These weeks I’ve spent many of my few spare hours digging through the LJ community blogs that have discussed the Pope’s discourse.
It seems that, especially on the communities designed for interfaith dialogue, much more important than the discourse is to catch traces of bigotry in the others’ messages. No Christian can say something without being reminded about Crusades and few Muslims can go on without being reminded about Bin Laden.
And the best part comes every time when a combatant tries to convince the audience that every violence that happened in the name of his/her religion is contrary to the true spirit of that faith and should be considered as not representative for this peaceful spirit. True, Muslims are far better at this kind of rhetoric: we can find out that Al-Qaida, the Saudi Arabian regime, the craziness in Somalia have nothing to do with Islam. Christians manage to reply only by saying that the fundies who blow up abortion clinics aren’t truly Christian; I don’t remember seeing any reference to the Inquisition or the colonization of Spanish America.
But I wonder what would be left of these religions if all violent acts ever committed in their name were simply excluded. How many believers would admit openly the benefits of most holy wars of conquest launched by their ancestors? I remember a historian who said that, if not for the Crusades, Christian faith and culture might have followed Zoroastrianism (another of Islam’s rivals) into extinction. Now, as the above-mentioned LJ users like to put it, there’s no such thing as religious violence – there’s only the peaceful spirit of religion and, well, some less peaceful people who only pretend to practice that religion and should not be taken into consideration. And those who don’t accept this distinction are ignorants, intolerants and so on.
So here we have again the old game about political correctness. I wanted to test how far this game can go and I wrote to a Catholic that the bigot and narrow-minded in the story told by Pope Benedict was in fact the emperor Manuel Paleologos, because he couldn't understand that the Ottoman Turks ready to besiege Constantinople weren’t representative for the real, peaceful Islam. And those who turned Hagia Sofia into a mosque weren't true Muslims, because the Islamic teachings wouldn't have approved this. And you know what? The guy took me for serious.
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