Pope Benedict XVI has opened a can of worms not because he seemed to stigmatize Islam but because he prompts each of us to evaluate how we perceive meaning and purpose in our daily lives.
Both the Pope and Islam see faith as including firm belief in the divinity of the founders of their respective religions. They also require obedience to their doctrines and scripture, which are trusted as the actual revealed words of God.
There is a core divergence. In Catholic doctrine, God can be reached mainly through intercession by His Son and authorized Papal institutions. This is distant from Islam, which says God must be reached directly without the mediation of religious institutions or priests.
In contrast, reason is a process of intelligent case-by case questioning of life’s problems and joys, to advance through them in short steps each day. People of faith use reason to understand God’s will, while others may use it to question most things attributed to God’s will.
Each of faith and reason is lived one person at a time and one minute at a time. But the Pope used them to delineate modern European identity as distinct from all others. He said Europeans are defined by the Christian faith and the Greek logos.
Without Christianity, logos would not have flowered in Europe. Without both, Europe would not be what it is today. Therefore, Europeans should no longer use reason as a secular tool to override their Christian, and preferably Catholic, roots.
In the same breath, the Pope seemed to say that Islam, and presumably the people of all other religions, are more distant from reason in the practice of faith because the Greek logos and Papal Christianity were not in their ancestry.
He suggested that the way in which faith and reason are used defines one civilization in contrast to others. This aspect is more important than the measure it gives of a person, any person, regardless of religion or civilization.
To me, it seems self-interested to divide civilizations according to which one practices faith more reasonably as determined by a Greek logos upon the meaning of which experts have failed to reach consensus despite millennia. In any case, since faith in any religion requires belief in the miraculous divinity of its founder, it is a shaky starting point for the practice of reason.
Turning religious faith and reason into criteria that delineate a civilization also deemphasizes them as basic driving forces of each human personality.
Faith should not be defined only as the practice of religious doctrine. It is also the trust an individual has in his intelligence, worth and learned abilities. As such, it is an emotion inseparable from reason.
Is it realistic to believe that our emotions do not skew reason, or that logic proceeds unfettered by moods and perception? We do not need to look beyond our own lives to realize that we are more like bundles of emotion than logicians unaffected by desires and passions.
Religious doctrines try to sublimate some of the emotions that make us laugh and cry, love and hate, share generously or shrivel with envy. On many matters, they lay down inviolable rules that we must impose upon our emotions and reason through relentless inner struggle. We are told to weigh all our decisions, including going to war, against doctrines so fuzzy that even scholars are unsure of what they say.
Quite reasonably, a person with faith in God prays for strength and wisdom to overcome difficulties. In this very common situation, is faith in God driving reason or reason driving faith in God? In any case, there is no need for a religious doctrine to feel the emotion of faith in God, or in oneself or others.
Each person is an emotion-filled life trying to get through each day as intelligently and happily as possible. In this endeavor, faith and reason together invest meaning and purpose to life, like the left and right eyes together bring form and substance to sight.
Any human life embodies faith and reason, whether faith is belief in a religious doctrine, in oneself or in a secular God undefined by religion. It seems injudicious to turn this into a religious faith vs. reason wedge to distance one civilization from another.