Long before Daesh (Islamic State) began murdering thousands of woman and children in order to establish God’s right order in the world, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) got the massacre ball rolling. Upon assuming the papacy in 1073, Pope Gregory issued official proclamations urging Christian princes to recover lands occupied by Muslims in Spain, over which he claimed papal sovereignty on the basis of previous rule and right. These decrees were really the beginning of the Christian Crusades against Islam.

Gregory’s ideas about Christian war, which were extended to fighting against domestic enemies of the papacy and the Church (like Emperor Henry IV), were also supported by his successors in the papacy. Gregory VII’s idea that popes were responsible for establishing the right order in the world, which could only be obtained through righteous Christian violence directed by the papacy, forms the political basis for all later Christian Crusades.

It also further stimulated an all out missionary battle against Judaism and Islam that had already begun in Spain, that led Muslims like Ibn Hazm to respond in kind. Religious truth became a zero sum game: anything positive said about another religion was seen as a weakening of your own side. The goal was not to modestly try to harmonize various religious perspectives of the one and only God; but to self-righteously exaggerate religious differences, well beyond any reasonable understanding of the two sides.

If one believes that there is only one God who is revealed by many different inspired prophets, then we should be able to learn more about God’s will by gaining insights into our own unique revelation, from other revelations of that one God. Since all monotheistic scriptures come from the one and only God, we should view other scriptures as potentially enriching our understanding and appreciation of our own scripture. But in the middle ages almost all readers thought of revelation as a zero sum sport like tennis; rather than a multiple win co-operative sport like mountain climbing.

In a zero sum game any value or true spiritual insight I grant to another scripture somehow diminishes my own. This was the result of the influence of Greek philosophy’s emphasis on the logic of the excluded middle. Something is either true or it is false. There is no other option. If two propositions are not the same, one or both of them must be false.

This would mean that if my religion is true, yours must be false. In modern terms, light could not be both a particle and a wave. Yet we now know that light is indeed both a particle and a wave, and at the same time.

This medieval situation did not improved much in modern times. In the last two........

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