Re: Muslim Extremism, We Are The Problem
ISIS AS RESPONSE TO WESTERN NIHILISM
Joseph Ratzinger:
After the collapse of Communism, Josef Ratzinger published
an interview[14] in 1993 in which he answered the
question: “How do you analyze this divorce between faith and modernity?
Ratzinger: “It is explained by the encroachment of relativism and
subjectivism, an inevitable consequence of a world overwhelmed by the alleged
certainties of natural or applied science. Only what can be tested and proved
appears as rational. Experience has become the only criterion guaranteeing
truth. Anything that cannot be subjected to mathematical or experimental
verification is regarded as irrational.
“This restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself who is threatened.
“The great ideologies have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism.”
In the West, this terrorism takes the form of the quiet elimination of the person as a subject and rendering him an object. The restriction of reason to the scientific method renders any and every other experience outside of the empirically measurable-sensible as “irrational” and obligatorily to be reduced. Every experience of the subject as Being must be reduced to the object. It must be rendered “legible to the computer.” In another place, Benedict had written: “The Book of the Apocalypse speaks of the enemy of God, the beast. The beast – the counterpower – does not bear a name but a number – 666 – the sees tells us. The beast is a number and translates into numbers. What that means is known to us who have experienced the world of the concentration camps: Its horror was due to the fact that the camps obliterated faces, annihilated history, and turned human beings into interchangeable parts of a huge machine. Human beings were identified by their functions, nothing more. Today we must fear that the concentration camps were only a prelude, and that the world, in accord with the universal law of the machine, may adapt itself completely to the organization of the concentration camps. For in a place where only functions exist, human beings can only be a kind of a function. The machines that human beings have constructed will stamp on people the sign of the machines. It is necessary to render human beings legible to the computer, and this is only possible if human beings are translated into figures. Everything else remaining in human beings becomes unimportant. Whatever is not a function is nothing. The beast is a number that transforms people into numbers. But God has names and calls us by name. He is a Person who seeks other persons. He has a countenance and he seeks our countenances. He has a heart, and he seeks our hearts. For him we are not functions of the great machine of the world; precisely those persons who have no automatic function are is people. To have a name means the possibility of being called, and it means communion. For this reason Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of the name. He did not come to bring a new word as a name, but much more; he was himself the fact of God, he was the name of God; he was the possibility even for God to be called `you,’ to be called as a Person and as heart.”[15]
“This restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself who is threatened.
“The great ideologies have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism.”
In the West, this terrorism takes the form of the quiet elimination of the person as a subject and rendering him an object. The restriction of reason to the scientific method renders any and every other experience outside of the empirically measurable-sensible as “irrational” and obligatorily to be reduced. Every experience of the subject as Being must be reduced to the object. It must be rendered “legible to the computer.” In another place, Benedict had written: “The Book of the Apocalypse speaks of the enemy of God, the beast. The beast – the counterpower – does not bear a name but a number – 666 – the sees tells us. The beast is a number and translates into numbers. What that means is known to us who have experienced the world of the concentration camps: Its horror was due to the fact that the camps obliterated faces, annihilated history, and turned human beings into interchangeable parts of a huge machine. Human beings were identified by their functions, nothing more. Today we must fear that the concentration camps were only a prelude, and that the world, in accord with the universal law of the machine, may adapt itself completely to the organization of the concentration camps. For in a place where only functions exist, human beings can only be a kind of a function. The machines that human beings have constructed will stamp on people the sign of the machines. It is necessary to render human beings legible to the computer, and this is only possible if human beings are translated into figures. Everything else remaining in human beings becomes unimportant. Whatever is not a function is nothing. The beast is a number that transforms people into numbers. But God has names and calls us by name. He is a Person who seeks other persons. He has a countenance and he seeks our countenances. He has a heart, and he seeks our hearts. For him we are not functions of the great machine of the world; precisely those persons who have no automatic function are is people. To have a name means the possibility of being called, and it means communion. For this reason Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of the name. He did not come to bring a new word as a name, but much more; he was himself the fact of God, he was the name of God; he was the possibility even for God to be called `you,’ to be called as a Person and as heart.”[15]
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