Papa and the secularists

Radical Islam and those troublemaking secularist.
These would not be at the top of my evildoers list.

Pope Benedict XVI "[urged] believers to stand up against the 'hatred and fanaticism' that he said were tarnishing the image of God." quoted in today's New York Times in "Pope Assails Secularism, Adding note on Jihad."

Fundamentalists are scary people even when they are feminists, anarchist, secularists, atheists; however, I'd still rather live in a world of these fundamentalists than Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish extremists. I'd rather function under their reign than Bush's economic and political reign of terror.

“Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God’s image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe,” the pope said.

“Only this can free us from being afraid of God — which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism,” he said. “Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life.”

I am a secularist, and I am afraid of the world but it is not because I am godless. It is being those who have kidnapped God are telling us how to think and breathe. They want to take over my bed and my body. Life is not empty--it is full of possibility, hope, reason & unreason. I trust myself to navigate those complexities and contradictions.

The difficulty for me as a leftie secular Arab is I have to navigate the realities of anti-Arab racism. I am going to condemn any act of violence that seeks to subjugate people and lands for its own profit. I am going to condemn those with power first --I am an advocate of nonviolent resistance, but I think it is ultimate arrogance to condemn all acts of armed resistance especially when I sit in the US w/ the home I own and the other rights I enjoy. I am not facing the same struggle that a Palestinian in Gaza is facing. I don't side with the Iraqi insurgents inside of Iraq, but I find bigger fault in the Bush administration's military incompetence at not foreseeing the sectarian nightmare they created. When Saddam Hussein was in power, did these insurgents get into the borders of Iraq? How was this despot able to keep them out, but the great superpower is incapable? Who gave them the right to go into Iraq anyway? No one. People sometimes get lost talking about the now and not HOW we got here. Who is most responsible for all this violence? I say Bush.

Why can the Pope come out and condemn radical Islam but not come out and condemn the extremism of US foreign policies? Why not condemn the preemptive war in Iraq? Israel's bombing of Lebanon? Implicit in his critique of Islam is a wholesale condemnation of the religion itself. These were religious wars against Islam and in the name of protecting Christian and Jewish power.

I'd have to say that there is a great gap between those who live by faith and those who claim to live by reason. The disdain and suspicion runs both ways. How many academics appreciate and respect religious folks? Is there not an implicit and many times explicit judgment that religious people are less intellectual, less informed, less sophisticated or savvy? I won't exempt myself from this sort of thinking. Many times, I rail against my own peeps and think they are fanatical and right wing(they are), and I know more than they know (I do).