I’m all for the free market place of ideas, but being glad that the introduction of Islam into Europe has brought the subject of religion back into the sphere of public debate, is pure buffoonery on such a grand scale that it staggers the mind.
Put another way, the decadent, lazy Western Europeans should have lost the Cold War to the Soviets, we would have then appreciated our hard earned, but now lost freedoms and religious values that much more. Stupid.
PARIS (al-Reuters) – A senior Vatican cardinal has thanked Muslims for bringing God back into the public sphere in Europe and said believers of different faiths had no option but to engage in interreligious dialogue. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Catholic Church’s department for interfaith contacts, said religion was now talked and written about more than ever before in today’s Europe. “It’s thanks to the Muslims,” he said in a speech printed in Friday’s L’Osservatore Romano, the official daily of the Vatican. “Muslims, having become a significant minority in Europe, were the ones who demanded space for God in society.”
Vatican officials have long bemoaned the secularisation of Europe, where church attendance has dwindled dramatically in recent decades, and urged a return to its historically Christian roots. But Tauran said no society had only one faith.
“We live in multicultural and multireligious societies, that’s obvious,” he told a meeting of Catholic theologians in Naples. “There is no civilisation that is religiously pure.”
Tauran’s positive speech on interfaith dialogue came after a remark by Pope Benedict prompted media speculation that the Vatican was losing interest in it. Some Jewish leaders reacted with expressions of concern and the Vatican denied any change.
The “return of God” is clearly seen in Tauran’s native France, where Europe’s largest Muslim minority has brought faith questions such as women’s headscarves into the political debate after decades when they were considered strictly private issues.
All over the Levant, traditional Christian countries have fallen like dominoes over the centuries in the face of Mohamed’s religion, most noticeable of all is Turkey. So I suppose the wayward folk cannot depend upon the Roman Catholic Church to defend it either. Whether it’s the government or the Church, expediency wins over common sense. The ruling state gets the extra bodies to help pay for the ever expensive and expansive welfare state, and the Church gets the center stage once again after being sidelined all these years. How lovely.
And to show just how out of step with reality these particular religionists are, an Indian prelate lets us all in on why Muslim terrorists attacked Mumbai, and brutally butchered over a 130 people.
[…] An Indian prelate, speaking after the Mumbai attacks began, said in Rome that a lack of courage to meet across faith lines was often behind religious violence in his country. Archbishop Felix Machado of Nashik diocese, just east of Mumbai, told Italian priests the violence was caused by “inequality, a lack of justice and understanding and, above all, a lack of courage to dialogue,” the Vatican daily
