His lecture in Germany was, first of all, a celebration of human reason - the human capacity to know the truth of things. Our ability to think our way through to convictions we can know are true is the defining characteristic of our humanity and the spark of the divine within us. So reason and faith cannot be in conflict: True faith is reasonable faith, faith that makes sense, faith that can be proposed as reasonable to others.

The pope's second point was that our idea of God has a lot to do with how we think about the world, ourselves and our moral obligations. Christianity, following its Jewish parent, proposes a God of reason, love and compassion - a God who invites us to use our reason in responding to his invitation to faith, a God who calls his people
Israel (in the Hebrew Bible) and the church (in the New Testament) into a true conversation. That idea of God shapes the Jewish and Christian convictions that the world is intelligible and that people of reason and goodwill can build decent societies, based on reasonable standards of behavior.

But there are other ideas of God to offer, and one of them is the idea of God proposed by certain currents of Islamic thought. In this view, God is utterly transcendent, a majestic, unapproachable lawgiver to whom the only appropriate response is the absolute submission of our own minds and wills. Now, to be sure, this idea of God can lead to a profound piety. As a Muslim acquaintance once said to me (speaking of the Catholic belief in the real presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist), "If I really believed that Allah was on that altar, I'd be crawling up the aisle on my hands and knees." It would be a blessing if nominal Christians shared such a powerful belief in the majesty of the divine.

Alas, the pope went on to suggest, the idea of God as pure will can also have bad effects. Taken to extremes, it may suggest that God can command anything. As one scholar of Islam cited by the pope, Roger Arnaldez, has argued - this kind of God could order us to practice idolatry. Or, to come down to contemporary cases, God could command us to do what seems wicked - suicide bombing, for example. That far too many jihadist Muslims around the world - including, one fears, the president of
Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - believe that the killing of innocents is pleasing to God if it advances Islam's cause and hastens the day of Islam's triumph suggests that
Pope Benedict's theological point is not an abstract one.

Whilst I disagree with the vehemence of Muslim anger against the Pope's speech, I think the speech demonstrated a gross inability to see his own religion through others' eyes (no matter how well-read he might be in non-Catholic Theologies) and to see that it also contains many of the flaws he was so quick to point out in Islam.

The logic here seems to be that, "some Muslims have done such and such, therefore all Muslims are about such and such".

No different than saying that " some Christians, atheists, scientists, whoever (like some trolls have alleged) have done such and such therefore all do such and such".

This, to me, indicates that the problem isn't so much with the religion itself, but with the dominant culture that religion exists in.

Does it? There has been major recent religiously-motivated violence involving Muslims in the Phillipines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Algeria. What is the common cultural element?

I would also point out that Islam hass a sufficiently pervasive influence on its followers' lives that it can itself be considered a major cultural influence.

*Not* the United States? [shrugs] I honestly don't know. I just know that we don't have the sorts of problems *here* in the U.S. that seem to cause so many problems in so many other parts of the world.

Probably because the US is neither majority Muslim (Indonesia, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria), nor has a large area that is majority Muslim (Southern Phillipines, Southern Thailand, Kashmir, Northern Nigeria). Thus nowhere in the US is Islam a pervasive influence.