American Thinker | Andrew Walden | May. 3, 2008
Speaking at the White House, Pope Benedict XVI April 16 embraced America’s “quest for freedom….” Benedict explained: “Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. Americans know this from experience – almost every town in this country has its monuments honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom, both at home and abroad.”
Today, as in the Civil War, Logos is on the side of freedom. And in spite of the secular media effort to obfuscate, Benedict’s message couldn’t be clearer: Logos rises to defend against the secular call for submission to the Chaos unleashed by Islam.
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Benedict’s message resonated with President Bush’s White House greeting:
“We also believe that a love for freedom and a common moral law are written into every human heart, and that these constitute the firm foundation on which any successful free society must be built.
“Here in America, you’ll find a nation that is fully modern, yet guided by ancient and eternal truths. The United States is the most innovative, creative and dynamic country on earth — it is also among the most religious. In our nation, faith and reason coexist in harmony. This is one of our country’s greatest strengths, and one of the reasons that our land remains a beacon of hope and opportunity for millions across the world.
“… In a world where some invoke the name of God to justify acts of terror and murder and hate, we need your message that ‘God is love.’ And embracing this love is the surest way to save men from ‘falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism.'”
The coexistence of faith and reason is a theme going back to the earliest development of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is also the theme of Benedict’s September 12, 2006 Regensburg speech in which he said:
“Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the Logos.’ …Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”
In the opening verses of Genesis, God literally speaks the world into existence. (God said, let there be ….) God acts through words. In the Judeo-Christian tradition God is limited by Reason, Truth and the law of non-contradiction.
Islam teaches that Allah is transcendental — not bound by anything. The followers of Allah imitate their deity. Left without the use of reason, many live in conditions little changed from centuries past.
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Contrary to the modern neo-pagan environmentalist mythology of the ‘noble savage’, the reality of many pagan societies replaced by Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, was exactly Chaos. Life was hard, brutish, and short. The gods of multi-theistic belief systems were riven by vanity, jealousy, lust, and vengeance. Emulating their gods, tribes constantly raided one another creating an atmosphere of almost permanent low-level warfare which for tens of millennia made the development of technology, written language, and systems of thought nearly impossible.
Islam directs Chaos towards the infidels of what Islam terms Dar al Harb — the house of war. But Islamic Chaos is not merely external. Life in Darfur, Frontier Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, or Chechnya has advanced little from that of pre-Islamic pagan tribes.
Secularists will immediately point to the worship of Logos as a contradiction. Yet if Logos is not a deity, man could convince himself he possesses reason in its entirety rather than reason being an aspiration which, like infinity, one never reaches. One might then logically presume that all humans can today be reasoned with-a common and fatal mistake when considering responses to Islam. Another dangerous conclusion comes when the belief that humans can possess reason in its entirety is combined from the belief that “scientific socialism” is the pinnacle of human achievement.
The last century is piled high with the bodies of those slain by such atheist regimes led by those who call themselves “conscious”. Based on their so-called ‘consciousness’ they sought to transform the nature of what they deemed to be the ‘unconscious’ mass of humanity. Trying to create socialist man, Mao Zedong killed between 40-80 million. Estimates of Joseph Stalin’s death toll range as high as 20-60 million. Trying to control the most fundamental element of human nature, the Chinese one-baby policy has so far resulted in the death of as many as 50 million Chinese baby girls.
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Excellent article. As a Orthodox convert from Catholicism, I was very interested in the Pope’s visit.
I was appalled, however, to see abortion advocates receiving Holy Eucharist from him in Washington. Talk about hypocracy.
Anne
The author of this article wrote, “Today, as in the Civil War, Logos is on the side of freedom.” However, Pope Pius IX supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was not a question of slavery, but a question of sovereignty. The Papal States had been taken from the government of the Vatican and made part of the Kingdom of Italy. The Pope sympathized with the South, who was being forced into the “nation state”, a direction they did not want to go. Many Roman Catholics, especially from Louisiana, fought for the South.