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[Solve et Coagula]

Pope launches scathing attack on Islam
http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=322238&sid=WOR

Regensburg (Germany), Sept 13: Pope Benedict XVI hit out at Islam and its concept of holy war during one of the last public appearances of his six-day visit to his Bavarian homeland.

The thinly-vei led attack on extremist Islam's justification for terrorism came in a complex theological lecture to staff and students at the University of Regensburg, where the former Joseph Ratzinger taught theology in the 1970s.

Using the words, "Jihad" and "holy war" in his lecture, the Pope quoted criticisms of the Prophet Mohammed by a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," Benedict quoted him as saying in a contemporary debate with a learned Persian.

"The Emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable," said Benedict, during his 32-minute lecture yesterday on the relationship between faith and reason.

"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he added.

Reiterating his concerns about a modern world "deaf" to God, he warned that other religious cultures saw the west's exclusion of God "as an attack on their most profound convictions".

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said.

Bureau Report