[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2006]

Anyone who has even lived with an alcoholic family member, particularly a parent, is aware of the insidious effects it has on the psyche of the nonalcoholic family members.  Alcoholics are predictable in their unpredictability.  The child of an alcoholic often develops depression after years of never being able to do anything right, never being able to please the parent, because a normal system of rewards and punishments does not exist in the family of the alcoholic.  Rewards and punishments follow no logical or reliable pattern.  This impacts the children of alcoholics in serious ways that are beyond the purview of these paragraphs, but medical research and common sense both indicate the impact of an alcoholic parent takes seven generations to dampen out.

What brings this to mind is a part of Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University that did not get media coverage or encourage radical imams to whip their congregations into a murderous frenzy during Friday's services.

The Pope spoke at length about the idea that "spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."  As the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus was supposed to have said in a text referenced by the Pope:

"God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.  Faith is born of the soul, not the body.  Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats . . . .  To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . . ."

Then the Pope said this:

"The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor [of Emperor Paleologus's dialogue], Theodore Khoury, observes: 'For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.  His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.'  Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that [early Muslim theologian] Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.  Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry."

So while the God of the Western world is omnipotent, it is against his nature to act unreasonably.  On the other hand, God in the Islamic view is also omnipotent, but in no way constrained to act in ways his earthly children can understand.   Allah's absolute transcendence allows Him to act in ways that His children cannot even begin to understand.  The only thing they know is that He is great beyond human imagination and must be obeyed without question because the human mind cannot even conceive of anything worthy to ask him without insulting him.  Apparently, Allah is an unreasonable and irrational God.

Does this mean that anything a Muslim is capable of conceiving could meet with Allah's approval?  Yes, particularly if the imams who completely made up the bit about the 72 virgins say so.

What we have, then, is Allah the irrational, Allah the unreasonable, Allah the alcoholic.  Drinking alcohol is forbidden to Muslims, but apparently Allah Himself likes to imbibe, because to hear Islamic theologians describe Him, He behaves like a typical, irrational, self-contradicting, alcoholic parent.  Allah's earthly children are both enablers and victims and will do anything to keep from making Him angry, even doing the most outrageously irrational things in His name.  They are depressed and overemotional about their lot in life and often take it out on others in violent ways.  Too many members of the Muslim umma are what psychologists call adult children.  

I call this disorder Allaholism.