September 20, 2006


IN A BRILLIANT lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things.


ADVERTISEMENT
If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational — like the murder of innocents. Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus is a God of reason, compassion and love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of salvation.

This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God's revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by attending to reason.

The pope's second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children "is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul." If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.

Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam's conscience — as Pope John Paul II taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.

We know that, in the past, Christians used violence to advance Christian purposes. The Catholic Church has publicly repented of such distortions of the Gospel and has developed a deep theological critique of the misunderstandings that led to such episodes. Can the church, therefore, be of some help to those brave Islamic reformers who, at the risk of their own lives, are trying to develop a parallel Islamic critique of the distorted and lethal ideas of some of their co-religionists?

By quoting from a robust exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor and a learned Islamic scholar, Benedict XVI was not making a cheap rhetorical point; he was trying to illustrate the possibility of a tough-minded but rational dialogue between Christians and Muslims. That dialogue can only take place, however, on the basis of a shared commitment to reason and a mutual rejection of irrational violence in the name of God.

The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.



CAN ISLAM BE self-critical? Can its leaders condemn and marginalize its extremists, or are Muslims condemned to be held hostage to the passions of those who consider the murder of innocents to be pleasing to God? Can the West recover its commitment to reason and thus help support Islamic reformers? These are the large questions that Pope Benedict XVI has put on the world's agenda. Men and women of reason and goodwill should be very glad that he has done so.