In non-news today, Muslims are outraged. Also, the sun rose at its usual time and the Earth continued to turn on its axis in the customary fashion.

As the sentient know, extremist Muslims have found another excuse to bloody the streets, this time over a quotation from a lecture Pope Benedict XVI delivered last week at the University of Regensburg in Germany. My guess is that not many of the outraged Muslims have actually read the lecture -- it's not the sort of thing one lightly skims between effigy-burnings.

To understand what the pope actually said, one would have to stop and think, which is a colossal waste of time when there are infidels to kill. Thus far, people who claim to be fervent disciples of the religion of peace have shot a missionary nun in Somalia and demolished Christian holy sites in the West Bank and Gaza.

All this just because the pope had the audacity to suggest that some Islamists tend to prefer violence to reason. Whatever gave him that idea?

The single line extracted from the pope's lecture to inflame the highly flammable is an excerpt from a 14th-century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and ``an educated Persian'' about Christianity and Islam. Said the emperor:

``Show me just what Muhammad 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.''

This one-sentence quotation was part of a wide-ranging discussion about the intersection of faith and reason, as well as the contradictory nature of religion and violence. Pope Benedict's key point was that faith through violence is unreasonable and, therefore, incompatible with the nature of God.

``The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature,'' he said.

Think fast: Who wants to spread faith with violence? Not missionary nuns in Somalia. Who wants to slit the throats of infidels? Not the Southern Baptist Convention.

Contrary to what fanatics have insisted, the pope was as critical of the West as of Islam, if not more so. While Islam suffers faith without reason, he said that Western culture suffers from reason without faith.

His point was that the two cultures cannot enter into a productive dialogue unless they both recognize that faith and reason are inextricably bound. Islam has to drop its sword and the West has to make room for the divine. Continued...