Unbelieveable - the only one defending the Pope is Merkel!

Merkel defends Pope amid Muslim fury | Top News | Reuters.com

Well what do you know - German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to be one of the only leaders of free nations to get what the Pope was trying to say, and defend him publicly.

I must say this whole thing is so utterly ridiculous that my mind can't wrap around the full implications of it. Make no mistake - this is BAD. But, I ask, why the hell do so few Western citizens (to say nothing of their Muslim/Eastern counterparts) SEE what is going on here? It was one passage of a complete speech given as a scholar's reflections on the relationship between faith and reason, and the utter wrongness of any religion that claims to be peaceful to use violence or war to obtain its goals. And the mainstream media gleefully jumped on one sentence as a "soundbyte" and may very well now become responsible for blowing up the world. Good job guys.

Never mind the fact that the outraged reactions by Muslims over this is so completely ironic that I shake my head in dismay - seriously, the pope talks about how Islam has historically been spread by the sword (something that is undeniable, as some Islamic scholars have already, praise their courage, said publicly) and then moves on to condemn all violence by religious adherents. And what does the Muslim population do? (Well, a high number of them anyway.) Say, "you can't call us violent, that's an insult, we're going to REALLY kill you now!" and proceed to burn churches, kill Christians, and burn pictures of the Pope while screaming obscenities. As Amy Welborn observed, this basically proves NOT the point of the Pope (which was about faith and reason and non-violence), but proves the opposite of the point they are trying to make, which seems to be, "we're not violent and if you say we are we'll kill you!"

It has been noted that the vast majority of Muslims (and the vast majority of European/American citizens, for that matter) haven't even read the speech they are protesting against, they are doing this based on what they think they know, and they should therefore not be held responsible for what they are doing. HUH? Yeah, and we don't hold any of those SS soliders of Hitler's responsible for killing all kinds of people do we. Right. We might not hold them to the SAME responsibility as Hitler himself, but we sure do see that there is indeed responsibility there.

Nope, no matter how "misled" they are by their own media, a good number of the Muslim population right now is proving to the entire world how focused it is upon Islam at all costs. In fact, if they are indeed doing this while beingn IGNORANT of what the Pope actually said, it only serves to further prove the point that this kind of violent mob mentality is even more deeply rooted in the psyche of many Muslim adherents than we might have guessed.

AND NO ONE SEEMS TO SEE THIS! So submerged are we in the mass media culture, after being slowly boiled like a frog in the kettle for the past decades of CNN. Even if people do see this, they are apparently so cowed by the possibility of being called "intolerant" that they are willing to allow World War III to continue heading our direction. Very, very few people seem willing to call a spade a spade, or even to just call the reactions of many Muslims to this for what they are - incredibly overreacting temper tantrums. Unbelievable.

Prayer warriors unite - while as Christians we recognize that nothing that happens in this world, even the utter destruction of it, can harm us except for our own sinfulness, we are called by Christ to always work and pray for peace and safety. For peace and sense to return to the people of the world, particularly for the Muslim adherents and for the Christians who live among them, and for the safety of our Holy Father, let us now pray. Hard. It only takes one lunatic in St. Peter's Square, or have we forgotten May 13th, 1981? I haven't - I've touched the stone.

One practical step we can all take - go read the full address given by the Holy Father at Regensburg, at Zenit.org, and then print out a ton of copies, give them to everyone you come in contact with in the next few days who hasn't read it yet, warn them not to read only the NY Times and the mass media, but to really read what the Pope said and then judge for themselves what is going on here and what the various reactions from the media and Islam mean for our futures.