AT

Forrest, Your profile states that you’re an engineer hence I was expecting you’d be better with numbers! The faithful who you characterized as mobs are less than 1% (in the worst case estimate ) of a faith that has 1.2 billion believers.

Just as a side note, before you lecture me about how "you in the west" (in case you don’t know I’m Canadian) handle mobs, please address the mob in your own backyard, namely Bush and Co. before lashing out on 1.2 billion people who are completely innocent and want nothing more from life than to live an honorable life, feed their children, and enjoy themselves while doing it.

You’re Classic!

Forrest, In theory you are right, but you have to understand that Islam has no power structures like Catholicism in which one person (the Pope) represents the entire faith.

I agree that there are numerous muslim so called clerics that give themselves the right to offend but come home kicking and screaming when treated alike, but those so called clerics don’t represent Islam nor represent the majority of muslims exactly like Bin Laden doesn’t represent anyone but his like-minded terrorists who are a minority (yet create so much havoc).

There are millions and millions of Muslims who neither like to offend nor to be offended and the Pope’s speech painted everyone with the same brush.

If some Bishop in some church said what the Pope said, your analogy would’ve been correct.

The highest figure in Islam is the Prophet and his rank is not inheritable and he hasn’t said any thing foul about Christians and Christianity. Instead the Quran and Hadith are full of passages that revere Jesus, and while the Jews of his time (and till today) were saying that Marry committed adultery and that Jesus is the fruit of her sin, the Quran came to assert her immaculate conception and reaffirmed Jesus’ status as a prophet of God!

Homey, I was using the word "ex cathedra" looser than I should. What I meant was the psychological effect of whatever the Pope says for millions of Catholics.

Regardless of the formality of how things are said the fact that they came from the most influential Catholic figure on the planet is significant enough. With authority and power comes responsibility and when the Pope says something, again, regardless of how formal it is, it will be interpreted as an official church position by the millions of people who believe that Pope to be "infallible".

Etybolik,

Classic Islamic Interpretation of apostasy and the rules that follow make no distinction of where you headed to when you left Islam; no difference between leaving it to Christianity, Judaism, or any other belief system.

AT