Socrates vs Muhammad

Socrates or Muhammad? Joseph Ratzinger on the destiny of reason, by Lee Harris
Synopsis:
No, this is not some Monty Python skit.
It is a very good exegesis of Pope Benedict 16th's (B16) "Reason" speech that inflamed our brethren in the religion of peace.
The main thrust of the article is how advocates of "modern reason", are not capable of saying one religion is better then the other because in the secularists mind you can't compare imaginary Gods in the first place (my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend).
B16's approach was to use reason only (not an appeal to religious beliefs) to show you can differentiate between two imaginary constructs and discern that one is better than the other by the resulting societies they logically produce.
Exhibit A is a God constrained by his own nature (he cannot change what is good or bad), who wants humanity to follow him through their own free will.
Exhibit B is a God unconstrained by his own nature (e.g. an act that was once evil can now declared to be good), who wants humanity to follow him by either free will or violent compulsion.
The question raised is which group would a non-believer be better off living in.
Opinion:
What I like best about the article and B16's approach is that it provides a non-religious argument for society to be modelled on Judeo-Christian ethics. This approach is, in my opinion, far preferable to the religious arguments made by christians when debating public policy. Religious arguments do not work on non-believers, yet so many christians persist in quoting scriptures to make their points. What B16 has done is to argue his point from a reasonable and logical point of view, making an argument that makes sense to believer and non-believer alike.
Money quotes:
Modern reason says that all ethical choices are subjective and beyond the scope of reason. But if this is so, then a man who wishes to live in a community made up of reasonable men is simply making a personal subjective choice--a choice that is no more reasonable than the choice of the man who wishes to live in a community governed by brute force. But if the reasonable man is reasonable, he must recognize that modern reason itself can only survive in a community made up of other reasonable men. Since to be a reasonable man entails wishing to live in a community made up of other reasonable men, then the reasonable man cannot afford to allow the choice between reason and violence to be left up to mere personal taste or intellectual caprice. To do so would be a betrayal of reason.
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If the individual is free to choose between violence and reason, it will become impossible to create a community in which all the members restrict themselves to using reason alone to obtain their objectives. If it is left up to the individual to use violence or reason, then those whose subjective choice is for violence will inevitably destroy the community of those whose subjective choice is for reason. Worse still, those whose subjective choice is for violence do not need to constitute more than a small percentage of the community in order to destroy the very possibility of a community of reasonable men: Brute force and terror quickly extinguish rational dialogue and debate.
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Modern reason cannot hope to prove these postulates to be scientifically true; but it must recognize that a refusal to adopt and act on these postulates will threaten the very survival of modern reason itself. That is the point of Ratzinger's warning that "the West has long been endangered by [its] aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby."