No Anti-Christian sentiments out there

For the past couple of years, three of my friends have argued with me wheni contended that there was a strong sentiment against Christians of all bents, out in the real world. They would ask me for evidence, and all I had were vague bits, anecdotes shown in such places as movies and television series. Apparently, this was not enough. I even pulled up articles on how, worldwide, missionaries have continued to become martyrs for Christ, not in the way that Allah seems to inspire martyrdom, by taking out innocents when you blow yourself up, but by having the Government torture them to death for sharing the Word.

It seems that there is no bias there, either, against Christians. It has become quite frustrating -- and I'm merely an agnostic. One can only imagine what it is like for somebody who is actually a believer in all the teachings of Christ.

So, with frustration I come to the latest absurd nonsense to reach the front pages. I can not honestly say I am surprised that Muslims are sent out into the streets to protest a single sentence, brought up from writings more than an half millennium old, in a lecture on rational discourse and the place of reason in modern faith. I also cannot say I am surprised by the support from the New York Times for radical, violent Islam. Gee, whiz! The mere mention of the fact that somebody once long ago said Mohammed's only new ideas were wrong and violent means that the Pope is intolerant, and therefore must be beheaded... well, that's a reasonable reaction in the eyes of ol' Pinch and his buds! After all, if you have to insult anybody for believing something your own training says is wrong and irrational, then it should be the Christians, right? If you insult anybody else -- Off With Your Head!

Yeah, there's no bias there.

Let me share with you this bit from the NYT piece:

But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims.

In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.”

As somebody who has scanned a fairly large swath of those pages of the EU "Constitution", I can safely say that it doesn't hold up well under Sharia. It calls for tolerance for all faiths, as well as all sorts of lifestyles that don't do so well under any traditional religious tenets, but really sink under the burden of strict Islamicism (homosexuality and drug/alcohol use at the top of the list). So, does the then-Cardinal have it wrong? Is it "foment[ing] discord between Christians and Muslims"? Or is it stating the obvious?

Or, maybe stating the obvious is the problem?

The discord was already there.

The pope has called for reason (emphasis mine):

[A]s far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

He has not called anybody names. He has juxtaposed one centuries-old perspective with another, and sees "the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry."

The remainder of his speech -- in fact, the whole point of the speech -- is not at all to contrast the East and the Western faiths, but to put science and faith back onto compatible grounds. He is asking for scientists to allow for something more than simple empirical evidence, but -- hey! -- how about an open mind? And, the same to you, o faithful ones! Leave a litte room for reason in your devotions. If this occurs, then both science and faith may benefit:

We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Yeah, that sounds like casus belli to me. Gimme the torch. This Vicar of Christ has got to be stopped.