Levy on the Pope's Speech

There is a controversy over Pope Benedict's recent speech -- wherein Benedict apparently committed the grave sin of quoting someone else who believed that Islam is not good. Jacob Levy makes the excellent point that it is only to be expected that religious leaders believe in their own religion:

It seems to me that if religion is meaningful it's serious business; if one is committed to divine truths then one is committed to the falsehood of rival claims. By my human standards "No man comes unto the father but through Me" is a terrible way to run a universe; but if there is a God I have no reason to think that His rules will conform to my contingent, twenty-first-century Western liberal human standards. And so I don't expect religious believers to softpedal the exclusionary implications of their beliefs. I don't think Unitarian Universalism is somehow a better religion than Catholicism or Mormonism or Orthodox Judaism just because its god seems to be so nice and inclusive . . . .

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No matter how politically serious the responses from the Muslim world, there is something morally unserious about many of them--a demand to unsay what was not said, an expectation to be immune from criticism, and (again) an insistence that non-Muslims act with the same reverence toward Mohammed that is religiously demanded of Muslims themselves.

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I don't expect Catholics to take their theology less seriously than Muslims do; I certainly don't expect the Pope to take his theology anything less than wholly seriously. And what is a Catholic, committed to the truth of Catholicism, to think of Mohammed's additions to and transformations of the Christian bible? What is a theologically serious Catholic to think about "what Mohammed brought that was new"? At a minimum he or she will think it false--and, because false, evil in distracting religious believers from an all-important truth.

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Neither do I expect Muslim clerics to take their theology less than seriously, or to pay those who stand in the apostolic succession the same respect that believing Catholics do! And I would find it very odd, a category mistake, for the Pope to insist on apologies from every Muslim cleric who describes Christianity or Catholicism as false, evil, or likely to lead humans into sin.

In response to Levy, Brad DeLong makes two key points that seem to contradict each other. First, DeLong takes issue with Levy's point that religious believers should take their own religion seriously. After quoting Christ's parable of the sheep and the goats, DeLong says this:

It strikes me that Bill and Ted's injunction to "Be excellent to each other!" has much more sense--and is far more Christian (in the good sense of "Christian") than volumes of deadly serious theology committed by Pope and Imam.

Note the comic picture of Brad DeLong thinking that he, and not the Pope, understands that the true meaning of Christianity is a line from a Keanu Reeves movie. His point seems to be that that Christians (and believers in other religions too?) shouldn't worry about whether Christianity is, in fact, truer than other religions. They should just believe in the principle: Be nice.

But then, DeLong takes issue with Levy's point that God could still be good even if He differs from "twenty-first-century Western liberal human standards":

I found Levy's first point to be even more disturbing. It is, if I may paraphrase, that we shouldn't let the fact that the Unitarian-Universalist God is a good God who guides all to heaven by their various roads while the Calvinist God is an evil God who before the beginning of time condemned all but a tiny remnant to eternal damnation and torture in hell make us conclude that Unitarian-Universalism is a better religion than Calvinism.

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Evil deeds do not cease to be evil just because a God does them. John Calvin's God, who treats almost every soul he creates not as an end but as means, and damns and tortures them for eternity to accomplish some other goal that we will never comprehend, is a doer of evil--if the word "evil" has any meaning. The Unitarian-Universalist God who uses her infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite patience, and infinite mercy to eventually get us all on the Big Raft to Heaven by our various roads, that God is a doer of good--if the word "good" has any meaning.

If you presume that (a) there is a God who (b) is good, then priests who preach a God of Evil are ipso facto preaching a bad religion, are they not?

So the question is: If it is bad (in Delong's eyes) for the Pope to say a critical word about Islam because of the supreme principle that we should just all be nice to each other, then why does he think it appropriate to label Calvinism as "evil"? How come he has the prerogative to identify which religious beliefs are good and which are evil, and the Pope can't do the same?