Addressing academics at the university of Regensburg where he taught before being posted to the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of Islam and violence. At a morning mass, he rejected the use of God's name to justify hatred and fanaticism.
In a theological address to academics at Regensburg University, the pope spoke of the relationship between faith and reason and Islam's holy war, Jihad. Historically, he said, spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable and therefore, ungodly.
The pope said violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. God is not pleased by blood, he added, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.
The pope said reason and faith must come together in a new way in order to achieve that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions that is so urgently needed today.
The world's deeply religious cultures, he added, see the exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason, the pope said, which is deaf to the divine and relegates religion into the realm of subcultures, is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
Earlier Tuesday, the pope celebrated an outdoor mass outside of Regensburg attended by over 250,000 people. He rejected the use of God's name to justify hatred and fanaticism.
Benedict also restated his position that science could not provide an explanation of the origins of the world that would exclude God's role. He dismissed the notion that man and reason could be nothing more than a chance result of evolution.
Speaking of the relationship between science and religion, the pope said that since the enlightenment in the 18th century, some sectors of the scientific world had tried to seek "an explanation of the world in which God would be unnecessary." But he said, "When God is subtracted, something does not add up for man, the world, the whole vast universe."