[pierrem15]

He didn't address any of Benedicts points, in particular the fact that Islam itself rejected the influence of Hellenism and reason. In this respect, the Pope's choice of Ibn Hazm as representative of this voluntarism may be an extreme, but one that highlights essential differences regarding the voluntarism that makes Islam susceptible to being highjacked by nutcases, not just now, but in the past. For example, he brings up Averroes, but fails to mention that Averroes was driven from Spain by Muslim fundamentalists, and that his Two-Truths Doctrine was specifically developed to counter the voluntarism of Islamic theology with a hyper-rationalism that condemned theology as the imaginative representation of truths that could only be fundamentally understood by philosophy.

Worst of all, his tuquoque defense obscures the fact that intellectual forms of Islam such as those apparently held by Schwartz himself have not been the dominant forms of Islamic theology since the 12th century. There was a brief period from the 9th to the 12th century whe that was the case, but in the period prior to that and ever afterwards, the dominant strains of Islam have been dominated by scimitar wielding kooks who were only ever restrained by the despotism of the Caliphs and the Sultans.

[Urbane_Guerilla]

Worst of all, his tuquoque defense obscures the fact that intellectual forms of Islam such as those apparently held by Schwartz himself have not been the dominant forms of Islamic theology since the 12th century.

This is why Schwartz has always been so absurd.

His "pbuh" looks ridiculous to everyone, including his fellow worshippers of mohammed. His islam is a pair of chartreuse socks.

Only he knows why he wears them.