Right Reason

Pope Francis vs Donald Trump on Saudi Arabia

 

 

A fascinating new article has been published in Foreign Affairs by Victor Gaetan, titled "Why Trump and Francis Diverge on Saudi Arabia."

In that article, Mr. Gaetan discusses the tension between how Pope Francis and President Donald Trump have entirely different views about the Wahhabist absolute monarchy that is Saudi Arabia. The Vatican condemns Saudi Arabia because it is a nation that persecutes Christianity domestically, has played a critical role in the wars in both Syria and Yemen, and, perhaps most fundamentally, is aligned with an intolerant branch of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism. 

An excerpt from the article:

A key source of tension between the House of Saud and the Holy See is Saudi limits on Christian religious expression. Some 1.5 million Catholics currently reside in the Kingdom, most of them guest workers from the Philippines. They have no way to practice their faith. Mass is only available to Christian diplomats at a few foreign embassies and is off limits to foreign national laborers. (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI met with King Abdullah in 2007, inspiring discussion of opening a Catholic Church, but nothing came of it.) Non-Muslim signs of religious devotion, from rosaries to Bibles, are banned. Meanwhile, the Holy See has collaborated with governments in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where Christian populations—and tolerance of Christianity—have grown over the past ten years, to establish Catholic places of worship.

Second, Catholic experts on terrorism consider the official Saudi faith of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century Salafi movement founded on the peninsula, to be a destabilizing source of extremism. For the Holy See, Wahhabism’s threat is existential: Wahhabi intolerance and money fuel violence against Christians and other communities across the Middle East and beyond. To counter this threat, the Vatican is cultivating relationships with non-Wahabbist Islamic cultural centers such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which Francis visited last month. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, visited Francis in Rome last year, an especially significant development given that Tayeb led a boycott against the Vatican in 2011 after Benedict commented on anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Many hope that the renewed relationship will give new momentum to Christian–Muslim dialogue.

Wariness about Wahhabism also applies to Syria, where local Catholic leaders remain skeptical regarding a Saudi-backed regime change. It is a simple calculus: Christian communities, whether Orthodox or Catholic, have been protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad before that; Sunni extremism could bring Sharia law and second-class status for Christians. In the Church’s view, it does not bode well for Trump to plant himself so squarely in the Saudi camp.

Third, the Vatican has opposed Saudi Arabia’s particularly aggressive war in Yemen, a relatively tolerant country with some respect for religious freedom. The Vatican classifies Saudi Arabia’s bombing in Yemen as an archetypical “unjust war”—inessential to the country’s survival, launched without negotiating first, and ruthlessly devastating to non-combatants. In an air campaign highly dependent on U.S. support, Saudi Arabia has dropped cluster bombs and other devastating munitions on Yemeni civilian populations, including schools and medical clinics.

 

Another interesting aspect of the Vatican's relationship with the Muslim world that Mr. Gaetan highlights in the article is its cordial relationship with Shia Iran: 

Analysts typically describe the Saudi–Yemeni conflict in terms of Sunni–Shia rivalry, with Saudi Arabia facing off against the Houthi rebels, mainly Zaydi Muslims, who, at least originally, had loose ties to Shia Iran. Although the Vatican has no link to the Houthi movement, it is generally sympathetic to Shia Islam, which has highly educated clerics organized hierarchically, a theology with Christian parallels, and a general respect for the Catholic Church and its faithful. The Vatican has developed a sympathetic relationship with Iran’s religious leadership and was highly supportive of the U.S.–Iranian nuclear deal. The modern diplomatic relationship between the two dates back to 1954, and was maintained throughout the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s embassy in Rome is one of the largest, most active missions to the Holy See, which sees Iran as key to solving the crisis in Syria.

Pope Francis and the Vatican are ultimately right. If the United States really wanted to advance peace in the Near East, it would pursue further détente with Iran and stop selling Saudia Arabia billions of dollars worth of weapons. 

On a side note, the problems with American policy transcend the person of Donald Trump and his administration. For over a generation, the United States has portrayed Iran as the evil empire in this area of the world all while casting a blind eye of the House al-Saud's patronage of Wahhabist causes that preach jihad. Moreover, the problem isn't even particularly American. Even Justin Trudeau's administration in Canada has gone ahead with an, albeit much, much smaller, arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. 

Remarks On France's Totalitarian Secularism

 

From The Economist's "Muslim attire: The state and the veil":

France is different. The roots of French political secularism, known as laïcité, go back to the revolution of 1789 and to an anti-clerical campaign in the early 20th century. By 1904 some 10,000 religious schools had been shut; thousands of priests fled France. 'We have torn human conscience from the clutches of faith,' declared René Viviani, a Socialist minister.

Anti-Muslim sentiments in France is a symptom of a much more deep-total totalitarian secularism. The fact is that faith, genuine faith nourished by good deeds, cannot simply not a private matter. France's laïcité laws force a rather totalitarian view of society upon its citizens in which they have to all but renounce their faiths in order to be French.

 

France's laws against practicing Islam in public therefore isn't just a matter of Islam in particular, but a matter of how French law treats of religion in general. Laïcité forces public atheism upon French citizens who do no harm to others and is therefore, as a matter of general principle, contrary to human liberty. It's one thing for citizens or France, or any other nation for that matter, to vote for a woman who wears a veil in public, on account of such practices being against what they believe their national characteristics to be, it's quite another thing to ban such a practice. 

The Irony of the Communist Crucifix

 

No está bien eso.

 

From "The Unintended Irony of the 'Communist Crucifix'" by Joe Carter: 

When leftist Bolivian president Evo Morales met with Pope Francis yesterday, he gave the pontiff a “communist crucifix”—a carving of Christ crucified on the hammer of a hammer and sickle. Clearly uncomfortable with the blasphemous gesture, Francis shook his head and is reported to have said “No está bien eso” – “This is not ok.”

...

While we can’t know for sure what Espinal intended his statue to mean, Morales appears to have clearly missed the irony of portraying the symbol of communism as an instrument of death and torture.

While it’s difficult to determine exactly how many people died because of communism, it is estimated that at least  94 million died in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe, because of the ideology. As John J. Walters notes, during the 20th century “more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.”

Because of the number of Christians who were martyred under communist rule, it is perhaps fitting our Lord should be displayed as suffering and dying on this symbol of evil and perverted ideology. The “communist crucifix” is certainly blasphemous, but it also accurately portrays the true meaning of the hammer and sickle.

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

 

In "What Really Scares the New Atheists", John Gray argues that Friedrich Nietzsche represents the type of morality that New Atheists haven't really dealt with. Unlike the New Atheists today, who absurdly argue that science can support a liberal morality, as a classical scholar, Nietzsche recognized the imprints of Christianity on liberal morality and, from that recognition, created a scathing critique of both Christianity and liberalism. Mr Gray writes:

The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

It’s a familiar question in continental Europe, where a number of thinkers have explored the prospects of a “difficult atheism” that doesn’t take liberal values for granted. It can’t be said that anything much has come from this effort. Georges Bataille’s postmodern project of “atheology” didn’t produce the godless religion he originally intended, or any coherent type of moral thinking. But at least Bataille, and other thinkers like him, understood that when monotheism has been left behind morality can’t go on as before. Among other things, the universal claims of liberal morality become highly questionable.

It’s impossible to read much contemporary polemic against religion without the impression that for the “new atheists” the world would be a better place if Jewish and Christian monotheism had never existed. If only the world wasn’t plagued by these troublesome God-botherers, they are always lamenting, liberal values would be so much more secure. Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values.

 

Bill Vallicella has a worthwhile commentary on this specific point, "Nietzsche and the New Atheists", at Maverick Philosopher. The challenge that Nietizsche presents to atheists, New and otherwise, is that they have to be careful about how they talk about morality. In the West, people take a Christian framework for granted and don't realize that terms like 'rights' or 'equality' are nonsense sans God. The challenge isn't an argument for God's existence; rather, a call for atheists to take the nihilism that their worldview implies seriously.

Lent and the Monkish Virtues

 

The life of a monk ought at all times to be Lenten in its observances but because few have the strength of this, we urge that in LEnt they should maintain a life of complete purity to make up, during these holy days, for all the careless practices throughout the rest of the year.- St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict

 

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season for Western Christians. For those who are unaware of the nature of the liturgical season, the discipline of Lent is characterized by penance, abstinence and alms-giving. In general, Lent is reorientation one’s life towards God in preparation for Easter. 

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume rails against the monkish virtues behind the fasting tradition of the Lenten today. He characterizes them as worse than useless, but genuine vices that don’t encourage what is good and proper in human life: 

Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? (EPN: IX.9) 

On the issue of the monkish virtues, Hume swings and misses. His treatment completely whiffs the issue. He entirely misses the point and, in missing the point, helps to set up two hundred years of similarly missing the point, especially by philosophers of the analytic tradition. Without the monkish virtues, which focus on what we center our attention around, ethics becomes merely about the rules of social interaction. That grand tradition of missing the significance of the monkish virtues culminates in Peter Singer’s imbecile claim that “sex raises no unique moral issues at all.” 

The monkish virtues have nothing to do with being a valuable member or society or in enjoying a glass of wine. The monkish virtues are about orientating our lives in their proper directions. When a Catholic abstains from a hamburger on Ash Wednesday, he isn’t doing so out of some sorry sense of self-loathing or out of a notion that hamburgers are bad on certain days of the year. If he were to reach for one in a buffet line and then remembers, “It’s Ash Wednesday!”, he is doing neither. What he is remembering is that, though hamburgers (when properly prepared at least) are certainly something that are good, that they are not the good that he should orientate his life around. 

 

 Human life is characterized by fragility. Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Time will break everything around us, be it our laptops or pets, and eventually it will break our mortal coil. To orientate our lives around fragile things is to tie ourselves to ashes and dust. Although, as part of this impermanent world, we need to live our lives within it, we ought not base our lives around something as impermanent as food and drink, other people or our pets. We can bring out the full Platonic beast and question the reality of this fragile world, but that’s not a direction I’m all that interested in traveling down.  

Hume might retort that death and fragility doesn’t matter. That it’s an event that should have no impact on our lives and that we should be therefore not care abut it. C.S. Lewis responded wonderfully to such a mindset in “A Grief Observed”:

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death.And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Death does matters. We need to therefore be mindful to what we cleave to. The monkish virtues help us to remember that our habits bind us to fragile. As Pope Clement exhorts the Corinthians in his letter to them: “Let us keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Father and Creator of the whole universe, and hold fast to his splendid and transcendent gifts of peace and all his blessing.” The monkish virtues help us to break away from that which is fragile in the world and to look towards that which is ever-lasting. 

Panem Nostrum Supersubstantialem Da Nobis Hodie

 

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has a worthwhile meditation, "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread," on the interpretation of the Our Father's fourth petition at Luke 11:3:

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.

...

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

But this morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.

The entire meditation is definitely worth reading.

Eastern Orthodox Priests Will Bless Anything

 

It's true. Some examples:

 

 

 

The Skeptic as a Quack

 

 

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

- Sir Charles James Napier, The History of Sir Charles Napier Administration of Scinde 

 

From Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Skepticism:

We say, then, that the standard of Sceptical persuasion is what is apparent, implicitly meaning by this the appearances; for they depend on passive and unwilled feelings and are not objects of investigation. (Hence no-one, presumably, will raise a controversy over whether an existing thing appears this way or that; rather, they investigate whether it is such as it appears.) 

Thus, attending to what is apparent, we live in accordance with everyday observations, without holding opinions - for we are not able to be utterly inactive. These everyday observations seem to be fourfold, and to consist in guidance by nature, necessitation by feelings, handing down of laws and customs, and teachings of kinds of expertise. By nature’s guidance we are naturally capable of perceiving and thinking. By the necessitation of feelings, hunger conducts us to food and thirst to drink. By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad. By teachings of kinds of expertise we are not inactive to those which we accept. (I.22-24)

 

In short, the skeptic cares only for the effective, not for the true. In that manner, the genuine Skeptic is a quack. Like a snake-oil salesman, he can only say that what he does has worked before and he leaves his audience unsure about what conditions the oil has worked in before. Has the oil been found to cure impotence under the conditions of a clinical trail? Or are we supposed to believe the testimony of housewives? Indeed, if we are supposed to “set out without opinions from ordinary life” (I.2454), then how are we supposed to be confident that snake oil is, indeed, snake oil? 

 

The problem is magnified when we consider practices such as Sati and female genital mutilation. Surely there can be a moral standard that can sufficiently transcend our day-to-day lives to help us recognize that those practices, which have been part of the day-to-day lives of many, many human beings, are evil? 

Yes, it may take somebody else’s ordinary life to inform somebody else of the monstrosities that lurk within their own ordinary life, but that is why Adam Smith’s fiction of the impartial spectator is so important: Our ability to recognize good and evil is all too often contingent upon the limitations of our ordinary lives. Yet, given impartiality and recognition of those limiting circumstances, human reason is able to come to the recognition of good and evil. 

 

God has played the role of the ultimate impartial spectator in religions like Islam and Christianity. Revelation serves as the sharpest tool for cutting across the ethical contingencies of human culture. The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments. They admit of no cultural contingencies, and so each person shall be judged according to their injunctions once they have learned of that divinely impartial perspective. To argue that one is merely following everyday observances in acknowledging the emperor as a god is no defense before divine judgment. Both the Bible and the Qur’an argue that the impartial perspective was there, and, as a being able to discern good from evil, one had an obligation to follow it. 

  

 

Biliography

Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Skepticism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambride, Cambridge University Press.  

Easter Sunday

 

 

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who had been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by bapitism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our former man was crucified with him that the sinful body might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again: death no longer has any domijnion over him. The death he died he dies to sin, once for all, but the live he lives he lives to God. So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Rom 6:1-11

 

Good Friday

 

 

Though he was in the form of God,

Jesus did not deem equality with God

something to be grasped at.

 

Rather, he emptied himself

and took the form of a slave,

being born in the likeness of men.

 

He was known to be of human estate,

and it was thus that he humbled himself,

obediently accepting even death,

death on a cross!

 

Because of this,

God highly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name

above every other name,

 

So that at Jesus’ name

every knee must bend

in the heavens, on the earth,

and under the earth,

and even tongue proclaim

to the glory of God the Father:

JESUS CHIRST IS LORD!

Phil. 2:6-11