Category: Articles

Pollster: Excuse me, sir.

Jesus: I forgive you.

Pollster: No, I mean I want a minute or two of your time for a survey I’m doing.

Jesus: I have all the time in the world. And then some.

Pollster: We’re surveying religious attitudes–random sample, of 1200 adults. Can I ask, What’s your occupation.

Jesus: I am a messiah.

Pollster: Can you spell that.

Jesus: C-h-r-i-s-t. It’s the Greek form.

Pollster: Are you Greek?

Jesus: No, Palestinian Jew. I’ve been working here in the States for ages though. Things in Europe aren’t what they used to be. I find that in America, you can be anything you want—even a humble carpenter’s son who turns out to be divine, or an ordinary reporter for the Daily Planet who wear blue tights and a cape.

Pollster: Sir, the first question is this: Do you believe in God?

Jesus: Sure. I believe in the God my people believe in.

Pollster: You mean YHWH?

Jesus: Shushhhhh for Pete’s sake. Where I come from you could get us stoned for saying that out loud.

Pollster: Sorry. Now, do you regard this God – whatever – as having a special relationship with you?

Jesus: Of course I do. He’s my father.

Pollster: No, I mean really.

Jesus: Really.

Pollster: Like, your mother’s husband?

Jesus: Not exactly. They weren’t married. She was his handmaid. He just chose her from the village.

Pollster: She was raped?

Jesus: Nah, she was happy to do it. He was God Almighty, she was a nobody. Now she’s a big deal. Anyway, it wasn’t Abba, not exactly: it was the Paraclete.

Pollster: A bird?

Jesus: No, more of a spirit. I used to think of him as the family pet because he was always morphing into a bird–crashed my baptism party–annoying–but missed my circumcision. The old man said, “the Paraclete is not really a dove and he’s not a tongue of fire either.” So I said, “Well, is he my brother or something?” and Abba said “He is what he is. Now shut up.”

Pollster: Second question; Do you believe in heaven?

Jesus: Do you believe in Westchester County? Yes, of course, that’s where Abba lives with the Paraclete. I’m there too except for weekends when I have to be physically and really present in the Eucharist. I sit at his right hand, the Paraclete sits on his left hand. It’s dull, a little uncomfortable, and we don’t talk much. Sometimes we sing. But the old man is really good at sitting. If he needs something special done he sends me.

Pollster: Like what?

Jesus: Nothing recently. A few thousand years ago, though, the human race needed redeeming and he sent me. Now the work is pretty dicey—an apparition here, a mystical vision there. Mom does a lot of icon intervention. There’s a lot more for the Paraclete since Abba put him in charge of speaking in tongues, getting born again, inspired preaching and so forth—When the old man wants to say something, he just asks the spirit to do it for him. Once I said, speak for yourself, Pop, but he just rolled his eyes and fell back asleep.

Pollster: That is a pretty odd picture of heaven.

Jesus: Not really. Millions of people see it that way. Have for centuries. You never took art history did you?

Pollster: What I really meant is, Do you believe in an afterlife?

Jesus: No need. I am the way of eternal life. Others have to believe it. I just have to keep saying it.

Pollster: Do you believe in hell?

Jesus: The place where people suffer the torments of damnation in everlasting fire, from which there is no surcease of agony and where all lost souls utterly abandon hope of salvation? You bet your sweet pickle I do. Been there, burned that. Satan is not a nice guy.

Pollster: You’ve met him?

Jesus: OK, no art history, no mythology, no Milton, no Joseph Campbell videos either: who hired you? Hell is a lot like a marathon without snacks. Satan invented manga but the Japanese got the credit.

Pollster: Final question. Do you consider yourself more spiritual than religious?

Jesus: That’s a hard one—divine and human, that sort of thing. Doesn’t really translate. When I see a sunset–wow!–spiritual, definitely spiritual. The old man won’t even look at them because he says “I didn’t create twilight.” But then on the weekends, it’s hard not to feel as little religious, you know–especially with millions trying to reach the old man through me. So I guess “both” would be my answer.

Yeah, definitely both.

I remember a friend telling me only a few days after the Sept 11 attacks that the World Trade Centre had been wired with bombs either by the government or by the owner. It was also pointed out to me that the dust around the World Trade Centre had fallen in the shape of Satan’s visage. I wouldn’t have predicted it at the time, but the crackpot impulse behind these ideas has become common currency. In one American poll, a third of respondents registered their belief that the Bush Administration either aided the attacks or declined to stop them.

More recently the cult of Zeitgeist: The Movie, made by someone called Peter Joseph, has been brought to my attention. Its argument – if it could be called that – is that the world is divided between the manipulators, the suckers, and the truth-telling dissenters. In the first group, you’ll find international bankers, American presidents, and the Internal Revenue Service. (According to Zeitgeist, income tax is “nothing less than the enslavement of the entire country”.) The suckers, meanwhile, are those who are none of the above and who are also none of the following: America First hero Charles Lindbergh and the 9/11 “truthers”.

Watch the film as closely as you like; you will not discover what Mr Joseph believes actually occurred on Sept 11. You will, however, find a general spray of points culminating in the assertion that the attacks were part of a “false flag operation” orchestrated by the Government in order to frighten the public, crush civil liberties, and launch wars in the Middle East (as well as “the war against you” – and why not, when the going’s good?).

This, honestly, is as nicely as I can put it. Because when the “arguments” are put together, they create rather a lot of friction. For instance, it is suggested that the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, had a hand in funding the hijackers, and that the Bush Administration has failed to investigate because of its cosiness with the Pakistanis. In itself, this is not a crazy claim. (I first read it in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, which argues that Pearl was murdered by ISI types because he knew too much about the relationship between the Pakistani regime and Al-Qaeda.)

But it suggests that 9/11 was not an “inside job”, doesn’t it? Or could the American war-mongers not scrape together enough dosh to fund their own hijackers? Zeitgeist goes on to tell us that “At least 12 Countries warned the US regarding intelligence about an eminent [sic] attack on America”. Well, again: did the American Government organise this attack or not? Anyway, if Pakistan and the United States were co-plotters, then the former did not get much bang for its buck: the war against the Taliban unseated the ISI’s closest international ally. Nor could such close co-operation buy the Americans any Pakistani support for the Iraq War. Still, by missing the fairly significant point that a major American “ally” is also apparently funding a major enemy of open society, the “truthers” have managed to neglect this real scandal, preferring to feast on a half-baked non-theory.

There is no dearth of evidence that United 93 crashed in Shanksville, but suppose Zeitgeist’s claim is correct, and this evidence does not exist: how careless can one government get! All that scheming and no one remembered to plant any wreckage. I hope someone was fired for that foul-up. This contradiction – America as both Iago and Bottom – might loom larger in the thoughts of the “truthers”. Most obviously, why would the mastermind make its plot so difficult to execute? These fake hijackings and fake phone conversations and fake building collapses and fake planes and fake people seem to be needlessly complex. The “plot” to unseat Saddam Hussein might have been greatly assisted by making the culprit someone with more obvious ties to that dictator.

All this can be said without even mentioning the factual howlers that make up Zeitgeist’s gooey core. None of the extraordinary claims are backed up by even tokenistic evidence. Precisely zero experts agree that flying a plane into a wall of the Pentagon was beyond the wit of the hijackers, pace Mr Joseph. Nor is there “extraordinary secrecy” surrounding the collapse of WTC 7: you can find the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s working hypotheses by doing a Google search. And it is true to say that no evidence exists of a plane crashing into the Pentagon only if you discount all the pictures of a crumpled plane next to the Pentagon, and deny the existence of eye-witnesses like Allyn E Kilsheimer: “I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box. … I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?”

Okay, but did you know that experts agree the way the WTC buildings collapsed could only have been caused by a controlled demolition? You didn’t know that because it’s not true. Although, unless you have considerable knowledge of civil engineering, you’re unlikely to be able to provide a rapid-fire response when someone says, “Explain how WTC 7 collapsed!”

For those who are genuinely curious, the best and most easily available elucidation of these supposed abnormalities is the March 2005 report published by Popular Mechanics. According to the PM journalists, “[W]e were unable to find anyone with any degree of authority, in the public or private sector – first responders or university professors, engineers or flight instructors – who agreed with the claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists.”

It’s all very well to know that reports like this exist. But if you wanted to respond quickly to the claim that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to “melt” steel and that therefore the WTC buildings should not have collapsed, you would have to know that steel frames do not have to “melt” for a building to collapse, and that steel can expand, crack, and buckle at much lower temperatures than those caused by burning jet fuel. You would also need some knowledge of the fact that the spray-on fireproofing insulation was damaged by the initial impact of two Boeing 767s, which left the metal vulnerable. Plus you would need to know a bit about the WTC’s steel bar joists, centre-core columns, outer frame-tubes, and bearing walls.

In the same way, if a creationist collars me and demands to know how I explain the development of immune systems in vertebrates, I will not be able to provide an immediate answer. But I don’t consider this a crushing defeat. I can of course give my reasons for rejecting creationism, and these reasons are good enough that my inability to explain every detail of evolutionary biology does not cause me to spiral into a crisis of doubt and angst.

But to the paranoid mind everything should have a rapid explanation. “The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking”, writes Michael Shermer in Scientific American. “Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.”

The quickest way to refute the Sept 11 fantasist is not to trawl through the detailed reports, but to point out the existence of a jihadist movement with a life well beyond North America and a history that stretches back to at least 1928. Given these facts, it would be far more surprising if a group like Al-Qaeda had not managed to attack America. Reading “truther” screeds, you’ll find waves of quasi-physics and hearsay circling around some meagre scraps of gossip, but usually no mention of Islamism. That’s like charging into a debate on Darwinism and ignoring the fossil record. What good are the receipts if all the debits are blanked out?

But to reason against Zeitgeist is to miss the point; the point is to get angry. And Mr Joseph, like most fans of the racist demagogue Charles Lindbergh, seems to be an angry guy. What’s interesting here is that, while Lindbergh is quoted as an oracle throughout the film, Bush is depicted in no uncertain terms as a new Hitler. So, in between shrieks that America is a dictatorship, Zeitgeist invokes the authority of the man who did most to encourage a Roosevelt-Hitler pact. How must it feel to adore the moral leader of the anti-Jew America First movement while pretending to oppose fascism?

Turning to Afghanistan and Iraq, it emerges that the United States has really overthrown the Taliban and Baath dictatorships for oil. Odd, given that America never had any trouble purchasing oil from these countries when it wanted to, and could have saved itself a lot of trouble by simply removing the trade sanctions. Apparently “other non-conforming countries like Iran and Syria” are next. Who knew that the defining characteristic of the Baath Party has been non-conformism? But now that you mention it, it makes sense: America can’t handle having such chilled-out individualists in the region because it’s a threat to the American project of crushing diversity and unconventional behaviour. Right on.

The movie ends with some nugatory uplift – the power of one, the oneness of our power, the togetherness of our all, etc. Apparently “when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace”. And that’s what you get from a group who believe that the Jews run the world.

A further irony, in a film that has a brief and ham-fisted section on religion, is the extreme similarity between inside-jobbers and creationists. Both have adopted silly titles – “9/11 Truth Movement” and “Intelligent Design Network” – that are supposed to give them an air of scrupulous objectivity. Both are political movements originating on the extreme Right (with sympathisers on the reactionary Left) masquerading as disinterested truth-seekers. Neither can distinguish between criticism and persecution; anyone who criticises the argument is said to be “silencing dissent”. Their methods – supposition posing as fact, hearsay treated as proof, early factual mistakes repeated as if they had never been discredited, quoting phoney sources, ignoring or distorting the opinions of experts – are the same. Then there is the laziness. It takes more work to understand the theory of natural selection than to chant “creation”. And if America can have a fundamentalist enemy, then certain comfortable political assumptions might have to be reconsidered; it might even be necessary to learn something about Kashmir and Waziristan.

In some cases, the connection is more than metaphorical: the most prominent “truther”, David Ray Griffin, is a Christian theologian who sees Sept 11 as “a religious issue”. The film’s other idol is the creepy Jordan Maxwell, who bores on about “the true and divine presence in the universe called God”. His website sells DVDs including Magic Dominates the World and Signs of Destiny II: The Hidden Hand in World Affairs. One has to wonder whether these people truly believe their propaganda: why are we not seeing an exodus of “truthers” fleeing the American dictatorship before it’s too late? Why are they reporting for duty to their IT jobs and attending pep-rallies instead of making plans to save their families?

In Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day, the anxious Tommy Wilhelm is surrounded by men who know and know and know. The “psychiatrist” Dr Tamkin is one, styling himself as an otherworldly mystic, always ready to dish out ready-made advice, full of pseudo-profundities. “I deal in facts. Facts always are sensational. I’ll repeat that a second time. Facts always! are sensational”, Tamkin insists. In his eyes, everyone leads a squalid double-life, “like the faces on a playing-card, upside down either way.” “I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does”, reflects Wilhelm.

The Tamkins of the world are stubborn. But, encouragingly, there is always resistance. Whatever your opinion of the American military, one thing it deserves credit for is the development of the Internet, which makes it infinitely easier to check facts. The freely available investigations by Skeptic, Popular Mechanics, and NIST make it that much harder to sucker the credulous. For every David Ray Griffin there is a Michael Shermer. When you look at the “sources” listed on Mr Joseph’s Zeitgeist website, it turns out that there are quite a few and that almost all of them are crank publications with titles like Rule by Secrecy and The Shadows of Power. Following Wilhelm, you find yourself asking, “With all the books he reads, how come the guy is so illiterate?”

What is the difference between Jack the Ripper and the Suffolk Strangler? Apart from that we actually know Steve Wright is the latter and he was caught, what separates them?

Jack the Ripper rejoices in a whole tourism and franchise industry centred on him. He has films, television programmes, documentaries, books, cups, ashtrays, t-shirts and tours. How does one serial killer become so profitable? Why are there no Suffolk tours or films starring Johnny Depp?

Of course, timing would seem the obvious answer: with no living immediate relatives of Jack the Ripper; we feel it is safe to exploit his legend. It is just too soon to do the same for Steve Wright.

For Jack the Ripper read “recognised” religion. For Suffolk Strangler read Scientology. Recently, the fear of offending members of various “communities” may have jumped the shark when lawyers advising the Metropolitan Police decided that the word “cult” on signs protesting Scientology could be considered offensive. A protester was ordered to relinquish a sign, he refused, and he was handed a summons.

It seems this is one step closer to the UK finally allowing Scientology the status of a religion. Both atheists and the faithful seem determined to prevent this; we are supposed to feel this is another crazy bureaucratic decision, political correctness gone mad, and an offence against proper religions. However, even though the belief and practices of Scientology are sheer lunacy, you cannot help but find some irony in the current debate as to whether it is a religion or a cult.

It would be perfect if the intention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard had been to start a joke on the faith-based masses; however, it appears that he and his followers genuinely believe this stuff about aliens.

As objectionable as their beliefs may be to logic and reason, are they any more so than existing religious thought and belief? Are the underhand controversies Scientology has embroiled itself in any worse than we have seen and continue to see from recognised religions?

The mere existence of this group and its ever-expanding popularity hold up a mirror to the whole issue of religion. The hypocrisy of major religions defending their own status yet attempting to repudiate Scientology is among the finest pieces of real-life comedy in action.

The question is, who decides when a belief gains religion status? Many European states are hand-in-glove with many major religions and seek advice on social policy from religious leaders, yet they seem to have a set of rules to deny Scientology the same status. How? What are these rules?

Is it the numbers of believers that matter in how important a religion or belief is? There are over 100 million Liverpool Football Club fans across the world. Every one of them will tell you “next season is our year”. Like Armageddon, The Second Coming, The Rapture, the 100 million fans (including myself) are still waiting.

Based on numbers and an irrational belief in a scientifically implausible event, Liverpool Football Club Supporters could well get the same protection against offence and jokes as every other religion. Best remember that when standing on the famous listening to away supporters offend our faith with hate-filled chants about never winning a thing. Next time a satirical cartoon appears portraying Liverpool fans in a negative light, we will be looking for some direct action.

Is the reappearance of alien super-beings really so implausible a belief compared to a supreme being that managed to create everything in the space of six days or the title ambitions of football fans? An all-loving and all-powerful supreme being, furthermore, that does not seem to have enough love or power to stop huge earthquakes or tornadoes.

If numbers of people who hold the belief is not the marker for validity, what else is there? The easiest suggestion is that the inherent moral value of the belief plays a significant part. This would seem logical, but who determines “moral value”?

Using dianetics and positive thought to cure an illness does not sound like the kind of advice you’d give to parents. I am sure there’s only so much a parent can do with happy thoughts when little Johnny breaks a leg by falling off his bicycle.

How does this differ from the power of prayer though? Surely, it is the same thing as dianetics? The only difference is, instead of being positive about it in the hope of a cure, you are going cap-in-hand to a god asking for his help. As Christianity retreats even further into the anti-scientific Dark Ages trying to fight off scientific theory from all angles, we hear of cases where children die because their parents chose to pray for a cure rather than get medical help. Apparently this benevolent God did not check his voicemails.

Are the beliefs of Scientology any less moral than the homophobic, misogynistic, anti-union, pro-violence, anti-tolerant nature and belief of most other accepted religions? On the face of it, the answer is no.

The Belgian Government brought charges against Scientology; it claims that the Church of Scientology is an unscrupulous commercial enterprise that harasses its critics and brutally exploits its members, calling it a “criminal organisation”.

It certainly has had its moments. However, does a bit of espionage during “Operation Snow White” really compare to some of the actions of recognised religious groups? Does it compare to collusion with Nazis, war, suppression, terrorism? Does a bit of wire-tapping and breaking and entering compare to bombing abortion clinics or tube trains?

Critics hold the practice of disconnection as another example of malpractice, but again, writing a stern letter to your loved ones about how you are upset that they don’t believe in that stuff about aliens doesn’t even compare to tactics by other major religions. The letter may be upsetting for the parents, but it’s not really on the same level as having to seek the help of Amnesty International after “coming out” to your religious parents. And with Channel Four recently winning their case, it can hardly be claimed that Scientologists are the only ones practicing a bit of brainwashing.

At each twist and turn, there is a defence for Scientology as a religion and not a cult. This is not in defence of Scientology in itself, but its existence raises some serious questions about the protection and influence of all other faiths in our society. In fact, it seems that the only reason Scientology is denied religion status is because it isn’t extreme enough. Maybe it needs the blood of a few thousand more people on its hands before it can achieve that.

For what reasons exactly are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam afforded their status as a religions, yet not Scientology? Scientology is a joke, but a good one. One of those jokes that leaves you creased with laughter until some time later when its true suggestion sinks in and you realise the joke was on you.

My proposal is that we all take up banners stating that Scientology is a religion, not to support the practice, but to show all other religions up for what they are. No better or worse than the bizarre, money-making ruminations of a science fiction writer.

As mesmerized television viewers know, America is beset with vapid discussions of the faith of their future president masquerading as “compassion forums.” In the April 12 CNN version of what may become a permanent feature of American political showmanship, candidates were challenged to describe whether they have ever felt the Holy Spirit move within them and whether, in their best judgment, God wanted him, or her, to be president.

No, this was not a BBC satire. It is American Realpolitik. The questions were deadly earnest, exceeded in absurdity only by the feigned seriousness with which the combatants stumbled through their rehearsed platitudes. Neither contender was asked the unfashionable empirical question that used to dominate discussion: Would you push a red button or invade a country if you were menstruous, or testosteronous, or had simply had a bad day? Plausible reasons for doing irrational things, in 2008, are not discussible. The real, persistent, and biologically-based causes that explain why human beings sometimes behave dangerously are sequestered through a diabolical system of rhetorical taboos. But imaginary things, like “the Holy Spirit moving” in us, still matter. In America, anyway, this is where the Postmodern Feminism that supplanted (even if it was nascent within) the Political Feminism of the 1960’s has brought us.

I have just come from a lecture by Daphne Patai. Her father, the much-neglected Rafael Patai, was a Hungarian Jew who collaborated with the mythographer-poet Robert Graves in producing one of the most sophisticated exposés of Hebrew myth ever compiled. Her lecture was on the intellectual limitations of feminism. Thirty one people attended. It was one of the best lectures I have heard on the “anti-science” of the feminist movement. It was not recorded. That is a shame because it was a refreshing breath of heresy directed against the political orthodoxy of “women’s studies programs.” It opened a wound that has scarcely been noticed: the tension between political liberalism and secular humanism, between skepticism as a programmatic cast of mind that can be turned even against fashionable positions, and a programmatic liberalism that advocates a selective form of skepticism—namely, the sort applied to conservative orthodoxy.

Patai inherited from her father the compleat sceptical gene that very few people, in my experience, possess. Voltaire may have been one of them. He is alleged to have said “Only my skepticism keeps me from being an atheist.” The same rule applies to Patai’s feminism. She is a feminist, self-proclaimed and proud to be one. She was a pioneer in the founding of women’s studies programs at the University of Massachusetts, where she still teaches (but not women’s studies). She believes that the souls, bodies, and intellects of men and women are created equal. I am sure she hates the mindlessness, violence, brutishness and unreflective self-congratulation that defines sexism; but she finds sexism in both sexes.

She is problematical because she (brazenly) challenges her sisters to justify the excesses of their trade, without saying their trade is insignificant. A curriculum that studies and celebrates the achievements of women is as justifiable, surely, as one that glorifies the achievements of dead Greeks and medieval monks and reformers.

If women’s studies means that, then recherchez la femme. She is aware of the peculiar history of the field, which, without being limited to Jewish theorists, boasts an array of them. She worries that the history of personal violence and masculine idiocy should become, in its own right, a field of academic inquiry.

A fable: A young Jewish Bennington graduate betakes herself to the freewheeling culture of Amsterdam to research the Provo Anarchy movement. She marries one of her “subjects,” and in turn is abused by him. Mercilessly—beaten, hunted, and harassed. She is befriended by a fellow American-in-search of meaning, also Jewish, Ricki Abrams. Abrams introduces Andrea Dworkin to radical feminist writing from the United States–Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. She and Abrams begin to work together on “early pieces and fragments… of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history.” The result of all this is the theory that (a) all men are sexist and naturally violent; (b) all acts of heterosexual sex are rape, by implication if not in law and (c) all women are victims. From this, to Third Wave, to Catherine MacKinnon’s reverse legal-Aristotelianism, to Riot Grrrl punk feminism is a dizzying journey. But it is more than a journey. It is a curriculum leading to a degree in America’s best liberal arts colleges and universities.

Daphne decided to jump ship when, in a planning session with other women’s studies specialists, she wondered out loud why the sciences were “sexist,” and asked specifically about the Periodic Table—something, surely, both men and women would agree is beyond the dimorphism that characterizes most modern discussions of sex and gender. After all, the world is the world, chemical, physical, biological. But with that contempt for intellect which characterizes both Bubba in Georgia and too many women’s studies professors, she was told that “Only men would put numbers in boxes.” She retired happily into the Romance Linguistics department, whence she had come.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the brilliant biblical and Talmudic scholar, is best known for his pioneering work on the nature of Hebrew prophecy, less known for his daughter Susannah who now teaches at Dartmouth. Heschel, like many Jews of his generation, had doubts about the “legitimacy” of women being ordained to the rabbinate in the culture that is alleged to have given us patriarchy. But he had a history of his own. His sister Esther was killed in a German bombing. His mother was murdered by the Nazis, and two other sisters, Gittel and Devorah, died in Nazi concentration camps. He never returned to Germany, Austria or Poland. He wrote, “If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”

Heschel concluded that if the message of the prophets is social liberation, then the prophets were pointing forward to the religious enfranchisement of his children, irrespective of their sex. Susannah would be a rabbi, because so many women had been killed by the cruelty of men without conscience and scruples.

Not every father is Abraham Heschel, or Rafael Patai. And those men were not uncomplicated, perhaps not typical.

But Patai bears that sort of relationship to her father, who is her ghost and her mentor, but not her master. “He had,” she said to me over dinner, “seventeen languages; I’m a professor of Romance linguistics and I have four.” It is the kind of complex father-daughter relationship that throws Margaret Atwood’s “King Lear in Respite Care” into view, or Anne Sexton, on the death of her father:

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

She does not begin with atheism, or secularism or any of the liberal secular agendas thought to arise from a purely personal and political point of view. Her father was bold, or foolish, enough to write books called The Arab Mind (1976) and The Jewish Mind (1996). He was martyr to an intellectual cause that flew in the face of liberal orthodoxies. So is she. Irreverent critics of The Arab Mind, infected with the spirit of Edward Said’s Orientalism, said it was “a compendium of racist stereotypes and Eurocentric generalizations.” The Jewish Mind fared worse. She lives his controversies amidst controversies of like proportion, against social orthodoxies of similar dimensions.

I must wonder where these discussions are headed, as the academy lapses into the self-preserving rhetoric that dilutes liberal ideals on the one hand and punishes scepticism with an iron glove on the other.

In early December, 2007, my hometown newspaper, the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, published my opinion piece concerning the newly opened creation museum in northern Kentucky.[1] I’m a former science teacher with a particular interest in the understanding and advancement of science in society, so the article expressed my extreme concern that this $27 million monument to the acceptance of blind faith over science and reason is exceeding attendance expectations and gaining momentum in their mission to cast doubt, in whatever way they can, on evolutionary biology and the multitude of scientific theories that support it. I went to the museum and toured it twice during their opening weekend in late May of 2007. While no one can argue with the high quality of the facility and their 103 animatronic dinosaurs, the museum, built by the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis, fraudulently claims their Biblical interpretations of creation are backed up by scientific facts. What is most disconcerting to me (and the reason I wrote the article) is that the museum has become a sort of de facto science center for the growing Christian home-school movement in the Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky areas, teaching thousands of children that the theory of evolution is incompatible with Christianity and that science can only be valid when viewed through the ‘lens’ of Christian scripture.

Despite the fact that in the article I suggested Christians seek guidance on the subjects of evolution and cosmology from a Christian organization dedicated to the advancement of modern science (I even included the organization’s website URL), I was accused (in the C-J comments blog) of being an intolerant fascist, as well as being doomed to burn in hell. One of the museum’s founders, Chief Communications Officer Mark Looy, responded to my piece with a letter to the C-J, suggesting that had I visited the museum (which I had) I would see that AIG is not anti-science and that I was one of the intolerant cabal of scientists and secularists who have pushed Darwinism on society and stifled dissenting faith-based scientific theories (oxymoron) on human origins. He stated that “Darwin was not the first to fully describe natural selection; it was a creationist, Edward Blyth, 24 years before Origin of Species. Darwin just popularized an already existing idea and tagged it onto his belief about origins.” Looy also said that AIG is not anti-science and that I “conveniently” failed to mention that AIG has seven PhD scientists on staff. [2]

Before addressing Looy’s (and other creationists’) canard that Darwin undeservedly received credit for the theory of natural selection at the expense of Edward Blyth, let me first mention that the reason I failed to mention that AIG has scientists on staff is that while some of his staff may indeed have PhD’s, AIG does not practice science. AIG practices a form of religion which they masquerade as science. One need not look any further than their “statement of faith” on their elaborate website to see how anti-science this organization actually is: “No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.” In addition, they believe “The view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of Biblical teaching, that knowledge /or truth may be divided into “secular” and “religious,” is rejected.”[3]

The creationist practice of beginning with all the answers from a supposedly inerrant source (scripture) and then disputing all evidence which contradicts their beliefs is about as far from science as one can get. As I mentioned in my original article, I have no problem if adults want to throw away reason and support this fraudulent temple of pseudo-science. What I object to is that thousands of children are being taught that this approach to science is valid and that many of the major theories of evolutionary biology, geology, physics and astronomy, since they contradict AIG’s belief in a six 24 hour day creation, are not to be trusted or believed.

Now, on to Blyth. One of the tactics that creationists use to cast doubt on Darwin’s theory of evolution is to cavalierly suggest that at best, Darwin undeservedly received the credit for the theory of natural selection and at worst, was a plagiarist of Blyth’s (and others’) work. This claim is as false as the ‘science’ of creationism itself. As anyone who has ever studied the history of science can tell you, new discoveries in science seldom emerge from a single source. Since many of the advancements of science occur when new knowledge, derived from a variety of sources, is blended together to form new theories, credit for scientific discovery is often a messy business. This was certainly the case with Darwin.

Contrary to Looy’s claim, natural selection was first described not by Blyth (or Darwin for that matter), but by the ancient Greek philosophers Empedocles and Aristotle in the third and fourth centuries, B.C. Many scientists and philosophers in the centuries that followed contributed to the understanding of the adaptation of species due to environmental and competition pressures: al-Jahith, Harvey, Paley, Linnaeus, Buffon, Mathus, Lamark, and Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, to name a few.[4] Blyth contributed to the pool of knowledge with his insightful observations of bird species (specifically the birds of India) and his analysis of selective breeding practices of domesticated animals. [5]

It is true that in his younger years (specifically 1837) Blyth believed, as did most of the biologists /naturalists of his day, in an “eternal and ever-glorious Being which willed matter into existence”.[6] He believed that while animal populations changed due to the influences of environmental conditions over geologic time, the human species was created by God as is. He reasoned that because modern humans are able to shape the environment to suite our purposes, we are exempt from the forces of natural selection. “Does not, then, all this intimate that, even as a mundane being, man is no component of that reciprocal system to which all other species appertain? a system which for countless epochs prevailed ere the human race was summoned into being.”[7] While Blyth’s writings clearly disagree with young Earth creationists on the age of the Earth (“It is needless to add, that a prodigious lapse of time is required here; and, to judge from data which past history of the globe abundantly furnishes, in legible records, wherever we turn our eyes…”)[8], he was firmly in their camp when it came to the origins of man. However, there is evidence that Blyth’s thinking on human origins changed, possibly due to the influence of his good friend Charles Darwin.

In 1867, thirty years after Blyth’s above quoted articles first appeared in the Magazine of Natural History, a very different Edward Blyth emerges from correspondence with Darwin. Blyth wrote Darwin at least 57 letters between 1855 and 1869, with Darwin, in all likelihood, responding to most, if not all. I have read all of Blyth’s known letters to Darwin: 25 are posted on-line by the remarkable Darwin Correspondence Project[9] while the other 32 were read during a blissful, wintry day spent at the manuscript room of the Cambridge University library. In a letter dated February 21, 1867, far from believing that man was created “as is” by God , Blyth suggests to Darwin that humans descended from primates similar to gibbons. The complete letter follows (with my comments in italics). Be advised that Blyth’s beliefs on man’s origins were obviously influenced by the wide-spread racism of mid-19th century Western culture:

My Dear Sir, (Darwin)

The remarkable resemblance in facial expression of the orangutan to the human Malay (Blyth had spent time studying the wildlife of Sumatra in the Malay Peninsula) of its native region, or that of the gorilla to the negro is most striking, and what does this mean? Unless a unreadable of anthropoid type prior to the specialization of the human similarity, while unreadable would imply a parallel series of at least two primary lines of human descent which seems hardly probable; and moreover one must bear in mind the singular facial resemblance of the unreadable unreadable (an unreadable form) to the negro the resemblance can hardly be other than accidental. The accompanying diagram will illustrate what I suggest (rather than maintain); and about Hylobates (genus of Southeast Asia lesser apes) or gibbons, I am not sure that I place it right, for, upon the whole, the gibbon approximate the chimpanzee more than they do the orangutan not withstanding geographical position. Aryan I believe to be improve Turkman or Mongol.

To appreciate the likeness of a Malay to an Orangutan, you should see an old Malay woman chewing unreadable (probably betel, a palm seed / pepper leaf / ground limestone combination still commonly chewed in Southeast Asia) and note the mobility of the lips, in addition to the general expression. However, to be explained, the likeness is much less unreadable in other races of the Turkman stock. We cannot call this a case of mimicry.

I remain, ever sincerely yours,

E. Blyth[10]

Might I suggest that Answers in Genesis, the Creation Institute, and others, in addition to correcting their claims that Edward Blyth was a “creation” scientist robbed of credit for the theory of natural selection because he was creationist, should also inform their devotees that Blyth changed his thinking in later years and suggested that all humans evolved from primate ancestors, with some races sharing near ancestry with orangutans while other races shared near ancestry with gorillas? Something tells me Chief Communications Officer Looy won’t be jumping up and down to put this on AIG’s website.

DNA analysis and the fossil record show that Blyth was half right: Homo sapiens have a shared ancestor with the small Asian apes (gibbons) going back 18 million years, giving credence to the Out-of-Africa, Into-Asia, Back-to-Africa theory of ape migration. He was wrong however, in his hypothesis of two separate paths of Homo sapien evolution, one from an orang ancestor and the other from a gorilla ancestor. We now suspect that all humans share our nearest non-human ancestor with chimpanzees, going back 6 million years, with gorillas splitting off 7 mya and orangutans splitting off 14 mya.[11]

Why did Blyth’s thinking on human origins change? Judging from his published articles and his letters to Darwin, one can only conclude that his exposure to thirty additional years of scientific inquiry and evidence lead him to reshape his philosophy on human origins (he was never a young Earth creationist) into one that recognized that transmutation of species was the logical extension of the theory of natural selection. In fact, it is this theory, descent with modification over ‘countless epochs’, creating totally different species, including mankind, that Darwin originated and popularized, with the already described theory of natural selection gaining additional acceptance due to Darwin’s brilliant insights and writings. AIG’s Looy states, “Blyth, though, did not believe that natural selection could be a mechanism to produce new genetic information in creatures that could, over time, turn molecules into men.” [12] Is Looy so sure of the validity of this statement since Blyth, in his later years, clearly believed that humans were the result of new genetic information passed along by our primate ancestors?

A fellow Louisvillian, Mohammed Ali, once said, “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” I would bet that were he alive today, Edward Blyth would have this axiom as a banner on his website. He might also be asking AIG, Ken Ham, Mark Looy, William Dembski[13], and other evolution obstructionists to quit using his earliest works to prop up their fundamentalist, nothing-to-do-with-science-but-we-want-you-to-think-it-does worldview. Unfortunately, Mr. Blyth is no longer with us to prevent his considerable body of work from being misused by AIG. As Stephen J. Gould (another great evolutionary biologist, no longer with us, whose writings and opinions have often been misrepresented and purposely misused by creationists) once wrote, “Shall we deprive millions of this knowledge and once again teach biology as a set of dull and unconnected facts without the thread that weaves diverse material into a supple unity?”[14]

By not vigorously exposing and confronting the educational injustice that the creationist movement is inflicting upon an ever-increasing number of young people, will we regret our inaction when, as adults, this growing crop of fundamentalists become school board members, military personnel, journalists, teachers, and politicians? If we think the situation is bad now, wait until a creationist who also believes in the prophecies of the End Times[15] has their finger on the trigger of a nuclear weapon. Then the real fun will begin. Surely the radical Islamist / Koran literalists will make sure they have reciprocal powers in place. It will matter little if an ensuing Armageddon is due to self-fulfilling prophecy (reality) or God’s anger with the sinfulness of the human race (fantasy). The result will be a man-made extinction event (certainly small-scale, possibly large-scale)…something that would surely disappoint and anger Edward Blyth, Charles Darwin, and our other hard-working ancestors who were committed to the advancement of science and knowledge.

During the past one and a half centuries, evolutionary biology and other modern sciences have given our species an unprecedented understanding of our existence and increased our profound appreciation for the responsibilities we have towards this amazing experiment we call life on Earth. It seems such a shame that the superstitious clap-trap which is creationism continues to flourish in the 21st century, with the help of enormous expenditures of capital, both intellectual and economic. What is particularly insidious is that creationists’ chief tool for supporting their absolutist doctrine (besides their “cause the Bible tells me so” argument) is to attack the enormous collection of evidence supporting evolution, while supplying no evidence to support their own position. It is a practice I’m sure would be appalling to Edward Blyth, a credible scientist whose thinking ‘evolved’ over the years due to Darwin’s Great Idea.

Will we allow the legacy of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution to be over-powered by tax-free, fundamentalist, pseudo-science institutions? Or will we stand up to their campaign of science disinformation and strongly re-advocate for the advancement of science and reason in society? I suggest Edward Blyth would strongly support the latter position and firmly condemn the former.

References

1) Courier-Journal

2) Courier-Journal

3) About faith

4) Evolution library

5) Blyth, E., The Magazine of Natural History Volumes 8, 9 and 10, 1835–1837

6) Blyth, E., Psychological Distinctions Between Man and Other Animals – Part 4, The Magazine of Natural History Volume 10, 1837.

7) Blyth, E., Psychological Distinctions Between Man and Other Animals – Part 3, The Magazine of Natural History Volume 10, 1837.Blyth, E., Psychological Distinctions Between Man and Other Animals – Part 4, The Magazine of Natural History Volume 10, 1837.

8) Blyth, E., Psychological Distinctions…– Part 4

9) Darwin Project

10) Letter 5405 — Blyth, Edward to Darwin, C. R., 19 Feb, 1867, Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge University

11) Dawkins, Richard, The Ancestor’s Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004)

12) Courier-Journal

13) Was Blyth the True Scientist?

14) Gould, Stephen Jay, Evolution as Fact and Theory, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994)

15) Even though Answers in Genesis claims the Bible is the Word of God “from the first verse”, they are strangely silent on the ‘inerrancy” of prophesies (e.g. Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the second coming) as described in the Book of Revelations and other gospels. “AiG doesn’t have an official position on a particular eschatological (the branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind position) except accepting there will be a bodily return of Christ. “AiG/Creation Museum doesn’t even talk about Armageddon.” says CEO Ken Ham in AIG’s newsletter dated December 4, 2007. He does say on his podcast of September 14, 2007, “The second coming is eminent.” The only text reference to the End Times or Consumption on AIG’s website is the relatively benign Revelations Chapter 21, verse 4: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” AIG may be choosing to disassociate themselves with the rest of the Book of Revelation and their claim that it is literally true, since it appears quite likely that the author, John of Patmos (if he was indeed the author and if the text is a true accounting of his two visions) may have arrived at his visions by a) consuming large quantities of psychotropic plants or fungi, b) experiencing some sort of serious psychotic break from reality or c) a conscience manipulation of fanatical believers to believe lies.

The first time I went to Israel, in 1983, when everyone could still drive freely around the West Bank, I got into an argument with a distant cousin, a social worker. Like many Israelis (and many social workers) she is Leftish and secular and regrets that proportional representation gives such disproportionate influence to Israel’s religious and expansionist parties. She and her husband are peaceniks, demonstrated against Israel’s 1982 involvement in Lebanon, and want the settlers out of the West Bank.

Like many Israelis, she also lost family members to the Nazis and came as a teenager to Mandate Palestine. She isn’t the sort who won’t listen to Wagner or Richard Strauss, though she still doesn’t like visiting Germany. We were arguing about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-8 and she handed me a book. ‘You English Jews are so detached. Read this. Then you might understand.’ The book was Rolf Hochhuth’s A German Love Story, published in 1964. Subtitled ‘a documentary novel’, it uses the story of an illicit liaison between a Polish prisoner-of-war and the wife of a German soldier away on the Eastern front to illustrate the nastiness of Hitler’s regime even to paid-up Aryan Germans. The ‘documentary’ bits include both German and Anglo-American wartime statements. At the end of the book, Hochhuth noted that some of the principal Nazi villains were still alive and prospering.

I was struck by one particular document. Early in 1939, The Times sent Churchill’s journalist son, Randolph[1] to interview the ageing Kaiser Wilhelm in Holland, where he had been exiled since 1918. ‘The old man was 80 by then,’ Churchill wrote. ‘He said he’d spent twenty years reading every history book he could lay hands on and there was only one eternal truth: anyone who steals land he wasn’t born on, is doomed.’ Wasn’t this, I suggested, the basic problem with Israel? My cousin brushed aside the Kaiser’s mature insight and maintained that the beastliness of the Nazis justified and will always justify the existence of Israel. Many people, including many non-Jews, evidently agree with her and even if they don’t, 60 years of UN membership (however questionably acquired in 1948) surely confer some pretty powerful squatters’ rights by now.

The Kaiser’s reading had apparently made him wiser and kindlier. He would presumably have regarded the creation of colonies and Bantustans in the Occupied Territories as particularly indefensible. Years of Arab refusal to recognize Israel and make peace, until rather late in the day, explain but only partly excuse the settlers, and both the Kaiser’s ghost and my cousin say they should go. But what about the larger issue, the original late-19th-century Zionist aspiration to establish a Jewish state in what was bound to be hostile territory? What irritates me about many of the Israelis I have met (and it must be infinitely more irritating to Arabs) is their reluctance to recognize that it is very reasonable for Arabs, especially those from old or new Palestine and including relatively secular ones, to have a lasting sense of grievance about Zionism’s takeover of their ancestral farms and villages, not to mention Islam’s second-holiest site, the Dome of the Rock, which the Israeli army’s chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, wanted to dynamite after the taking of East Jerusalem in 1967. Perhaps not many Israelis still cling to the myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land’ but they still have their psychological defence mechanisms.

Too often, Israelis and their diaspora supporters imply that even if dispossession occurred, it was justified because the local inhabitants were a bunch of primitive nomads. Even today, Zionist apologists repeat the historically unsupported allegation (which my father clung to until his death) that Palestinian Arabs were not expelled from the nascent Jewish state but ‘encouraged’ or even ordered – in mysterious and never-documented Arabic radio broadcasts – to leave their homes, so that the invading Arab armies could have a free-fire zone to massacre the Jews. (The expulsions, it is clear, began well before Israel’s declaration of independence and the subsequent declaration of war by neighbouring Arab countries in May 1948.) The fact that among people not hostile to Jews (including many Jews) there was much reasoned opposition to Zionism is apparently forgotten. Where their recent history is concerned, Israelis, like many non-Israeli Jews, seem a nation in denial at least as much as many Germans used to be, until home-grown writers like Hochhuth confronted them with it. Indeed, the vicious attacks by Jews on distinguished Jewish historians like Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein (the son of Holocaust survivors) for their detailed academic studies of Zionist plans for expansion and ethnic cleansing are often not very far removed from Holocaust Denial.

It is no coincidence that the country most supportive of Israel is the USA, itself a successful colonizing society that treated the Amerindians much as Zionist settlers treated the ‘Palestindians’. We see the same out-manoeuvring of the native inhabitants by more militarily, technically and judicially sophisticated colonists, the same insincere undertakings, the same feelings of cultural superiority and eventually the same claims of ‘manifest destiny’, a phrase which doesn’t sound very different from what the Nazis called lebensraum. Perhaps the main difference between the two colonisations (apart from Israel’s much shorter timescale) is that whereas the Amerindians had no written language, no educated middle class, no intelligentsia and thus no journalism as we know it, the Arabs of Palestine and the neighbouring lands had all four. Accordingly, we know that right from the start, many Palestinians knew what was happening, what was planned and what the future might hold for them. We also know that while many Jews in the 1930s and 40s migrated out of sheer desperation and would probably have willingly co-existed with Arabs in Palestine (or elsewhere had it been an option) as an alternative to the Nazis, the ambition of many in the Zionist leadership had always been partition and as much land and ethnic exclusivity as they could get. If Zionism had begun in the 1980s instead of the 1880s, it wouldn’t have stood a chance. Yet instead of feeling lucky to have pulled off the last successful bit of metastatic colonization before it became unacceptable, many Israelis behave as if the Arabs were to blame for disturbing the 19th century status quo.

As Carlo Strenger, an Israeli psychology professor, recently wrote in Ha’aretz (Israel’s Guardian): ‘Israeli public discourse and national consciousness have never come to terms with the idea, accepted by historians of all venues today, that Israel actively drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947/8 and hence has at least partial responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba…In the best of all possible worlds,’ he concluded, ‘an Israeli statesman (a rare commodity in an age of mere politicians) would arise and tell the Palestinians: “Israel came into existence in tragic circumstances that inflicted great suffering and injustice on your people. We accept responsibility for our part in this tragedy, even though we cannot fully rectify it. Let us sit together and see how we can end the vicious cycle of violence and suffering and live side by side.” This is not likely to happen in the immediate future. A Jewish Israeli politician who would say such a thing would become unelectable…’ That gloomy prognosis is supported by an even more recent Ha’aretz article about studies showing that only half of Israelis believe that Jews and Arabs should have full equal rights, that more than half support encouraging Israeli Arabs to leave Israel, and that 74% of young Jewish Israelis think Arabs are ‘unclean.’

The Nazis certainly gave an enormous and perhaps irresistible push to the process of Zionist colonization, but it is surely very unfair that a largely Islamic Arab society was the victim. For well over a thousand years, Jews had coexisted fairly amicably in Arab countries as well as in Persia and the Ottoman empire – more amicably, perhaps, than Catholics in England during the couple of centuries after the first Elizabeth and certainly more amicably than in the England from which Jews were completely expelled for several centuries, long before the better-known Spanish expulsion of 1492. It is said that near the end of the British mandate, an American diplomat was trying to persuade King ibn Saud that Jews needed and deserved a country of their own because the Germans had been so beastly to them. ‘In that case’, the old man replied, ‘why don’t they take some land from the Germans?’

What a pity the Kaiser didn’t live for another seven years to comment on that interesting proposal for a fledgling state, which might not even have existed had his foreign policy not had such terrible consequences. After all, apart from being partly responsible for starting the Great War, he encouraged and facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917. In consequence, Russia did not just drop out of the war, as the Kaiser hoped, but changed from a moderately brutal though gradually reforming monarchy into an extremely brutal one-party state. Leninist Communism attracted many people at the time and destabilized parts of Europe almost as much as the war itself. As well as high unemployment and Versailles, the numerous attempted Communist revolutions of 1919-20 were also partly responsible for Hitler. If the Kaiser did indeed help make the difference between a Menshevik and a Bolshevik government in Russia, that was his biggest mistake. Seventy years later, Bolshevik Communism disappeared from Europe in not much more time than it took to say ‘false consciousness’ and not many people seem to regret it. Yet without the Nazis, it is surely probable – to put it very mildly – that far fewer European Jews would have emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s and 40s and that the country that emerged 60 years ago would have been a very different entity. It might not even have emerged at all, given that the original position of the UN in 1947 was that it had no power under its charter to ‘deprive the majority of the people of Palestine of their territory and transfer it to the exclusive use of a minority in their country’.

We certainly need the Kaiser’s belated wisdom now. When I last spoke to my cousin a few years ago, she despaired of the future but said she was just grateful for the protection against the Palestinians that Mr Sharon, the army and the wall-builders had started providing. She probably hasn’t read the perceptive opinion of one of the Kaiser’s contemporaries, Admiral Lord Fisher, the man who gave us Dreadnoughts. ‘The world’, he wrote during an earlier Middle East crisis, ‘has yet to learn what the Mohammedan can do if once the holy fervour seizes him’.

NOTES.

1) Totally irrelevant but totally priceless is Evelyn Waugh’s comment on hearing that the younger Churchill had recently had surgery for a benign tumour. ‘How typical of the medical profession to find the only bit of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and then remove it’.

2) Marder, A.J. (Ed) Fear God and Dread Nought: the letters of Lord Fisher of Kilverstone London 1956 p 389

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Our civilization is a civilization of fear. Walk into any bookshop and look at the titles – horrors assail you from all sides; open a newspaper, check how many headlines try to awake in you a feeling, if not of mortal fear at least of anxiety; take a notebook and a stopwatch to your evening news and write down how many times during one evening you are told about violence, disasters, crimes, and suppositions that aim to trigger your fear, flight impulse, or “righteous” anger.

Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations are waging a deadly battle over who can frighten you more. Every day specialists check to see what works, which headlines and which trailers induce you to buy a newspaper, to prick up your ears when you listen to the radio, to settle more intently into your armchair in front of the TV. The game to catch your attention is a game worth billions.

The news from the global village is dripping with blood. But reality is not enough: writers and film-makers raise the bar even higher, here the play on your feelings is limited only by the imagination of the artists.

Journalists and artists are far from the only merchants of fear. The producers of goods scare you and assure you in their advertisements that a small outlay can alleviate your “well-founded” anxiety. They advertise weapons, alarms, food, insurance, and medicines for real and non-existent illnesses. The market is huge; There are an infinite number of opportunities to call upon your fear and your yearning for security.

Politicians also love your fear. Election campaigns are competitions between halls of mirrors and ingenious walls of death. You have to be convinced that you are living in hell, that you and your family are in mortal danger, and that your country needs a strong man who will save you from extinction.

Behind the statesmen who are in the business of frightening you are politicians and activists from different spheres: police, army, teachers, doctors. The situation is bad and it will get still worse. We need money to prevent a catastrophe.

The army of fear-mongers even encompasses the ranks of young and beautiful NGO activists. They defend the environment and fight for peace, they fight the greedy corporations, they fight against globalization, euro-bureaucrats, genetic modification, physics and chemistry.

There is no lack of learned political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists among the merchants of fear, not to mention clergymen, for they were the first in the field.

Since the commerce with fear is such a gigantic business it means that there is a demand. It means that a day without Apocalypse is a wasted day. Whence this passion of ours for scary stories?

Recently a book by Dan Gardner, Risk, the Science and Politics of Fear, was published in London. Risk! Life is a continual game, and absolute safety does not exist. We are constantly calculating what is safer – to get out of bed and risk falling down the stairs or to stay safely in bed, which can end in death from starvation.

Risk calculation is not easy at all, especially because our psyche was formed in the Stone Age but we are living in a global village. We are living in the present tense, but all our reactions were formed in the past far-from-perfect, when we roamed in small groups on the savannah and we used to get our knowledge about the world from direct experience and from stories told around the fire.

Modern evolutionary psychology charts step by step how our instincts, like the fear of spiders, snakes, faeces, spoiled food, and vague shadows, came into being. The danger you experienced personally and the danger you were told about both had to trigger your immediate reaction. You could think later. We live in a world that never was so dangerous. All living people are living in a world that never was so dangerous for them, because only the living are in mortal danger (our ancestors already have all that behind them).

Fear is not only our guardian angel; sometimes it is also a sadist, a murderer, a habitual liar, or a destroyer of the meaning of life.

Dan Gardner is a journalist, but his book is a solid attempt to sum up what modern science knows about fear– about our mind’s reactions when faced with risk. The reader can sometimes be overwhelmed with the bulk of statistics, but Gardner reveals the maladaptation and the helplessness of our primeval nature when faced with the conditions of the modern world.

No previous generation ever lived in such a safe world as we do; we live longer, we murder each other less frequently, much less frequently do we experience the tragedy of losing a child. We are healthier, we do not have to fear hunger, much less often do we fall victim of natural disasters, not to mention wild animals. But we have the same or greater fears and anxieties as our forbears, and many of those fears are delusions that we allow ourselves to be talked into.

Take cancer, for example. We live in times of a terrible cancer epidemic, don’t we? More and more people die from cancer. Even a hundred years ago cancer caused a relatively small number of deaths. Of course, our ancestors didn’t have the chance to die of cancer. Before they had time to get cancer they were taken by tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera, or other diseases which are not present today or are thought of as trivial.

The longer we live the greater the probability that we will die of cancer. The greatest number of cancer incidents affect people over the age of retirement. Not true, cry journalists, there is a rise in the rate of cancer among children. But maybe we are seeing better diagnosis, maybe we know more often what is happening and have the chance to save a child who has cancer? Pediatric oncologists do not doubt this. But cancer in an old man is not so heart-rending, and that is why the media show the tragedy of a child or a young woman a hundred times more often. The picture of this “epidemic” of cancer which arises in our heads as a result of media information is ridiculously warped.

There are many types of cancer and many reasons for getting cancer, for example heredity, environmental factors, and the normal process of aging, which causes a dramatic rise in the probability of having cancer in old age.

Cancer is more often the cause of death because we are healthier and we are dying later. In the last century we saw a rapid rise in the incidence of lung and throat cancer. The connection between smoking and these types of cancer is beyond any doubt. The only type of cancer that shows an indisputable rise of cases in relatively young people is just these lung and throat cancers.

Leaving aside the cancers of old age and cancer caused by smoking, we observe a decrease in the incidence of cancer and a sharp decrease of mortality caused by cancer. But our brains are not excited by statistics–we react to particular stories about particular people. When we meet parents who have lost a child, it is much more likely that the reason for this tragedy was cancer than flu, tuberculosis, or typhoid. Of course, we do not remember that losing a child is now a rare event, while until quite recently it was a normal occurrence. We take for granted that our child will live into his/her eighties and do not see it as a privilege.

But such knowledge does not free us from fear for ourselves and for our children. We more readily believe that the source of this non-existent epidemic is the environment rather than heredity. It appears that it is easier to believe in some obscure chemicals or magnetic fields than in heredity, cigarettes, a wrong diet, or lack of exercise.

Is it true that the safer we are the more eagerly we devote ourselves to the fear of improbable threats? Not quite, for the fear of the imminent end of the world is as old as the history of mankind, but the possibilities of magnifying improbable risks are immensely higher now.

If we smoke we want to have organic tobacco without any chemical additives. Such natural tobacco cannot harm us. It is chemistry that is killing us. Gardner recapitulates the history of the fear of “chemistry”.

“Our bodies have become repositories for dozens of toxic chemicals”, begins a report from Greenpeace. “It is thought that every person on Earth is now contaminated and our bodies may now contain up to 2000 synthetic chemicals.”

This blood-curdling statement is just one of the many examples of “information” we are fed daily. The word “chemical” itself no longer has anything in common with the chemistry we learned at school. A survey in the USA has shown that the majority associated the word “chemical” with death, toxicity, and danger.

Panic fear of “chemistry” started in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Carson, a biologist working with marine fauna, found traces of chemicals like DDT in birds’ eggshells. Her research was solid but the conclusions went far beyond the research. “For the first time in the history of the world,” Carson wrote, “every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” Carson was deeply convinced that the rise in cancer incidents was connected to the revolution in agriculture. While in 1900 cancer accounted for only 4 percent of deaths, in 1958 it was 15 percent.

Silent Spring immediately became the bible of ecological movements and sold in the millions. Eight years later it caused the ban of DDT production in the USA. Silent Spring is on the bestseller list to this day.

Rachel Carson drew wrong conclusions from her statistics. The rising proportion of cancer deaths was connected to the elimination of other diseases, longer life spans, and the spread of smoking (which she didn’t mention in her book). As a result her book blamed a factor which plays the smallest role as a cause of cancer. “Exposure to pollutants in occupational, community, and other settings is thought to account for a relatively small percentage of cancer death”, the American Cancer Society stated in 2006.

Moreover, not all carcinogenic substances are man-made; many of them occur in nature. The key question here is concentration. Many chemical substances (either natural or man-made), when given in high concentration to laboratory animals, sooner or later will cause cancer. Traces of pesticides in our food have in no way influenced the rising incidence of cancer.

Of course, environmentalists remained unconvinced. The machine fueled by faulty conclusions goes on from its own momentum. Why? Because we are a receptive audience. Our Stone Age brain is programmed to react with panicky fear to toxic food.

We are afraid not only of cancer, we are afraid of everything, and at the same time we can see how real but familiar danger is underestimated whereas rare and unlikely events have real power to move our minds.

The likelihood of a car accident is many times higher than the likelihood of an aviation disaster, not to mention the likelihood of airplane hijacking. After the attack on the WTC tens of thousands of people in the USA gave up flying and changed to driving. The result was that the number of fatal road accidents rose by 1900 and returned to normal the next year. It would seem that the number of victims of 9/11 increased by an additional 1900 persons.

For a terrorist, to trigger fear is more important than to kill victims directly. The true goal is to cause panic, to paralyze with fear. Terrorists count on politicians, the media, and the readers of newspapers, and they are seldom disappointed.

Gardner discusses psychology in Risk and attempts to answer the question of why our reactions are so often guided by instinct, by our gut feeling, and why our heads are so seldom able to correct those instinctive reactions. We are constantly weighing risks, but our scales are badly out of kilter. We see the world in a distorting mirror, and journalists are people with the same brains as ours. They distort the picture of reality not only for profit, and not out of ill will, but because certain inclinations in our brains are hardwired.

When we read a newspaper the most bizarre story will draw our eyes and we will read it carefully. Even this story will increase our fear. The likelihood that an American child will be in a car accident or beaten up on the street is much greater than that the child will be shot at by a madman in school, but in the opinion of American parents the fear of a shooting at school is much stronger than the fear of a car accident. Likewise with murders. Public opinion is deeply convinced that the rate of violent crimes is rising and that our times are much more dangerous than any time in the past. Actually, the exact opposite is true.

The myth of a gentle savage totally false: in primitive societies virtually every adult man was a multiple murderer. Our lives are not only exceptionally safe compared to the Middle Ages, but the murder rate is lower than in the 1980s (though in the USA it is still slightly higher than in the 1950s).

Our minds are especially receptive to rare, extraordinary events, but in the global village in the age of the information revolution, the news from faraway corners of a country and of the world comes to us in a flash. Therefore, very rare events, in the scale of a big country or a planet, happen quite often. The likelihood that just our child (under the age of 14) may be abducted by a pervert is in the USA 0.00015 %. However, since every such event is trumpeted by all mass media, not surprisingly the feeling of threat is much stronger.

All the tom-toms of the global village are constantly warning us of risks that are slight, but we are perfectly able to ignore those risks which we know and which we meet every day.

Is there anything we can do to change the proportions between instinctive reactions to false or absurdly exaggerated warnings and moments of rational sobriety? Dan Gardner’s Risk does not encourage optimism, but it is worth realizing that we have been frightened since the beginning of time and that most apocalyptic prophecies never came true.

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist from the University of California, examined the accuracy of the predictions of sociologists, economists, and journalists over a period of twenty years. He checked 82,361 predictions, and their accuracy was so pathetic that guessing at random would give better results. And they were not any old predictions or any old experts. In 1975 the world was supposed to start dying of worldwide hunger, later we were suppose to become extinct because of a demographic bomb, and of course according to Rachel Carson’s prediction there are no more birds, and that is not because of a nuclear war–which was also unavoidable.

The future inevitably holds uncertainty and anxieties. Dan Gardner opens his book with the inauguration of President Roosevelt, for whom the battle with fear was the key element to fight the Depression. At the end he quotes a passage from an article by Thomas L. Friedman, known for his techno-optimism, describing driving his daughter to college:

“I was dropping my daughter off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the world she was born into. I felt like I could still promise my daughter her bedroom back, but I could not promise her the world, not in the carefree way that I had explored when I was her age”.

How familiar it is. The past was perhaps dangerous, but it is already behind us and in hindsight our fears of yesteryear seem trifling and not worth mentioning; “the world we live in today is surely more dangerous”.

There is a risk but fear, especially unfounded fear, may only increase this risk. It is worth looking skeptically at the aggressive offerings of the fear merchants.

Dan Gardner, Risk. The Science and Politics of Fear, Virgin Books Ltd., London 2008, 355pp.

The online magazine Democratiya was set up by writers and academics in 2005 as a reaction to the status-quo left consensus that dominated liberal thought from the provincial dinner party to the pages of the British Guardian. From its founding statement:

When over eight million Iraqis voted in democratic elections in January 2005, at polling stations guarded by American and other foreign troops, emerging to dance for joy, their purple fingers aloft, only for Britain’s leading liberal newspaper to sneer that the election was ‘at best irrelevant’ it was clear that something had gone terribly awry. When Iraq’s heroic free trade unionists were called ‘collaborators’ and ‘quislings’, while their torturers and murderers were hailed as a ‘liberation movement’ one could hear the rattling of loose political and moral bearings.

For three years the magazine has provided a home for dissident and internationalist comment, and Global Politics After 9/11 collects ten interviews with academics from Britain, the US, Egypt and Iran. The purpose of these discussions and of the magazine is to make a positive contribution to foreign policy that goes beyond opposing whatever George W Bush does.

Despite this wide spectrum of opinion, there is a danger in magazine anthologies that the debate will slide into a mutual backslapping. This is a trap for all small intellectual groups that Global Politics skilfully avoids. Alan Johnson, Democratiya’s founder and the book’s interlocutor, isn’t afraid to ask hard questions and to challenge long-held beliefs.

Nor is this volume a chorus of acquiescence to the policies of British and American governments. Many of the interviewees are antiwar (I’m pointing this out because support for or opposition to the war is now a moral litmus test for the reactionary left). David Held, of the London School of Economics, slams what he aptly terms ‘market fundamentalism’; government-held dogma of purely capitalist solutions that condemns millions to starvation and disease. Paul Berman, considered to be the godfather of the ‘cruise-missile left,’ discusses Bush’s proposed appointment of Cold War criminal John Negroponte to the UN:

As a Central America reporter for the 1980s, I remembered his role as Ambassador to Honduras at the time the death squads were appearing… Excuse me, but I made some of these points earlier and a lot more loudly than some of my critics ever did. Thank God for the internet – it preserves everything.

It’s a fine answer to those who portray liberals as naive dreamers who think that America has been an unadulterated force for good since the 1940s.

Berman’s critique is trashed later in the collection by Joshua Muravchik, who is an actual, real-life neoconservative. At a time when ‘neocon’ is defined as ‘a person who deviates in any way from the antiwar/Seumas Milne/Noam Chomsky line on Iraq, Iran and religion,’ it is brave and necessary to include him, purely for the sake of perspective. As Johnson says, the label is ‘an obstacle to grown-up political debate.’

Another obstacle is identified by Iraqi writer and dissident Kanan Makiya in the book’s best interview. The dialogue opens with a fascinating look at Makiya’s background and travels (when are we going to get a full biography of this man?) The son of an architect, Makiya was lauded by the radical left for his book Republic of Fear, an exposé of the horrors of Saddam’s regime (at that point funded and supported by the West). In 1992 Makiya wrote Cruelty and Silence, which featured case studies exploring the impact of Ba’ath repression on individuals, spliced with servile apologia from Arab intellectuals towards the Hussein regime. Cruelty and Silence, Makiya says, was about ‘putting cruelty first’:

I pit the words of Arab and Western intellectuals of my generation, many of the left, against all these Iraqi words about violence and cruelty. The point was between these two sets of words there was a chasm. The intellectuals offered rhetoric about ‘nationalism,’ ‘Imperialism,’ ‘the Crusades,’ and so on. The focus of the book was about the rhetoric that the war had generated among intellectuals and the chasm between that rhetoric and the reality. Between those two realities – the words of the intellectuals and the words of the victims – there was a yawning gap.

Naturally, the status-quo left dropped him like a stone. Edward Said called the book ‘scurrilous,’ and ‘revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation.’ Makiya was expelled like a dinner-party guest who had lit up a cigarette at the table.

The metaphor is apposite when we think about the changes in left politics. From Makiya’s interview:

Look back at the Spanish Civil War and think of the brigades of volunteers who went to fight. Think of George Orwell. That’s the spirit of the traditional left. The language of human rights comes naturally to it as an extension of its internationalism and its universalism… Increasingly, by the 1980s, that is no longer the case… the internationalist concern with those universals human beings have in common declined in importance.

The left has lost its active spirit. It is now a purely social tradition based around shared opinions, taboos, reference points and in-jokes. Asking the conformist left of today to leave the dinner party and actually do something about oppression just seems laughable, which is why Makiya is derided as a foolish idealist. The result is that, in Makiya’s words, ‘any form of intervention began to be seen as immoral,’ and that efforts to draw attention to the repression of Middle Eastern people are seen as at best irrelevant and at worst propaganda for imperialism.

I’ll give an example. Back in January the British literary critic Stephen Mitchelmore criticised other bloggers for drawing attention to the censorship of Iranian novelists and publishers. ‘While I’m sure not one literary blogger I’ve mentioned backs the threats of violence made by the US administration,’ he conceded, ‘the willingness to promote this story uncritically has unwelcome consequences. It has already become a discussion point: ‘Should we bomb Iran?’ etc.’ The fact that you can be against both war on Iran and censorship in Iran had not seemed to occur to him.

It’s an example of what Johnson calls ‘the non-aggression pact that existed between the anti-Western left and the mainstream left’; the unwillingness to criticise one’s own side, however stupid and corrupt its actions, because you fear that the slightest dissent will provide ammunition to the enemy. From George Orwell’s essay ‘Through a Glass, Rosily’:

Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticises A is accused of aiding or abetting B… Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don’t criticise, or at least criticise ‘constructively,’ which in practice always means favourably.

Democratiya calls for a total abandonment of this paranoid self-censorship. It’s a call that should be heeded, for self-examination is the beginning of renewal. If its counsel is followed, then one day the left may be able to look itself in the mirror, and to sleep at night.

Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews, ed. Alan Johnson, The Foreign Policy Centre, 2008

It has been debated whether the term “the Fourth Estate” which refers to journalism or a “free press” was originated by Edmund Burke, who once pointed to the gallery of reporters in the British Parliament and declared them to be the fourth, and most important, element overseeing a triumvirate of governmental power. In my opinion, this was one of the most perceptive descriptions of democracy and its processes, applying equally well to the British Parliament and the Estates General of France (from which the term was derived); the constituents were supposed to be representatives of the society’s main elements— the nobility, the middle class and the clergy. Burke was saying that the influence of a free press was, and should be, greater than any of the other three because the “word,” written and spoken, was the key to power.

(Incidentally, the “debate” arises because a guy named Thomas Carlyle is the one who actually put the following statement in writing: “Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporter’s gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”)

Who said it first? Was it Burke? Was it Carlyle? Does it matter?

What does matter is that the uncertainty of Burke vs. Carlyle symbolizes the dilemma of whom or what we believe. In this country today, if we substitute the terms “United States Senate” for the “nobility” (makes you want to vomit doesn’t it?) the “House of Representatives” for the “middle class” (not very appetizing either) and “fundamentalist Christians” for the “clergy,” (Well, that’s not too bad) it is apparent that little has changed, with one glaring exception. The Fourth Estate has sold out to the combined forces of its previous antagonists and we now have the deplorable situation where the people have lost the protection of the “more important far than they all.”

Where is today’s Fourth Estate? Nowhere to be found, because sadly, with the exception of only a small minority of courageous and perceptive people, whom the other three estates have managed to portray as unpatriotic troublemakers, the American press has surrendered its role in the “reporter’s gallery,” and is no longer fulfilling Burke’s/Carlyle’s indispensable obligation. This is a devastating loss. It is devastating because access to the truth about governmental matters, of which the press has been the guardian, has been abandoned.

It is a loss similar to the one suffered when science capitulates to religion in the presentation of ideas, and is apparently unwilling to say exactly what its research has found because it comes into conflict with the clergy’s view of the world. The issue of stem-cell research is a notable example, because the only reason this is considered to be an “issue” is the Christian view that a “soul” is created at the moment of conception, and research involving embryos therefore, destroys that soul.

Mortimer Adler’s definition of truth is, “ideas that are in accord with reality.” Here we find the parallel I refer to between science and journalism . . . ideally, both are committed to Adler’s definition of truth; both science and journalism search for (or should search for) hidden facts, evidence, and information. And most important, they are obligated to bring these ideas to the attention of the rest of the people.

Journalism and science should be the leading proponents of ideas that “are in accord with reality,” but scientists have become reticent about espousing ideas that may get them fired (or jeopardize their research grants), in the same way that the Fourth Estate is rapidly abandoning its responsibility to keep the other three estates honest.

Both religion and politics frequently seek ways to distort facts, evidence and information. Both have always relied upon a misrepresentation of the truth. In fact, they go further and frequently try to pass off ideas that are not in accord with reality as truth, and when they are unable to do so (because the ideas are too preposterous) they make it illegal (or heretical) to investigate those ideas. This is why we have Christian apologists making statement such as, “when the Bible says the world was created in six days, it may mean that at the creation, each of god’s days was two billion years old.” It also explains why politicians are able to say “This pastor has been my spiritual advisor for twenty years, but I had no idea that he said, ‘God damn America.’” In theology it’s called “apologetics.” In politics they call it “spinning.” Both are systematic and planned attempts to deceive.

Is it an accident that the power structure of the last seven years has been formed from neo-conservative god-fearing religious “intellectuals” who are educated and intelligent enough to know better but apparently feel they can employ their mental skills to manipulate a gullible public into following them into the Armageddon they so ardently seem to desire?

Due to the exponential expansion of the media, radio, television and, especially, the Internet, the importance of the written and spoken word, and hence the Fourth Estate, has been magnified a thousand-fold. As a result of this growth, Burke’s (or Carlyle’s) words have never been more critical for the healthy functioning of free societies, yet they are becoming increasingly irrelevant, because the “free press” has apparently lost its will to fight. Information, or “truth,” of which the Fourth Estate has been the guardian, has become virtually under the control of a corrupt nexus of the clergy and the nobility, (Judeo-Christian leaders and the United States Congress) at the expense of the middle class and everyone else. And in a clever quid pro quo, the clergy has conferred a dubious morality and virtue onto a corrupt government while the government has reciprocated with laws giving preferential treatment to religion. This is a clever arrangement in which the congress has protected the clergy with a network of tax laws, regulations and immunities, while in return the clergy adorns the congress in an aura of sainthood because of their acceptance of the false morality acquired through opening prayers, swearing on the Bible, and pious allegations that they are the guardians of a Christian Constitution.

In this manner, these “estates” can play the role of martyrs by claiming to be besieged. Besieged by whom? Why, of course, the forces of science, reason, logic, words, journalism, “secular humanists”—in short—information. They say, “Our religion is true but it is attacked by evil scientists, Atheists, secularists and other spawn of the Devil; and our politics are a noble enterprise—our leaders courageous patriots who have to suffer the indignity of being attacked by unpatriotic, ungrateful whiners and dissidents, rabble rousers with no other purpose than to destroy our most cherished ideals.”

The war in Iraq is the quintessential example of the convergence of the two frauds—the religious and the political—whereby all of the most insidious qualities of both institutions, deception, self-aggrandizement, greed, power, and most important, the debasement and castration of the truth, have intimidated a once fearless press. And this fact may conceal the real reasons behind the timid behavior of investigative reporters and the surrender of the Fourth Estate.

Is it reasonable to hope that the Internet can fill the gap? Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! into cyberspace. Woodward and Bernstein, where are you now that we need you?

It is a matter of increasing importance that non-Muslims should be able to get a clear idea of Islam’s true attitude towards them. The questions are simple enough: Does Islam teach violence, or peace? Does it wish to coexist with other religions, or to dominate them? Do the jihadis represent Islam, or are they just a lunatic fringe? It should be a simple matter to get definitive, authoritative answers to such questions but, in fact, it is far from simple.

For those in politics and the media, the solution appears to be obvious: ask a Muslim theologian. This has been the approach taken, for example, by Ken Livingstone, the present Mayor of London, in his meetings with Dr. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi: “One of the most authoritative Muslim scholars in the world today” [1]. However, this is the worst way to get at the truth. The replies that are received as a result of such approaches will be designed to achieve a different purpose to the one intended by the questioners: they will be framed in such a way as to convince Westerners that Islam does not harbour any hostility to non-Muslims when, in reality, it does.

Am I really suggesting that some kind of deliberate – deception – is taking place? Please read on and judge for yourselves. I am going to start by giving an example of the kind of thing I am talking about, then I shall discuss motivations in a little more detail, then I will present some further examples. All the examples below are genuine and are taken from the IslamOnline website: a site overseen by a committee of major Islamic scholars, headed by Al-Qaradawi himself. Throughout the article, I will contrast the IslamOnline opinions with those of another authoritative source: a Tafsir, or Quran commentary, written by the 14th century Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir. This commentary is required reading for any non-Muslim wishing to know the reality of Islam; I will describe it in more detail at the end of the article.

A classic example

In answer to the question: “What does Islam say about terrorism? “, IslamOnline gives, as part of its reply [2]:

“Islam considers all life forms as sacred. However, the sanctity of human life is accorded a special place. The first and the foremost basic right of a human being is the right to live. Allah says in the Quran (Q5:32): ‘If any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.’

Such is the value of a single human life, that the Quran equates the taking of even one human life unjustly, with killing all of humanity”

which seems to represent as clear a condemnation of unlawful killing as one could wish for. However, look at the very next verse, (Q5:33), the one that is always kept under wraps:

“The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified, or their hands and their feet be cut off on opposite sides”.

Ibn Kathir’s commentary on these verses finally removes the sheep’s clothing from the wolf:

“`Wage war’ mentioned here means, oppose and contradict, and it includes disbelief, blocking roads and spreading fear in the fairways. Mischief in the land refers to various types of evil.”

So, a verse which, suitably filleted, sounded as if it might have been written by Gandhi is just the introduction to a passage which specifies the brutal torture and execution of anyone who opposes (or contradicts, or disbelieves in) “Allah and His Messenger”. Such misrepresentation of the intrinsic hostility of Islam to non-Muslims is commonplace. How apparently friendly, venerable, scholarly Muslims can do this with a clear conscience is discussed below.

Self-deception in Islam

Muslims believe that Islam is not simply a religion practised on behalf of the Biblical God, but one specified in detail by him. As a result, Islam is regarded by Muslims as ‘perfect’ (Q5:3) and the Quran a ‘mercy to mankind’ (Q6:154). Moreover, all the characteristics of society that people regard as desirable, such as justice, peace and freedom are consequently considered to arise automatically from the flawless ideology that is Islam.

A committed Muslim, when asked if Islam is a religion of peace, will therefore reply that it is, because he believes this to be true: any tendency towards violence is the fault of the other’s hostility. In a similar way, ‘justice’ is considered to be automatically achieved by the adoption of Sharia law and ‘freedom’ follows from the removal of the individual from the obligations to other humans, allowing him or her the unhindered freedom to obey God. A trusting non-Muslim may then be reassured, as many have been, by statements made in good faith which are nevertheless blatantly and, at times, absurdly untrue.

The deception of others

Non-Muslims should take time to consider the profound implications of the following central principle of Islamic jurisprudence: [3]:

“ ‘good’ is what the Lawgiver [i.e. God or Muhammad] has indicated is good by permitting it or asking it to be done. ‘Bad’ is what the Lawgiver has indicated is bad by asking it not to be done. Good is not what reason considers good, nor bad, what reason considers bad”.

This implies, without ambiguity, that a Muslim who follows the rules of Islam will be doing ‘good’, even if these rules seem to fly in the face of what is taken as ethical behaviour in all other human societies. Having quoted this principle, we can now introduce the Islamic concept of ‘dissimulation’ or ‘giving a misleading impression’. Again, from ([3], Section r10.0):

“Scholars say that there is no harm in giving a misleading impression if required by an interest countenanced by Sacred Law that is more important than not misleading the person being addressed, or if there is a pressing need which could not otherwise be fulfilled except through lying”.

The act of ‘giving a misleading impression’ means to

“..utter an expression that ostensibly implies one meaning, while intending a different meaning”

with the added clarification that

“It is a kind of deception”

Thank you. It is always easier when the accused pleads ‘guilty’. Ref. [3] helpfully even gives an example (Section r10.2):

“…as when a person asks a householder ‘Is so-and-so here?’, to which the householder, intending the space between himself and the questioner rather than the space inside the house, replies ‘He is not here’”

Islamic dissimulation is, in a satisfyingly self-referential way, also subject to dissimulation. The process, often referred to by the Arabic word ‘taqiyya’, is represented as a Shia-only practice and only permissible in circumstances where one’s life is in danger. Therefore, so the argument goes, it is not practised under other circumstances, nor at all by mainstream (Sunni) Muslims. However, the facts indicate otherwise: Ref [3] is a book of Sunni law (from the Shafii school, to be exact) and indicates a much wider range of permissible use: in support of “an interest countenanced by sacred law”. It is proposed here that the circumstances under consideration in this article: promotion of Islam in the land of the unbelievers, is exactly that.

The conclusion is inevitable: a committed Muslim, faced with the prospect of revealing an aspect of Islam which he knows is unacceptable to a non-Muslim, will conceal this aspect by highly selective quotation from the Quran (see above) or by the use of ambiguity (see below). If the occasion demands it, he will deceive you in order to achieve his goal, because Islamic law says that he should and Islamic ethics tells him that it is good to do so.

Those Westerners whose ideological feelings prevent them endorsing such criticism of non-Westerners should nevertheless accept that committed Muslims, by their own proud declaration (see above), play according to a completely different set of ethical rules. As an aside: those who remain unable to acknowledge this without the palliative of some corresponding accusation against their own kind may be comforted to know that an almost identical attitude to dissimulation is held by the Jehovah’s Witness movement and is known as the ‘Theocratic War Strategy’.

But can we still be friends?

Now for some more examples. A reader of IslamOnline asks the question: “Does Islam Forbid Befriending Non-Muslims?”, presumably basing his concerns on (Q5:51):

“O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them. God guides not the people of the evildoers.“

Remarkably, even in the face of this bleak and seemingly unambiguous statement from the Quran, a resourceful Mufti, Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, President of the Fiqh [i.e. Islamic jurisprudence] Council of North America, states, still finds the basis of an alternative interpretation [4].

“The Quran does not say that non-Muslims cannot be Muslims’ friends, nor does it forbid Muslims to be friendly to non-Muslims. There are many non-Muslims who are good friends of Muslim individuals and the Muslim community. There are also many good Muslims who truly and sincerely observe their faith and are very friendly to many non-Muslims at the same time.”

And he further offers the following:

In the verse you quoted, the word “Awliya” is used. It is a plural and its singular is “wali”. The correct translation of the word “”wali”” is not “friend” but it is someone who is very close and intimate. It is also used to mean “guardian, protector, patron, lord and master”.

Now, spot the dissimulation. Despite appearances, Siddiqi’s response actually endorses what the Quran appears to say. Of course it does; Siddiqi is a Muslim scholar. Read the response again and notice the precise use of language: twice, he states that non-Muslims can be friends with Muslims; twice he states that Muslims can be ‘friendly to’ non-Muslims. Now (forgive the implied snobbery): I am ‘friendly to’ the checkout staff at my local Tesco, but I am not ‘friends with’ them. The latter suggests a real relationship, the former, a superficial show of courtesy. I would be the first to admit that the above interpretation was a figment of my imagination were it not for the existence of other examples of dissimulation and for the fact that the response is clearly carefully constructed in order to make the distinction. If you remain unconvinced, consider: if your child asked if he could make friends with the boy next door and you were genuinely happy for him to do so, would you really reply in the type of guarded and convoluted manner chosen by Siddiqi?

Siddiqi also falls back on the classic ‘you don’t understand Arabic’ gambit, implying some subtlety in the original which has exceeded the expertise of the translator to represent it in English (Is it really the case that, in Islamic texts, nothing is ever as it appears?). However, if the Arabic word for ‘intimate friend’ is used in the Quran (Sarwar [5] uses this exact term) then, surely, it is reasonable to suppose that that was what was intended. Otherwise, the author must be considered to be guilty of not expressing himself properly: a conclusion unacceptable to a Muslim. Certainly Ibn Kathir thought this was the intention, because he states, in the commentary to (Q5:51):

“Allah described the deep enmity that the disbelieving polytheists and People of the Scripture, whom Allah warned against imitating, have against the believers, so that Muslims should sever all friendship with them”

and, just to emphasise the point he says, in his commentary to (Q3:28):

“Allah prohibited His believing servants from becoming supporters of the disbelievers, or to take them as comrades with whom they develop friendships, rather than the believers.”

and, to (Q5:53)

“Allah forbids His believing servants from having Jews and Christians as friends, because they are the enemies of Islam and its people…”

adding, in case the sentiments were unclear:

“…may Allah curse them”

In a society in which Muslims live as a minority and mix with the non-Muslim host community, it is clearly unrealistic to advise them not to form friendships. However, one should not blind oneself to the fact that this is precisely what the Quran commands. In fact, it goes somewhat further in (Q4:100), according to Ibn Kathir, who discusses “The Prohibition of Residing Among the Disbelievers While Able to Emigrate”.

Christians

Atheists, along with Hindus and assorted Pagan religions, know that they can expect little joy from Islam. As for Jews, well, there does seem to be a certain amount of tension. But what about Christians? Don’t they have a special place within Islam?

The next question selected from the Islam Online website is the following: “Could you please guide me to the domains of Muslim-Christian cooperation and the efforts that should be done from both sides to enhance such cooperation?”. The answer is particularly interesting, since it is given by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi himself. He says that [6]

“There are many common fields that we can work together to widen and to enhance.”

and, under the heading “Focus on Common Factors”, he continues:

“This refers to the focus on common factors between us and people of other divine revelations. This is why Allah says (Q29:46): ‘And argue not with the People of the Scripture unless it be in (a way) that is better, except with such of them as do wrong; and say: We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto Him we surrender.’”

Well, that text from the Quran seems fairly reasonable, especially since the Arberry translation renders the rather odd phrase “in a way that is better” as “in the fairer manner”. However, just for completeness, we had better check the meaning of that innocuous-looking: “except with such of them as do wrong”. Reference to the Tafsir Ibn Kathir reveals that:

“…‘except with such of them as do wrong’ meaning, those who turn away from the truth, turning a blind eye to clear evidence, being stubborn and arrogant. In this case you should progress from debate to combat, fighting them in such a way as to deter them from committing aggression against you.”

And all that inter-faith chumminess disappears down the pan. Christians are treated with respect only as long as they are potential converts. If they refuse to convert (because they are stubborn and arrogant) they may be attacked, not because they have initiated the hostilities but “to deter them from committing aggression”.

Inspection of other verses referring to ‘People of the Book’ (Christians and Jews) indicates that (Q29:46) above is as good as it gets. Consider (Q2:105):

“Those unbelievers of the People of the Book and the idolaters wish not that any good should be sent down upon you from your Lord”

and (Q2:109) states:

“Many of the People of the Book wish they might restore you as unbelievers, after you have believed, in the jealousy of their souls, after the truth has become clear to them.”

Christians may not recognise themselves or their motives in the above, but the following commentary by Ibn Kathir confirms that the intended meaning is exactly as it appears:

“Allah warned His believing servants against following the ways of the People of Book, who publicly and secretly harbor enmity and hatred for the believers, and who envy the believers, while they recognize the virtue of the believers and their Prophet”

Yes, Islam maintains that Christians refuse to convert out of jealousy, even though they recognise that they are wrong and Islam is right. The abuse becomes more acute in (Q3:110):

“…Had the People of the Book believed, it were better for them; some of them are believers, but the most of them are ungodly.”

So now Christians are called ‘ungodly’ (Arberry translation) or, in other representations: ‘perverted transgressors’ (Yusufali), ‘evil-livers’ (Pickthal), ‘trangressors’ (Shakir), ‘perverse’ (Rodwell) ‘evil-doers’ (Sarwar) and, finally ‘disobedient to Allah – and rebellious against Allah’s Command’ (Al-Hilali and Khan). That’s got to hurt.

Qaradawi, having therefore quoted exclusively the single Quranic verse which can be interpreted as being friendly to Christians, then falls back upon rhetorical questions:

“..why would Allah allow us to marry Christians and Jews? Why were the early Muslims sad when the Persians defeated the Romans-the former were magus (worshippers of fire) while the latter were Christians?”

To answer: the ‘us’ refers to Muslim men only. Muslim women are not allowed to marry Christian or Jewish men. The reason for this is, of course, the dominance of the man in the Islamic marriage. A Christian wife is a potential convert to Islam. A Muslim wife of a Christian or a Jew is not only a potential loss to the Religion of Peace, but the future mother of non-Muslim children.

The reference to the comradeship with the ‘Romans’ (actually referring to the Christian Byzantines, whose capital was Constantinople) is an outrageous piece of dishonesty, analogous to citing the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 as evidence of the Nazism’s enduring kinship with the Russians, while failing to mention the carnage that came later. The Romans’ defeat by the Persians happened around the year 615 (they subsequently rallied and reversed their losses). By 631, Muhammad was mustering an army to attack them. In his commentary on (Q9:29), Ibn Kathir says

“Allah commanded His Messenger to fight the People of the Scriptures, Jews and Christians, on the ninth year of Hijrah [i.e. 631, about a year before Muhammad died], and he prepared his army to fight the Romans and called the people to Jihad announcing his intent and destination.”

Constantinople was not first on the Muslim to-do list, but was eventually besieged (unsuccessfully) by the Arabs in the 670s and later in 717/718 (it eventually fell to the Turks in 1453). So much for the early Muslims being ‘sad’ at the Romans’ misfortunes.

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is an extremely eminent Islamic scholar, who is reputed to have learned the Quran by heart by the age of 10 (one can only wonder what sort of childhood that must have been). What can we possibly make of his interpretations, given above, which seem to say the precise opposite of what, for centuries, the verses have been understood to mean, other than that they are deliberately deceitful? Moreover, Al-Qaradawi and his colleagues will happily continue with this kind of deception for as long as their assertions remain unchallenged.

Where to find the truth – the Tafsir Ibn Kathir

One of the purposes of this article has been to highlight the ways in which Islamic scholars routinely try to pull the wool over our eyes concerning the way Islam views us. The other purpose is to introduce the antidote to this dissimulation in the form of the Tafsir Ibn Kathir, one of the most widely used interpretations of the Quran, which is available on-line in English (see e.g. [7], [8]). It presents authentic, authoritative mainstream Islamic opinion on the background to, and the intended meaning of all the passages in the Quran, drawing on a range of scholarly views. Because it was written in the depths of the Islamic world in the 14th century, it makes no attempt to hide Islam’s inherent hostility to everything non-Islamic. Readers need not be concerned that its age somehow makes it out of date: Islam remains unchanged and unchanging.

I should point out that the Tafsir Ibn Kathir is monumentally long, discussing each verse of the Quran (which itself is long enough) in minute detail. However, once you get used to its structure, which follows that of the Quran itself, it is not too difficult to find the interpretation of any given passage, though it helps to have a separate Quran handy so you don’t get lost. Each sura (chapter) of the Quran is discussed separately, in the usual order. Verses are also treated in order but are embedded in the text, in parentheses, so you have to search for them by scrolling or paging through (and ignoring the Arabic parts). A discussion follows each group of verses.

For example, the following extract comprises Verses 30 and 31 from Sura 9:

(30. And the Jews say: “Uzayr (Ezra) is the son of Allah,” and the Christians say: “The Messiah is the son of Allah.” That is their saying with their mouths, resembling the saying of those who disbelieved aforetime. May Allah fight them, how they are deluded away from the truth!) (31. They (Jews and Christians) took their rabbis and their monks to be their lords besides Allah, and (they also took as their Lord) the Messiah, son of Maryam, while they were commanded to worship none but One God, none has the right to be worshipped but He. Praise and hallowed be He above what they associate (with Him).”)

Each group of verses is then followed by Ibn Kathir’s interpretation, normally introduced by a subheading, the one associated with the above verses being:

“Fighting the Jews and Christians is legislated because They are Idolators and Disbelievers”

and then the meaning of the previous verses are discussed, sometimes phrase by phrase. The discussion of the above verses begins:

“Allah the Exalted encourages the believers to fight the polytheists, disbelieving Jews and Christians, who uttered this terrible statement and utter lies against Allah, the Exalted. As for the Jews, they claimed that Uzayr was the son of God, Allah is free of what they attribute to Him. As for the misguidance of Christians over Isa [i.e. Jesus], it is obvious. This is why Allah declared both groups to be liars”

And thus is Islam’s true attitude to unbelievers revealed. Even if Ibn Kathir’s opinions are regarded within Islam as, perhaps, a little hawkish (we don’t know this – he might be considered a hand-wringing liberal), the fact that he formed these opinions in the first place and also that these views are respected within the mainstream must surely be clues to the intolerant and aggressive nature of this ideology. In spite of the soothing words of the Islamic scholars and the denial exhibited by so many in politics and the media, Ibn Kathir’s book confirms that Islam harbours a venomous hostility towards non-Muslims: an eternal hostility based not on modern grievance politics, but on ancient theology.

The enmity of Islam for the non-Muslim world therefore did not begin with the Iraq War, nor with Al-Qaeda, nor with the founding of Israel, nor with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. It did not begin in the 14th century with Ibn Kathir. It began with Islam’s founder, Muhammad, in 7th century Arabia and it has remained malignantly consistent ever since.

If you continue to believe that Islam is truly a benign, peaceful religion, or feel that I am exaggerating or quoting too selectively, please take a look at the Tafsir Ibn Kathir. If you have been told that such-and-such a verse in the Quran preaches brotherhood and love, look it up in the Tafsir and see what it really means. If you know any non-Muslim apologists for Islam, show them what the religion they are defending is saying about them behind their backs. The truth about Islam, expressed in Islam’s own words, is out there for everyone to see. The sooner it becomes common knowledge, the better.

References

[1] Qaradawi Dossier.

[2] Ask a Scholar.

[3] Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, (rev. ed., trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Beltsville, Maryland: Amana, 1994).

[4] Ask a Scholar.

[5] Quran and Hadith.

[6] Ask a Scholar.

[7] Tafsir Ibn Kathir. The Holy Book website.

[8] Tafsir Ibn Kathir.

On 12 February 2008 the BBC World Service “Outlook”
news magazine programme devoted some fifteen minutes to a report on the reactions in Britain to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech the previous week in which he had advocated incorporating certain aspects of less contentious Sharia law (relating to civil matters such as marriage and divorce) into the British legal system. Notoriously, quite what he was advocating was by no means clear – Dr Rowan Williams himself later acknowledged elements of “unclarity” in his speech, and of “clumsily deployed” words.

Now there is no doubt that much of the response to the Archbishop’s speech was based on a knee-jerk reaction to the more unpleasant aspects of Sharia law advocated by extreme Muslim groups (and practised in countries governed under Islamic law), which Dr Williams was of course careful to make clear he found abhorrent. However, among the clamour could be found cooler voices that pointed out that there were serious objections to the Archbishop’s suggestions even in their least contentious interpretation. These were rooted in the realities of most Muslim organisations, specifically that they are almost entirely male dominated, and the fact that Sharia, as a generality, tends to favour men’s preferences over women’s. This negative side to the proposals floated by the Archbishop was highlighted by several people, including Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and
Johann Hari in The Independent. These concerns were summed up by the Government advisor on Muslim women, Shaista Gohir, who stated:

Although Islam gives women numerous Islamic rights, many Muslim women would fear discrimination due to patriarchal and cultural reasons. Muslims, particularly women, may be pressurised by families and communities into using Sharia courts.

Now you might have thought that a BBC programme purportedly reporting to the world the reactions to the Archbishop’s speech would have noted the reasoned concern about his proposals, as well as highlighting the less rational reactions that proliferated in the press. If so, you would have been wrong.

There were essentially three sections in the programme. The BBC religious affairs correspondent, Frances Harrison, was first asked by the presenter to report the reactions to the Archbishop’s proposals (and was later asked to add concluding words). This was followed by a Muslim woman, Aisha Begum, who the presenter told us was “grateful for the existence of British Sharia councils”, and recounted her satisfactory experience of obtaining an Islamic divorce, after which Dr Suhaib Hasan, secretary of the UK’s Islamic Sharia Council, answered questions from the presenter on the workings of such councils in Britain.

The introductory report by Frances Harrison is reproduced here, so readers can see for themselves its one-sidedness:

Presenter: So why the huge reaction? Here’s our religious affairs correspondent, Frances Harrison:

Harrison:

I think it has played into all the current fears about Islam. When people talk about Sharia law here they think of women being stoned to death, people being beheaded, and hands chopped off, although Dr Rowan Williams was very careful in his speech to say that these sort of inhumane extreme punishments were obviously not something he was propagating in any sense at all. His speech is very cautious, very careful to define exactly what he means, and he says that just because there’s this fear of Sharia law you shouldn’t assume that Islamic law, or parts of it, are not compatible with democracy or democratic values and human rights. But it has played into this sort of media frenzy, which I think really comes after the July bombings, the 7/7 bombings, and the 9/11 bombings, this fear of the ‘Other’, this fear of Muslims, it’s played into that, and people have seized on the some of the more out of context remarks and made a lot of them and not really looked at his remarks in context.

Note that, in addition to her complete failure to so much as hint at the more considered responses to the Archbishop’s speech, so anxious was Harrison to present as negative a view of the reactions as possible that she even stated that he was “very careful to define exactly what he means”, which, while true in relation to the aspects of Sharia to which he was referring, was certainly not the case as far as his proposals were concerned, as commentators of all views (including the Archbishop himself!) almost unanimously observed.

The account of the workings of the Sharia courts in Britain provided by Dr Suhaib Hasan, not unexpectedly, gave an impression of non-contentious application of Sharia in relation to marriage and divorce. Not once did the presenter raise with him the concerns expressed by Muslims less enamoured of the system such as those cited above, and by other less prominent individuals. Nor would listeners have the least idea of the kind of views held by Dr Hasan, of which here are some less palatable ones:

Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society. This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low.

And:

If sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country into a haven of peace because once a thief’s hand is cut off nobody is going to steal. Once, just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at all. We want to offer it to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don’t accept it they’ll need more and more prisons.

The significance of the above words is not that they indicate that Dr Hasan currently advocates that such measures should be incorporated into British law (he doesn’t), but that the entirely positive account of British Sharia councils from someone who holds such primitive views should have been meekly accepted by the presenter of “Outlook” without the slightest attempt to suggest there might be any negative aspects to their workings.

A similar criticism may be made in relation to the contribution of Aisha Begum. No doubt many women who wish to adhere to Islamic codes do obtain what they regard as an entirely satisfactory resolution of their problems by Sharia courts. But not once on the programme was there the least indication that this is by no means always the case, that in the words of the Government’s advisor on Muslim women already cited, there may be “discrimination due to patriarchal and cultural reasons”, and that “particularly women may be pressurised by families and communities into using Sharia courts”.

Finally we come to Frances Harrison’s summing up:

I think it makes it very difficult in a way to have a reasoned rational discussion about Sharia law. I think, you know, one of the things that the Archbishop quoted was renowned scholar Tariq Ramadan, who said that the idea of Sharia calls up the darkest images of Islam, and it’s reached an extent where even many Muslim intellectuals don’t dare to refer to it for the fear of frightening people. So, you know, this may actually close off rational debate about this issue, it may lead to greater alienation of Muslims, who say, when we raise these issues you won’t listen to us, but there’s the head of the Church of England, and look what reaction he gets, what’s going to happen to us if we start discussing these sorts of problems. And I think there’s a real fear among Muslims in Britain that this will lead to more Islamophobia not less, and of course that was not the intention of the Archbishop, he basically wrote a speech which showed great respect for all religions, amongst them Islam, and for people who want to live a religious life within a secular legal code.

Presenter: So a positive message may have in the long run negative implications for the various Muslim communities in this country.

Harrison:

I think already the Muslim communities in Britain, the Muslims I’ve talked to, feel a great sense of alienation, socially, yes, there are pockets of extreme deprivation for Muslims, they do academically worse in many areas, in terms of employment, in terms of housing, so there are real problems there that need to be addressed, a staggering number of the prison population is Muslim in this country already. So those are problems, but I think just in terms of their perception, this idea that if you’re a Muslim, if you wear a headscarf, you’re a terrorist, this is what people talk about, that they don’t feel they have that kind of freedom here that they used to have and that things have become much more difficult for them, and they point to the media, and I think, you know, this is a case in point, that they will say, the media is anti-Muslim, it stirs up frenzy, it takes things out of context, it suggests that all Muslims are extreme and I think they would look at this controversy that we are experiencing now as part of that anti-Muslim media bias that certainly British Muslims talk about a great deal.

The best way one can sum up the contributions of Frances Harrison is that she played the role of an advocate on behalf of disgruntled Muslims. Certainly a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain could hardly
have done a better job from their point of view – except that even they
would probably not gone as far as the more extreme assertions here. Note that in the course of her tendentiously simplistic account of the tribulations that beset Muslims in the UK she treats alleged perceptions as if they constituted facts – and even conveys to her worldwide listeners the absurd impression that if a Muslim in Britain wears a headscarf she is regarded as a terrorist. If we take her account of Muslim “perceptions” as reasonably accurate in relation to some sections of the population (she gives no idea which “Muslims” she has “talked to”, giving the impression that these are the views of virtually all Muslims), presumably we should also take seriously the evident perception of nearly half of British Muslims that Jews “are in league with the Freemasons to control the media and politics”. But given that we don’t, why should the perceptions cited by Harrison be taken, as she would have her listeners believe, as accurately representing the reality of Muslim experience in Britain?

On hearing this resolutely one-sidedly negative view of Britain conveyed by the BBC to a world audience, I felt impelled to write a letter of complaint to the Editor of “Outlook”, Gavin Poncia, outlining my concerns indicated above. In his response Mr Poncia first briefly outlined what was in the programme. He then told me that it was not the intention to debate the rights and wrongs of Sharia as practised around the world, and followed this by assuring me that “we at Outlook” take impartiality very seriously, and that, on the question of balance, they have in the past included many less positive experiences of Sharia law. (The latter obviously outside the UK.)

Now of course none of this actually addressed my specific complaints, so I responded by reiterating that the programme gave a completely one-sided account of the responses to the Archbishop’s speech, failed to provide alternative views such as I had cited of the workings of Sharia currently in Britain, and that the complacent account of Sharia councils by someone with a background like that of Dr Suhaib Hasan was allowed to stand without the slightest questioning.

In his second response Mr Poncia again irrelevantly stated that Outlook was not the arena for a detailed discussion of Sharia law, and that the choice of speakers indicated that it was the place for personal stories and testimonies. Although he cited my complaint that Frances Harrison’s account was one-sided, he failed to address it, writing instead about the fact that she had alluded to “inhuman extreme punishments” of Sharia. This, of course, was again a straw man, since my complaint was about the one-sided treatment of the responses to the Archbishop’s speech, and (in relation to the rest of the programme), of the workings of Sharia currently in Britain. He continued in the same vein, noting that Outlook had in the past provided negative reports on the unjust treatment of women in parts of the world under fundamentalist Islamic law. He then commented on the choice of Muslim speakers, once again completely evading my point about the exclusively one-sided viewpoints provided and the failure of the presenter to ask probing questions. The only concession Mr Poncia made was that they failed to challenge Dr Hasan on the more extreme punishments of Sharia, something yet again irrelevant to my complaint. (My citing Dr Hasan’s views on this was solely in the context of the presenter’s unquestioning acceptance of Dr Hasan’s report of the workings of Sharia in Britain.)

In short, Mr Poncia’s second response displayed the same failure to address my actual complaints as his first, a point I made in my next message to him. This elicited a short response the gist of which was that he had tried to reply to my criticisms as directly as he could, that he and his team would bear them in mind, and that he was sorry that I found his explanations unsatisfactory.

I can only explain the dismal failure of this edition of “Outlook” to live up to the “impartiality” that Mr Poncia claims he takes seriously (though in fact the issue here is more precisely that of accuracy in the reporting of events) by assuming that he has a mindset that makes him oblivious to his presuppositions, and the extent to which they influence his editorship of programmes on certain issues such as the one in question. Equally worrying is his evident obliviousness to the fact that the unrelentingly negative portrayal of Muslim experience in Britain by the religious affairs correspondent can only have a detrimental effect on outside perceptions of the UK in a geo-political climate that can be literally incendiary.

Allen Esterson’s website is here.

Posted April 4 2008

Many believed that General Musharraf would act swiftly against the militants in Swat valley after he imposed a State of Emergency in Pakistan on Nov 3 2007. After all, extremism and militancy were what the general presented as an excuse to pull the plug on constitutional democracy and to suspend the fundamental rights in the country. There are several reports in today’s dailies that the militants have captured more installations over the last few days. According to the reports from the local residents, the whole valley, from Kanju to Kalam, has come under the control of Taliban over the last few days. Inamullah, a teacher, social worker and lexicographer, reports, “Taliban entered our village ‘Bahrain’ the other day with heavy weapons mounted on a cavalcade of vehicles snatched from government officials. They delivered a speech on megaphone near a police station and ordered the police to surrender and submit their weapons to them. The police had left the building just an hour ago and a group of local people was entrusted to guard the building. A few hours earlier the village elders had decided not to confront the Taliban but to persuade them to stay away from the area assuring them there would be no security personnel stationed in and around the village. The local people had decided to be impartial in the fighting between Taliban and the security forces. It was a historic day and I saw some very interesting scenes. Taliban moved forward through the valley and halted in Kalam town where local elders negotiated with them the same way. Now they have moved back to their stronghold and we hope our area (the upper hilly area of district Swat) will be safe from any impending military operation against Taliban, though it is true, we are nowadays living under Taliban”. There are also reports that several security personnel thought it safe to flee from the valley.

In the meanwhile, Federal Minister for Political Affairs, Amir Muqam, has expressed disappointment over the deteriorating situation in Swat valley, “to be frank, unfortunately, there has been no improvement or sign of improvement in the situation on ground even after the promulgation of emergency”. The people of the whole valley feel themselves hostage to the firebrand Maulana Fazlullah and his 500 hundreds die-hard militant followers based in the villages of Mamderhai, Koza Bandia, Ningolai and Bara Bandai. According to the residents, there may be some 3000 sympathizers of the Maulana who might support him but might not accompany him in resisting the security forces. The residents of the upper Swat have started migrating either to the lower part of the valley or to other parts of the country. Educational institutions, business markets and government offices are closed down. The people living in the affected areas are terrorized after some eight beheaded bodies of the security personnel were shown to the people by the militants to win the support of the people a few weeks ago.

Maualana Fazlurrahman, leader of a religio-political party, Jamiat-e-Ulemai Islam, said last Friday that the present situation in Swat was created as a result of the reaction of the masses against the policies of the present regime. In his view, the regime’s support of the US war on terror might be the main reason behind the insurgency. In the same vein, the interim government of the North West Frontier Province announced that it would reinforce the Sahria’a code earlier promulgated to appease the defunct Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in the mid-nineties. As both of these assumptions are based on erroneous statistics, both seem to clearly miss the real target. In fact, a vast majority of the population in the valley has already lost trust in the religious leadership due to their inability to respond to the real problems of the people living in the valley. The religious leadership has ruled the province since the elections in 2002. Presently, Maulana Fazlurrahman has become a blue-eyed of the military regime after the imposition of emergency in the country. Sirajul Haqu, amir Jamaat-e-Islami N.W.F.P, called a Jirga in Chakdara on Oct 30, 2007 to gather support for Maulana Fazlullah who had been allowed by the MMA government to continue his activities. The Jirga called upon the government to end military operation in the valley. The local Taliban of Bajore and Momand Agncy also announced their support of Maulana Fazlullah on the same day.

One may see a clear pattern of external and internal factors instrumental in bringing the valley to the present critical stage. One has to be conscious, though, of the distinctive features of the valley. Situation in the valley begs an analysis separate from the situation in Federally Administered Tribal Areas located to the south of N.W.F.P.

The prominent among the external factors are the weakening of political institutions and the wave of militarization in the era of Ziaul Haque in the eighties. Afghan war and Zia’s dictatorship in a symbiotic relationship came dialectically opposed to the political institutionalization in the whole country, and especially in Swat valley, which remained under a benevolent autocracy for almost a century.

During the eighties and the early nineties, foreign funding in the shape of petro-dollars helped permeate Wahabi interpretation of Islam in a previously balanced socio-cultural fabric of the valley. Traditional elites, divided in two prominent social groups, had to give space to the religious and marginalized groups because of the politics of Dala-Para (social grouping). The existence of two groups would guarantee a balance in the exercise of political power. The lack of political process in the country did not allow the indigenous socio-cultural and socio-political institutions evolve after the merger of the valley with Pakistan in 1969. Merger of the valley with Pakistan created another vacuum. The previously responsive judicial structure was replaced with a judicial code termed Provincially Tribal Administered Areas (PATA). The people of the valley had neither familiarity nor patience with the lengthy procedures of litigation, and consequently the people were frustrated with the whole judicial process. The vacuum enlarged even more after the Supreme Court of Pakistan disbanded PATA in the early nineties.

Maulana Sufi Mohammad of the defunct TNSM apparently capitalized on this frustration of the people to launch his movement for the promulgation of his code of Sharia’a in the early nineties. The demands of Maulana Fazlullah seem to address the same old frustration of the people of the valley. The Maulana is probably not interested to address the issues related to the economic sustenance of the people.

Some observers also believe that the role of the national and international agencies may not be ruled out in the present situation of the valley. The observers are of the opinion that the US might be interested to contain the march of Chinese to Gawadar Port and the Karakuram Highway to have an access route to Central Asian oil reserves, which might become instrumental in future in keeping the US trade interests at bay in the region. The powerful Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan, the observers believe, might be interested to block the deployment of NATO forces in the region. The local residents in Matta, Durushkhela and Ningolai told this scribe that they had seen the militants of Jaish-e-Mohammad and those who might have come from Waziristan helping the local Taliban in bringing the upper Swat under their control.

The key to understanding the internal factors lies in understanding the composition of Maulana Fazlullah’s supporters. The majority of the supporters belong to the lower rung of the social structure—the vocational groups who do not have a share in the land distribution of the area. The Maulana communicates with them in their language through his FM radio, gives them recognition, and owns them as his colleagues. The supporters of the Maulana in the marginalized groups take a sense of empowerment in their state of powerlessness. Both the state and the traditional elites along with the political elites of the valley, unfortunately, have all along failed to respond to the aspirations of those remained marginalized in an already marginalized society of Swat valley. It is where the Jihadist interpretation found its room. This is not to say that the interpretation of Maulana Fazlullah aims at getting empowerment for the marginalized groups of valley Swat. None of his demands asks for the development of infrastructure, employment, conservation of natural resources, development of socio-cultural institutions such as education, lifestyle, healthcare and transportation. Even if the government acquiesces into the demands of the Maulana, the common people and the marginalized groups of the valley will remain powerless and poor. The demands of the Maulana include wearing of head to toe veil for women, banning NGOs, closing down CD shops, and implementation of what he terms Islamic punishments for the wrong doers.

This article was first published at Khadim Hussain’s blog and is republished here by permission.

Date: Saturday 12 April, 2008
Time: 5.00-9:00pm
Address:
University of London Union (ULU)
Room 3D,
Malet Street London WC1E 7HY
Closest underground: Russell Square

A year after the world was stunned by images of a 17 year old girl being stoned to death in Iraqi Kurdistan; an international panel will debate the rise of honour killings, violence against women, gender apartheid and political Islam in Kurdistan/Iraq and the Middle East.
The high profile speakers are women’s rights activists, academics and experts from Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Sweden, New Zealand, and Britain and include:

-Dr Sandra Phelps: Head of Sociology Department, Kurdistan University
-Houzan Mahmoud: representative of Organisation Women’s Freedom in Iraq
-Heather Harvey: head of women’s campaign-Amnesty International in UK
-Maryam Namazie: Spokesperson of Equal Rights Now; Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran
-Maria Hagberg: Cofounder of Network against Honour Killings in Sweden
-Azar Majedi: Chair of Organisation for Women’s Liberation in Iran
Chair: Maria Exall, Communication Workers’ Union National Executive in UK

For more information and to confirm your attendance please contact the organiser: Houzan Mahmoud:
houzan2007@yahoo.com
Tel: 07534264481
Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq- Abroad representative

Equality in Iraq

This is part of an interview of Colin Blakemore by Jeremy Stangroom which took place in 2004. The whole interview appears in What Scientists Think, Routledge 2005.

The issue of animal experimentation is not the only area of dispute in the field of medical science. There is also, for example, considerable public debate about the use of stem cells – roughly speaking, cells which have the capacity to differentiate into cells of any type – in medical research. What, I ask Blakemore, is the importance of stem cell research?

‘It’s very easy to slip into hype when answering this question, but even so, I would say that the discovery of stem cells, and of their potential to transform into any tissue type in the body, really offers the possibility of one of the most significant advances in the history of medical treatments,’ he replies. ‘Most importantly, the kinds of diseases which potentially can be treated with stem cell therapy is a whole range of presently incurable diseases which are growing in rate in the population because of ageing. These are the degenerative diseases. The possibility of replacing tissue which no longer functions properly is extremely exciting. The kinds of conditions which might well be treatable, and for which there are already animal models of treatment, include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, bone disease, stroke and cancer.’

In May 2004, the world’s first stem cell bank, partly funded by the MRC, was opened in the UK. On its opening, it contained two stem cell lines, developed by teams from Newcastle and London. What’s the idea behind banking different stem cell lines like this?

‘There are actually a number of reasons for banking stem cell lines,’ Blakemore answers. ‘The main one is to provide uniform standards for typing the cells; for understanding their composition and makeup. It is estimated that perhaps as few as one or two hundred different stem cell lines, each with different immunological characteristics, will be enough to provide tissue type matching for virtually every person who needs a transplant. So it’s a bit like matching blood groups, or indeed tissue typing for organ transplants; it is necessary to get the match right, which is the main reason for collecting more than one line.

‘The other reason is that different stem cell lines might have a better capacity to transform into particular kinds of adult tissue. We don’t know enough yet about the basic biology of stem cells to know this for certain, but it is possible that although all stem cells from embryos are derived at a similar stage of development, between 0 and 14 days of age, some of the lines will be better at transforming into say heart or brain than others. So this is a second reason for having more than one line.’

The moral objections to stem cell research tend to be voiced primarily by people who object to the use of embryos in the collection of stem cells. For example, Patrick Cusworth, spokesperson for the anti-abortion charity Life, claimed that the use of embryos in stem cell research ‘reduces human life to little more than a pharmaceutical product’. What does Blakemore make of this kind of argument?

‘Well, I said earlier that we should have a special attitude towards other humans, so crucial to this argument is how we define a person,’ he replies. ‘A pro-Life group will say that a fertilised egg is a human being. I don’t accept this; if any cell which has a full complement of DNA and is capable of transforming into a human being is a person, then every cell in a human body is a person. We now know from Dolly the sheep that if we take the nucleus from an adult somatic cell – a cell from our skin, for example – and put it into a vacant egg, then it can become a human being. Should we therefore be worried about every cell which sloughs off from the surface of our skin? Should we treat each one of those cells as if it were a person? Obviously not. We have to recognise that an embryo, certainly before the nervous system begins to form, is just a bundle of cells.’

People who are opposed to research which uses stem cells taken from embryos also claim that there is no scientific case for the practice; that adult stem cells will do just as well. Is there any truth to this claim?

‘This sounds very like the argument which the animal rights lobby makes about the alternatives to animal experimentation,’ Blakemore replies. ‘My response is to say show me the heart surgery which is going on using adult stem cells. It doesn’t exist. It might be that harvesting adult stem cells will be the right thing to do at some point in the future. One of the great advantages of adult stem cells is that you can do autotransplantation; you can take cells from a patient, let’s say bone marrow stem cells, or neural stem cells from the nose, grow them up so that there are enough of them, and then use them to treat whatever problem the person you took them from is suffering. In this situation, there is no difficulty with tissue typing, it will match perfectly. But we don’t have the expertise at the moment to do this; we would need to know a lot more about stem cells, and this knowledge is going to come from the study of embryonic stem cells. But the hope is that one day we will be able to use adult stem cells.’

What about if a person has an illness which is caused by a genetic mutation? Presumably it won’t be easy to treat something like Huntington’s, for example, with a patient’s own stem cells?

‘It’s true that if a person carries a genetic mutation then it is present in their stem cells; but actually this doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t use their own stems cells in a treatment,’ Blakemore says. ‘Huntington’s disease is a dominant genetic disorder. The symptoms, though, don’t appear until the person is thirty-five or forty years old. So although the gene is carried from birth, it doesn’t express itself until later; the problems accumulate gradually. It is conceivable, therefore, that if you were to derive neural stem cells from someone with Huntington’s disease, and you then transformed them into new nerve cells, that they too would last for many years before the condition showed itself. So there is this possibility.

‘One of the things which should be emphasised about stem cell research is that it is going to provide much greater insight into the nature of disease. It isn’t just a matter of developing new treatments, it is a way to understanding disease. For example, stem cells are helping us to understand the cancer process, because, like cancer cells, stem cells are immortal. Also, our understanding of the normal development of human embryos will be helped by understanding stem cells; we’ll learn about the rules which cause uncommitted cells to transform into committed cells. Finally, we can learn about the nature of certain diseases by studying the stem cells of people who carry genetic defects.’

Does Blakemore have a view about how the various issues and debates surrounding medical research are likely to play out? Is he optimistic about the future?

‘I think it is necessary to learn the lessons of history,’ he replies. ‘I remember that after the first heart transplant there was intense criticism from the church, civil libertarians, medical ethicists and the animal rights lobby. People complained that the original research had been done on pigs; that the procedure was a dangerous experimental technique; and that it was possible that patients were being coerced into undergoing transplants. All the same kinds of arguments that we hear now were being played out then. But people today think that heart transplants are a medical miracle. The public completely accepts the procedure. Social and moral attitudes then are not absolute and fixed; they are influenced by the evidence of benefit. My view is that if we keep the public informed, if we move forward gradually, then, as and when the benefits accrue, the issues will become progressively less contentious. I am actually extremely optimistic about the future of medical research. The investment of the last fifty years in basic biological research is going to deliver in very big ways in terms of human health and the quality of people’s lives.’

His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature – pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers’ unions, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (If You Can Answer These Ten Questions ‘Yes’, You Have Been SAVED!) the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. [Stephen King, The Stand]

The man (although not really a man) in the extract above is Randall Flagg, an agent of chaos and destruction who brings down a plague on twentieth-century America.

If Flagg (or is it Walter O’Dim?) stalked our land today, the tracts in his jacket would be different. He would offer you a DVD explaining how 9/11 was arranged by the US government, a pamphlet revealing how reflexology can cure cancer, another that let you know that condoms cause AIDS (or one that said that AIDS doesn’t exist); a leaflet picking at the holes in the theory of evolution; a pamphlet from Gillian McKeith (‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!’) claiming that human beings are capable of photosynthesis; a newspaper report linking the MMR vaccine to autism; an article challenging the historicity of the Holocaust.

Damian Thompson demolishes all these snake-oil merchants and more in his fantastic book Counterknowledge – perhaps the nearest thing we have to Hemingway’s fabled bullshit detector.

Yet his work sounds a little like a Louis Theroux-style giggle at the fringes of society, and indeed Thompson does have his laugh-out-loud moments. Here’s his account of a tour of Ohio’s creationist museum:

[Daily Telegraph journalist] Russell was shown animatronic children and dinosaurs playing together in the Garden of Eden. His guide, Ken Ham, from the fast-growing Young Earth organisation Answers in Genesis, explained that dinosaurs survived Noah’s Flood and roamed the earth until quite recently. ‘There are dragon legends all over the world. Why? Because they have a basis in truth, a basis in real animals. So, even though the word dinosaur wasn’t coined until 1841, we would say that it’s very possible that what people today call dinosaurs were known as dragons.’ But how did they manage to fit such gigantic creatures onto Noah’s Ark? ‘They only took young dinosaurs on board.’

But the joke is on us sceptics, because fringe ideas are taken increasingly seriously. The British government spends millions of pounds on building homeopathic hospitals, despite the fact that homeopathy has no medical value; charalatans like Gillian McKeith are given their own TV series and treated as experts in their fields; London houses publish books explaining that China discovered America in 1421 and that Jesus’s descendants are alive and well in France; a former UK government minister, Michael Meacher (also a onetime candidate for the governing Labour Party leadership) subscribes to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

The enhanced status of counterknowledge makes it dangerous. This is especially true in the field of ‘alternative medicine’ (i.e: not medicine). If you take the advice of quack nutritionist Patrick Holford and give your child a homeopathic vaccination for meningitis instead of an actual vaccination, you are exposing that child to a deadly disease. Putting alternative medicine on a level with actual medicine takes us into a world we thought was gone: the medieval age, where millions died because the alternative was all there was.

And that is just in the developed world. 5.5 million South Africans are HIV positive, yet its government refuses to distribute the antiretroviral drugs its people need. The administration’s insane arguments are bolstered by Western AIDS denialists, who take a Gillian McKeith-style approach to the condition.

The world’s leaning denialist is Peter Deusberg, a molecular biologist who argues that to prevent AIDS, and even cure the disease, it is necessary only to eat properly and abstain from toxic drugs. The American government’s top AIDS adviser, Anthony Fauci, takes a different view, as the New Yorker reported in March 2007. After hearing Deusberg speak at an AIDS research conference, the normally mild-mannered Fauci erupted. ‘This is murder,’ he said. ‘It’s really that simple.’

Thompson adds that Deusberg was appointed to a South African presidential panel in the late nineties.

Why counterknowledge? Conservatives would say that its popularity is caused by the decline of traditional religion, and I think this is Thompson’s view, too:

Consider the following statistics. Between 1980 and 2005, British church attendance fell from 4.7 million to 3.3 million… The number of weddings in the UK dropped from 480,000 in 1972 to 284,000 in 2005. Each of these trends reflects the fragmentation of traditional authority structures – churches, political parties and the two-parent family – that previous generations rarely questioned… The subjective side of human experience takes over from the objective.

Humans have an innate need to believe, and in the absence of churches they will turn to cultic superstitions. The fevers started in the 1960s when social revolution destroyed the authority of the family and the church. As the old saying goes, if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe anything.

Personally, I agree with Francis Wheen: if you believe in God, you’ll believe anything. State-sanctioned faiths (and what is a religion but a very successful cult?) don’t keep the lid on popular delusions: they set a precedent, ripping open the lining at the edge of rational thought. Let’s face it, if you can believe that a virginal woman gave birth to the son of God, who is later killed only to be brought back to life – then acupuncture and healing crystals will be quite easy to get your head around. Why favour one form of counterknowledge over another?

In any case, the phenomenon is indulged by conservatives as much as leftists. (If you don’t believe me you should read a copy of the Daily Mail, a newspaper whose mission is – in Ben Goldacre’s words – to divide the world’s inanimate objects into those that either cause, or cure, cancer.) As Thompson says, the free market loves counterknowledge. The idea underlying quack healthcare, that you can beat disease by cultivating a spiritual purity (or ‘SAY NO TO CANCER!’ as Patrick Holford puts it) is more than compatible with Victorian conservatism and social Darwinism. If all ailments are preventable by looking after the inner harnonies and eating the right foods, then people who get sick have only themselves to blame. There’s no need for governments to spend money on universal heathcare because if anyone becomes ill then they must jolly well deserve it.

But across the political spectrum there is widespread disillusionment with rationalism and Enlightenment values, which are now associated with the Iraq project and seen as concepts of a purely Western elite determined to impose ‘our’ idea of democracy and human rights across the world. (The quotemarks are an essential part of the argument.) The Enlightenment is for hopeless idealists, conniving politicians, fuddy-duddy Oxford professors and militant atheists.

Above all the Enlightement is mainstream, and people despise the mainstream. The mainstream is McDonalds and Ian McEwan and George W Bush. The mainstream is hated above all else, which explains the strange convergences of thought between ostensibly opposed fringe groups like the SWP and Hamas, between American creationists and fundamentalist Muslims, and between leftwing 9/11 deniers and Neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. This happens even when their theories mutually contradict each other. As Thompson says:

An author who believes that Stonehenge was built by Aztecs will cheerfully recommend the work of someone who thinks it was built by the Priory of Sion, because they both recognise their real enemy as orthodox scholarship.

Anything that’s against the mainstream can’t be all bad: and having rejected the mainstream, intellectuals then throw themselves behind another. Gavin Menzies, who wrote a book claiming that China discovered America (it didn’t) now does speaking tours of Chinese universities and has senior-level friends in the regime.

Thompson quotes the writer and editor Michael Shermer on the roots of counterknowledge: ‘I think the problem lies deeper than this. To get to it we must dig through the layers of culture and society into the individual human mind and heart.’ And indeed, people trying to explain the appeal of irrationalism will inevitably turn to psychological analysis.

Imagine being a 9/11 Truther or a believer in homeopathy. You have unearthed a vast, hidden conspiracy that most of the world has completely missed. Either it is the conspiracy of PNAC engineering the Twin Towers demolitions as a pretext to declare war against the Middle East, or a secret plan by the medical/scientific/pharmaceutical establishment to cover up the healing powers of alternative medicine so they can carry on selling useless drug treatments.

You can dismiss the testimony of most doctors, scientists, physicists or engineers because their very experience and qualifications show that they are part of the elite and therefore have an interest in covering up the scam. Indeed, any contradictory evidence can be ignored – it will have been planted. Your own lack of evidence doesn’t bother you; obviously, the conspirators are going to cover their tracks. The absence of proof is proof. Ignorance is the smoking gun.

Most people reject your explanations because they are brainwashed by the corporate media. Only you, and a handful of fellow Truthers, are smart enough to see through the lies. What a boost! And presumably, when the conspiracy is found out, your greater intelligence and heroism will be recognised and you will be given the power and rewards such qualities accord you.

Finally, I think that the conspiracy minded are people in need of reassurance. They can’t handle the random, the chaos of life, the disasters that can come out of a clear blue sky. It is more comforting to believe that George Bush destroyed the Twin Towers than Osama bin Laden. It’s more comforting because we can vote Bush out, and put him in jail. At the heart of conspiracism is a message of subliminal succour: don’t worry, your government is in control. Go to sleep. Sssshhh…

Purveyors of counterknowledge are not revolutionaries. They are reactionaries, seeking comfort and status from dark dreams.

Counterknowledge, Damian Thompson, Atlantic 2008

Progress in the Church of Pope Benedict is a moonwalk. That is what I have decided, anyway. For the pop-cultural non-cognoscenti, the moonwalk is a dance popularized by Michael Jackson in one of 1983’s most vibrant contributions to American civilization: “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever.” I’m told the correct name for the dance is the “backslide”—an illusion creating the impression the dancer is moving forward when he’s actually moving backward. Imagine the Pope and the curia perfecting this in the papal chambers, cassocks raised mid-calf, to the sound of the Electronic Boogaloos. Now try not imagining it.

It didn’t get sillier than John Paul II’s October 1992 expression of regret for how Galileo had been treated by the Church, following a report issued by the Pontifical Council for Culture. Not that 1992 was the year the Church conceded the earth was not stationary and at the center of the universe. The Vatican ban on printing Galileo’s books was lifted in 1718, a tacit acceptance of the scientist’s findings. Rather, 1992 was the year in which the church found a way to acknowledge the premises of scientific investigation while retreating from their consequences. Whatever John Paul II’s contribution to the “concession” in favor of Galileo, the clarion voice was that of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who quoted, approvingly, philosopher Paul Feyerabend on the topic: “The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.” That was 1990. In 1992, John Paul II said he was sorry. Galileo was right, but the Church was not wrong. Moonwalk.

Hands up all those who knew there were orthodox Christians in substantial numbers stretching in a band from Constantinople to Damascus and beyond in the year 1096, the year when Pope Urban II called the first Crusade for the “liberation” of the Holy Land. It was as much about papal authority over the east as about the predations of Islam, which had learned, over three hundred years, how to live with Christian minorities (tax them) in exasperated détente. No accident that the “Great Schism” between the western (Latin) and orthodox churches had happened only 50 years earlier (1054) in a slanging match between the eastern Patriarch Michael I and the western primate, Pope Leo IX. Always tactful, Rome sent a legation of soldiers to Constantinople, and they in turn placed the papal edict excommunicating the Patriarch on the high altar of the Church of the Hagia Sophia during the celebration of the Eucharist. But that’s history.

In September, 2006, Benedict XVI gave an address to the faculty of the University of Regensburg entitled, “Faith, Reason and the University.” In it he quoted the historically insignificant ruler of the Byzantine empire, Manuel II (circa 1396): “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.” Following an uproar by interfaith police in every tradition, the Pope quickly declaimed he had intended to distinguish between the Koranic position—“There should be no compulsion in religion” (sura 2)—with the “brusqueness” of Manuel’s characterization (brusqueness not being error) and the Islamist view that the sword is as effective as reason in propagating religion. Now of course, the pope might have said that both the cross and the crescent have been used, as conditions warranted. But instead, he decided to go abstract and political: The Holy Father hates violence, said the official explanation (16 September 2006): “The position of the Pope concerning Islam is unequivocally that expressed by the conciliar document Nostra Aetate.” Beginning in September 2006, a rash of murders extending from Somalia to Iraq were blamed on the Pope’s remarks; the Iraqi militia Jaish al-Mujahedin (Holy Warriors’ Army) announced its intention to “destroy their cross in the heart of Rome… and to hit the Vatican.” (Der Spiegel, 16 September 2006). Nuns, priests, and random Christians–more recently the Archbishop of Baghdad–have been killed. What then is the effect of a sophisticated and nuanced speech about reason and religion delivered at a distinguished German university at the centre of the liberal West? Hysteria among the intellectual clientele the Pope had hoped to woo with his logic. The solution? Apologize repeatedly. Invite Muslim leaders to tea. Stress commitment to interfaith and intercultural dialogue a la Nostra Aetate. Moonwalk.

Then there was Limbo. Limbo is just about my favorite place. It’s one of the best attested doctrines of the patristic and medieval Catholic Church, which is why the protestant reformers targeted it for destruction 500 years ago. Dante makes it the first circle of hell—Horace and Ovid are there. The best of the ancients, as well as great medieval Islamic thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes, not to mention Saladin. And a million potentially Christian babies. What brings small and great together is a simple fact: they weren’t baptized—either because they lived before the Church made it convenient, or because, through no fault of their own, their quest for truth didn’t quite get them to the door of the baptistery. In its wisdom and generosity, and the sheer force of its theological consistency, the Church gave the world Limbo: so that unbaptized babies and infants, bearing the stain of original sin, as well as unbaptized prophets, patriarchs and philosophers, would have some place to go. After examining the history of the doctrine, a theological commission appointed by the beloved John Paul II concluded that there was little biblical foundation for the teaching called the “limbo of infants,” and a patchy record in doctrinal discussion. When Benedict assumed office, the question had become practical: If babies don’t need to be baptized to be saved, what’s the good of the sacrament? If the sacrament—especially the Catholic sacrament—doesn’t (in an older language) produce what it signifies, what’s the good of the Church? No wonder that the final document—far from “closing Limbo” as the media announced—did something far more subtle: It affirmed the necessity of baptism as the “normative” means of salvation, while stating that some things have “not been revealed to us” (the fate of unbaptized babies, for example), and that “we trust and hope in the mercy of God” (which presumably has been revealed to us). Yet twice in the document, the theologians, with a papal nod from the wings, declares, “Limbo remains a possible theological hypothesis.” Moonwalk.

We live in pedestrian times. The Philistines press in on every side. Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to sin. The seven deadly sins were proclaimed by Gregory I in the 6th century, immortalized by Dante (yes, him again) and satirized (as their virtuous opposites) by Lerner and Loewe. They’ve had a good run, but they were looking a bit dated. 1500 years after their creation, the sins that used to require penance as a cure were going unconfessed, as Pope Benedict lamented in deploring “the decreasing sense of sin in today’s secular world.” 60% of Italian Catholics had stopped going to confession. Besides, lust, wrath, gluttony, sloth, greed, pride, and envy are really things you can deal with through anger management, cold showers, a good tax accountant, diet and amphetamines.

Clearly what was needed were globalized mortal sins for mortals living in a global economy. Sin had to be seen in a transnational, corporate light, restated in the language of social liberalism while keeping the theological matrix that offered the sacraments of the Church—Catholicism itself—as the solution. Besides, thought Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the bureaucrat in charge of penance and indulgences, if we link the global sin of pollution to the more parochially focused sin of “genetic manipulation,” we may be able to get some traction for the Church’s unfashionable view (even among Catholics) that stem cell research is contrary to God’s law. Or at least, that seemed to be the subtext. What the Archbishop actually said was, “You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos.”

We will miss the old Deadlies. —If I do say so they were rooted in a consistent if depressing view of human nature. They were categorical, descriptive. Too much pride is a dangerous thing. Just ask Eliot Spitzer (who also wins the lust award). But the tendency reaches back to Agamemnon and Midas of Pessinus. The mistake was in turning the tragic flaws of Greek drama into the sorts of defects that could get you sent to hell. What Rome now offers is a cynical laundry list of human and social “evils”—not sins at all, really, at least not in any interesting sense. If the Pope’s objective was to create a list of deficiencies that were more in keeping with our time, why this list? How do you confess “consumerism,” or being “obscenely” rich, or being a “manipulative genetic scientist” or enemy of the environment? (Presumably the corresponding virtues are paying an unfair share of taxes, recycling and owning a Nissan Altima.) The Vatican did not consult me on this matter, but I would have kept the traditional seven and added dullness, stupidity, and Texas.

As with the other attempts coming out of Rome, the sin-update was itself a subtle attempt to squeeze relevance back into the historical tube, a crashing failure which was acknowledged to be such from the time the story hit the newspapers. Faster than you could say L’osservatore Romano, the Church back-peddled. It wasn’t really trying to unseat the classical sins, and anyway, it’s more important to practice the seven virtues than simply to avoid the potholes of vice. Moonwalk.

This is my open letter to anyone who will listen.

Sexual apartheid is the outrage of our century. In Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and countries ruled by Islamic laws, millions of women and girls are segregated, degraded and relegated to second class citizenship. Keeping women and girls separate and unequal are important pillars of Islamic rule, affecting every aspect of people’s lives. Sharia law itself specifies that a woman is worth half that of a man and that she is the property of her male guardian, needing his permission even to travel and work.

As the source of ‘corruption’ and ‘chaos’, she must be segregated at workplaces, schools, libraries, universities, in sports and recreation, transportation, the health system, and even when attending weddings and funerals. In Iran, there are even plans to segregate pedestrian walkways on the basis of sex. ‘Alarmed’ at the large number of women university students, the Islamic regime threatens to limit female enrolment and change textbooks based on ‘gender differentiation.’ According to an official of the education ministry: ‘The spiritual, physical, and mental needs of boys and girls are not identical, and therefore textbooks that give them information cannot be the same.’

From age nine on girls must be veiled – a symbol like no other of what it means to be female under Islam – hidden from view, restricted and suppressed. Consigned to walking around with a mobile prison of one’s own. Separate and unequal. As I said – the outrage of our century.

They say a society’s treatment of women is a measure of its freedom. If so, the mistreatment of and discrimination against women is a measure of the degree of influence and power of Islamic and religious laws – whether in Iran or Britain.

But stop, I am told. Saying so ‘just supports Western propaganda’ – something by the way that the Islamic regime of Iran often tells women and men it is hauling off to prison and execution.

How absurd. It is like Iranian women’s rights activists telling one to stop opposing US-led militarism because it supports the ‘Islamic regime of Iran’s propaganda!’

The religious-nationalist anti-imperialist left always ready to act as prefect when women’s rights under Islamic laws are concerned has an affinity towards Islam, which it views as an ‘oppressed religion’ bullied by the USA. It is an anti-colonial movement whose perspectives coincide with that of the ruling classes in the so-called Third World. This grouping is on the side of the ‘colonies’ no matter what goes on there, and their understanding of the ‘colonies’ is Eurocentric, patronising and even racist. In the world according to them, the people in these countries are one and the same with the regimes they are struggling against.

So at Stop the War Coalition demonstrations here in Britain, they carry banners saying ‘We are all Hezbollah;’ at meetings they segregate men and women and urge unveiled women to veil out of ‘solidarity’ and ‘respect’. But even their anti-imperialism – their badge of honour – is pathetically half-baked; it does not even scratch beneath the surface to see how political Islam is an integral part of the US’ militarism and new world order. Their historical amnesia of even the past 30-40 years ignores that the political Islamic movement was encouraged and brought to centre stage by Western governments as a green belt against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. They conveniently forget how in Iran, for example, it was supported in an effort to crush the left and working class revolutionary movement. Or how political Islamists are some of the US’ closest allies.

They fail to see that in practical terms – notwithstanding the differences – political Islam and USA-led militarism are two sides of one coin with the same agenda, the same vision, the same infinite capacity for violence, the same reliance on religion and reaction, the same need for hegemony. It should not be surprising then that anywhere US-led militarism has ‘intervened’ – from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine – political Islam has been brought to power or strengthened.

This type of politics denies universalism, sees rights as ‘western,’ justifies the suppression of women’s rights, freedoms and equality, under the guise of respect for other ‘cultures’ implying that people want to live the way they are forced to and imputing on innumerable people the most reactionary elements of culture and religion, which is that of the ruling class.

In this type of politics, the oppressor is victim and any criticism racist.

Whilst the anti-imperialist left defends and justifies political Islam on the one hand, the virulently racist and right-wing defends US militarism and the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine on the other. They include groups and organisations like Jihad Watch and the Horowitz Freedom Center. The latter even has an ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’ and rattles off fact after fact about the horrendous status of women under Islam so that it can help promote the neocon agenda of bombing men, women and children into ‘liberated’ swamps like Iraq. Like the Stop Islamisation of Europe campaign, these groups have ‘difficulty with the concept of moderate Muslim’ and believe the ‘onus is on Muslims to ensure the safety of non-Muslims.’ Why? As if the onus of safeguarding Spaniards is on all those who are Basque or deemed to be Basque.

They are ‘concerned’ about the ‘rights’ of women and apostates so they can ban the Koran and ‘Muslim immigration.’ So they can stop the sub-human teeming hordes destroying the Christian nature of Europe and the West. They are quite happy to defend Christian religious morality, restrict the benefits due single mothers, demand exemptions from the Sexual Orientation Regulations, bar funds for AIDS- related and contraception-related health services abroad if they provide abortions and consider the women’s rights movement’s fight for equality ‘the destruction of the nuclear family and of the power structures of society in general’. According to their warped worldview, ‘the West has skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, leading to a cultural and demographic vacuum that makes [it] vulnerable to a take-over’.

Both anti-imperialist left and the right-wing refuse to see millions of people as truly human – with innumerable differences of opinions, and belonging to vast social movements and progressive organisations and parties – and worthy of the same rights and dignity as they believe is their due. Despite all their language to the contrary, the politics of both sides has nothing to do with improving and changing the lot of humanity and women’s status.

It is within this context that left and progressive groups, socialist and mass movements within the Middle East and elsewhere are challenging people and organisations everywhere to take a principled and human stand against sexual apartheid vis-à-vis both camps of reaction. This is the challenge that the women’s liberation movement in Iran brings to you today. Clearly, sexual apartheid must enrage civilised humanity into an international movement that is about changing and improving people’s lives.

But in order to succeed, this movement must reject both US-led militarism and political Islam and rely on and support a third camp of the millions of refusing and resisting people across the globe. To do so, it must be uncompromisingly secular and humanist, it must refuse to tolerate the intolerable, it must raise the banner of universal rights, it must defend the right and historical duty to criticise religion, and defend the freedoms and equality of people everywhere. To succeed, it has to have at its core a defence of the human being.

In 1973, as a result of international attention and widespread opposition to the apartheid system in South Africa apartheid was recognised as a crime against humanity. On the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, let’s together proclaim that sexual apartheid is a crime against humanity.

We must accept nothing less.

The above is Maryam Namazie’s speech at a seminar entitled ‘Sexual apartheid, political Islam and women’s rights’ in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 10, 2008 at Conway Hall, London. The seminar was organised by Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, and endorsed by the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association and the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

Posted March 20, 2008

Tolstoy’s grotesque caricature did a grave disservice to this fine and noble man. Tolstoy wrote: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” On the contrary Ivan Ilych’s life was complex, if not extraordinary certainly exemplary, and therefore most wonderful.

What was so terrible in Tolstoy’s eyes? True, Ivan Ilych was “an intelligent, polished, lively and agreeable man…a capable cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty.” However—and this appears to be his tragic flaw—“he considered his duty to be what was so considered by those in authority.” You see, Ivan Ilych led an unexamined life, and as we all know an unexamined life is not worth living.

As a legal magistrate and later a judge “he behaved with dignity both to his superiors and inferiors, and performed the duties entrusted to him…with an exactness and incorruptible honesty of which he could not but feel proud…Ivan Ilych never abused his power; he tried on the contrary to soften its expression.” In addition to integrity, Ivan Ilych performed his official duties with consummate skill. “He very soon acquired a method of eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be presented on paper only in its externals…completely excluding his personal opinion of the matter.”

As much as you might be pleased to present your legal case to Ivan Ilych, none of this was enough, because you see he did things for all the wrong reasons. In particular, he used his work to escape from his domestic situation. Although during their courtship his future wife was “the most attractive, clever, and brilliant girl of the set in which he moved” his feelings were towards her were never much more than lukewarm. “ ‘Really, why shouldn’t I marry?’ he thought, given that she was “well connected, and was a sweet, pretty and thoroughly correct young woman.” But when his wife became pregnant—alas—his life began to change. Adhering to the misogynistic stereotype so common in Russian fiction, his previously charming bride underwent a striking metamorphosis. She “began to be jealous without any cause…found fault with everything, and made coarse and ill-mannered scenes.” Also, she got fat.

What’s a guy to do…what would you do? Alcohol and adultery are perennial solutions, but compartmentalization and losing one’s self in your work are probably better. At first, “Ivan Ilych hoped to escape from the unpleasantness of this state of affairs by the same easy and decorous relations to life that had served him heretofore: he tried to ignore his wife’s disagreeable moods, continued to live in his usual and pleasant way, invited his friends to his house for a game of cards.” But this was only partially successful, and “with the birth of their child…the need of securing for himself an existence outside his family life became still more imperative…as his wife grew more irritable and exacting Ivan Ilych transferred the centre of gravity of his life more and more to his official work…and became more ambitious.”

Ivan Ilych was forced to “adopt a definite attitude…toward married life. He only required of it those conveniences—dinner at home, housewife, and bed—which it could give him, and above all that propriety of external forms required by public opinion. For the rest he looked for light-hearted pleasure and propriety, and was very thankful when he found them, but if he met with antagonism and querulousness he at once retired into his separate and fenced-off world of official duties, where he found satisfaction…his masterly handling of cases, of which he was conscious—all this gave him pleasure.”

The downward spiral continued when Ivan Ilych received a promotion and bought a larger house. He took an inordinate pride in furnishing his new quarters: “To him it seemed quite exceptional…in reality it is just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich…his house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed.”

Oh the horrors! See all those cheerful young couples at Crate and Barrel, or The Pottery Barn? Take pity on them as they engage earnest conversation, beaming with delight as they make their purchase. What frauds they are, for their little apartments will all look alike anyway. Hmmm…what’s the alternative? We can refrain from furnishing our homes, devoting ourselves instead to more spiritual pursuits. Or we can decorate our homes in such a profound, artistic, authentic manner that even Tolstoy would approve. (But where would we find the time?) Or, maybe it’s OK to furnish your apartment, so long as you don’t take an unseemly satisfaction from it.

Well, back to the story. Ivan Ilych developed cancer, somehow as a consequence of furnishing his new house. He, his family, and his colleagues all participated in the complex dance of denial, indifference, and pity that is familiar to all of us. And like most sick people, Ivan Ilych became increasingly difficult to mollify, being enraged equally by pity and by indifference: His response to pity: “ ‘Where are you going, Jean?’ asked his wife, with a specially sad and exceptionally kind look. This exceptionally kind look irritated him.” His response to indifference: “He heard through the door the distant sound of a song and its accompaniment. ‘It’s all the same to them, but they will die too! …and now they are merry, the beasts!’ ”

Fortunately, the servant Gerasim enters the picture. Russian peasants like these have a simple spiritual connection with God that is the forerunner of the magical Negro. This guy “did it all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan Ilych. Health, strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but Gerasim’s strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him…only Gerasim grasped [his position] and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilych felt at ease only with him.”

The physicians are singled out for special vituperation. They bustle about with an air of self-importance, go through the motions of examining their patient, and, peering over their spectacles, mumble a bunch of meaningless nonsense. But it’s the nineteenth century, for crying out loud! Tolstoy particularly objects to the fact that, deep down, they don’t really care that much about Ivan Ilych and his illness. That is quite true, they don’t. I myself am a physician, and my job sometimes entails telling pregnant women and their husbands that, if their baby is born alive, it will be terribly handicapped. If, for a single moment, I could truly experience the horror with which this message is received, that would be the last patient I would ever see.

Here is a passage that perhaps Mr. Tolstoy should have included (my words in italics, Tolstoy’s, with minor changes, in bold):

After his visit with Ivan Ilych, the doctor had lunch with his colleague, who inquired about his patient.

“Very bad, very bad,” replied the doctor, taking off his heavy coat and lighting a cigar. Every day is a bit worse…he’s slowly dying.

“Have you told him?”

“What good would it do?” The doctor signaled the waiter to bring the menus. “First: He already knows. Second: What if I’m wrong? Remember the case of Dr. Tevechensky who told his patient that her case was terminal? The family made all the arrangements, even picked out a coffin. When she recovered his career was ruined, he had to leave town. Third, and most importantly: The medications I prescribe are clearly useless. All I can do for him is give him hope; that’s why his family calls me out to see him. You should have seen the timid question that, with eyes glistening with fear and hope, he put to me as to whether there was a chance of recovery. I said that I could not vouch for it, but there was a possibility. The look of hope with which he watched me out was so pathetic that his wife, seeing it, even wept as she left the room to hand me my fee.”

“It must trouble you to have to go out there so often.”

“If he weren’t so sick it would be another matter; but we shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”

The last sentence was a trick; the words are indeed by Tolstoy, but he put them in the mouth of the Noble Peasant Gerasim, not the selfish petty bourgeois physician.

In the latter stages of his illness Ivan Ilych begins to reflect on his life. He had some joy, yes, but “the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he came to the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys…. ‘it is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up…maybe I did not live life as I ought to have done…what if my whole life has really been wrong?’ ” He begins to think that “his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things…There was nothing to defend…it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception.”

The ravings of a sick man can be forgiven, but what is Tolstoy’s excuse? How can he not appreciate a man that takes his work seriously, that copes with a less-than-ideal marriage with patience and fortitude? Can we not allow Ivan Ilych his small pleasures of pride in his work and his house, and a game of cards in the evening? No, not if his life was artificial compared to that of Gerasim, which was authentic. This is from the authoritative Sparknotes Study Guide:

The artificial life is marked by shallow relationships, self-interest, and materialism. It is insular, unfulfilling, and ultimately incapable of providing answers to the important questions in life. The artificial life is a deception that hides life’s true meaning and leaves one terrified and alone at the moment of death. The authentic life, on the other hand, is marked by pity and compassion. It sees others not as means to ends, but as individual beings with unique thoughts, feelings, and desires. The authentic life cultivates mutually affirming human relationships that break down isolation and allow for true interpersonal contact. Whereas the artificial life leaves one alone and empty, the authentic life fosters strength through solidarity and comfort through empathy. It creates bonds and prepares one to meet death.

Blah blah blah…the only thing artificial here is this artificial false dichotomy. I fail to understand how a selfless love for others is expressed by Gerasim cheerfully supporting a sick man’s legs, but not by the years of Ivan Ilych’s devoted service to the Russian judiciary.

The story ends with the inevitable deathbed epiphany, when the dying man realizes the error of his ways. He pities his sorrowful son, and even his crying wife. This realization, rather than a rush of endorphins in response to cerebral hypoxia, finally gives him release from his suffering.

We are all of us selfish creatures, living superficial lives and fearing death. Either God made us that way, or we evolved that way; take your pick, that is how we are. Some of us are slightly better than others, and Ivan Ilych was among the best. It’s ironic perhaps that Tolstoy made him a judge, because it seems that an honest judiciary is a crucial pre-requisite for a peaceful and prosperous society, second perhaps only marital fidelity. Neither the drunken loutish peasant nor the parasitic aristocrat, Ivan Ilych was the best that Russia had to offer.

Those who thought he wasn’t good enough may have helped pave the way for the Russian revolution and the New Soviet Man. And we all know how that turned out.

Before I discovered Christopher Hitchens, I seriously doubted that non-fiction prose could be savoured and reread. How wrong I was. As a writer, Hitchens has the style of Byron, the depth of Faulkner and the wit of Wilde. Possibly the most well-read man on the planet, Hitchens has the ability to communicate complex arguments with a warmth and economy that can engage the dullest layman.

I would read Hitchens on anything, but Hitchens on religion is especially fine. In this breezeblock anthology of secularist thought, he has gathered broadsides against religion from the pre-faith age to the twenty-first century. The word symposium, in Ancient Greece, simply meant ‘drinking party.’ This is a rough, raucous party of a book, where Persian poets mingle with evolutionary biologists and Arab dissidents. And Hitchens is buying the drinks.

Faith’s defenders and apologists like to remind us that many great rationalist and Enlightenment thinkers, such as Darwin and Newton, subscribed to religious beliefs or another competing superstition. Since most of these historical figures lived in times where publicly admitting a lack of belief could get you ostracised, imprisoned or even killed, this is like defending modern-day human trafficking by pointing out that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. But it’s fascinating to see how writers such as Hobbes and Spinoza, while publicly going along with the orthodoxy for breathing’s sake, weaved the traces of free thought into their philosophical works.

Of course, they were the lucky ones. Reading the early part of this anthology, you realise that you don’t know you’re born – that you’ve won time’s lottery. It’s a humbling realisation but also a liberating one. We live in an age where the churches no longer rule the Western world. We’re free to excuse religious crimes by explaining them as misinterpretations or perversions of the true faith. What the European dissidents of the medieval age knew back then, and the Arab dissidents of today know now, is that the violence, censorship and torture aren’t a misinterpretation of religion – the violence is the religion. The Portable Atheist gives us a catalogue of human rights abuses directly attributable to religious texts – if your stomach can take it.

From Hitchens’s introduction: ‘One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away.’ The criticism rings true, but even in the most liberal creeds we get a frightening sense of what the clerics would do if they ever again got near power. Last year floods devastated several counties of England. To most of us this just seemed like freak weather conditions, but the Bishop of Carlisle knew the real reason:

‘This is a strong and definite judgement,’ announced the Bishop of Carlisle, ‘because the world has been arrogant in going its own way. We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation.’ From a list of possible transgressions the Bishop (who has sources of information denied to the rest of us) selected recent legal moves to allow more rights to homosexuals. These, he said, placed us ‘in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgement, which is intended to call us to repentance.’ Many of his senior colleagues, including one who has been spoken of as a future Archbishop of Canterbury, joined him in blaming the floods – on sexual preference.

Of course, in these modern, decadent times the Christian Church has been forced to hang up its rack and to ease off on its multitude of enemies; Jews, gays, women, witches, other kinds of Christians, etc. It’s lost the mob’s siren-song, and only survives today because it offers what secular philosophy doesn’t – some kind of physical existence after death. If that had never been a part of the religious belief system, Islam and Christianity would have had the cultural lifespan of phrenology or the Flat Earth Society. It’s all they’ve got.

Liberal thinkers have to stress the point that this life is the only one we know of, and therefore our only real chance of happiness. It’s far too precious (too holy, even) to be squandered on absurd and repressive belief systems. We could start by saying that even the greatest religious scholars found it hard to describe heaven, or what goes on there. According to Tertullian, heaven’s main selling point was that you could laugh at all the people burning down there in hell. According to Islam, you’ll get laid there – if you take enough people with you.

This isn’t good enough, and the writers in this volume explain why. Marx started out as a novelist, and like Hitchens, his prose is as high as any of the great literary writers when he says: ‘Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.’ From Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely; we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Religion falls down in its wicked disrespect for this life. It treats life as a waiting room for death – which is perhaps why many of its adherents have so little respect for others’ lives and their own. It is against the world, against life; even in its most watered-down and moderate form, it is nihilism with a beatific smirk of its face.

The Portable Atheist is recommended, but it suffers from its omissions. I would have liked to see more from fiction writers, particularly the Scottish writer Iain Banks, who could have contributed a great passage from The Crow Road. Phillip Pullman should have been asked, too, as well as the fantasy author Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett’s Small Gods is set on a faraway disc planet that rides through space on the back of a giant turtle. On the Discworld, gods do exist – but they have to be believed in to exist. Belief creates gods, not the other way round. Pratchett’s theology is like galactic snakes-and-ladders, with thousands of wind and thunder and fire gods competing against each other.

In Small Gods, the god Om has established domination over much of the planet. In a twist of genius, his followers believe that the world is round and ruthlessly persecute philosophers who tell the truth; that it is flat.

The book’s finest scene comes when the gods of the Disc have a change of heart. In the midst of a bloody war, they descend onto earth and give the only two commandments that mankind has ever needed:

I. THIS IS NOT A GAME.

II. HERE AND NOW, YOU ARE ALIVE.

The Portable Atheist, selected and with introductions by Christopher Hitchens, Da Capo Press 2007

The idea that all religions are owed respect and understanding comes readily tripping off the tongue these days. Tolerance might be mentioned, but often only in passing. Since religious doctrines conflict with one another, it is hard to see how mindless respect can be extended to all of them at once. Respect would have to be equally given not only to the conflicting Christian doctrines of Trinitarianism and Unitarianism, but also to the Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, not to mention atheist, denial of these doctrines.

The demand for understanding is ambiguous but can be sorted out. It might mean simply grasping the significance of a doctrine for a community. But anthropologists and psychologists do not have to be believers to work out the significance that a religion has for its adherents. Understanding might mean grasping the semantic meaning. This too can be readily achieved, though the notorious obscurity of religious doctrines has preoccupied an army of commentators down the centuries. But other kinds of understanding might be hard to realise especially since most religions require some kind of unfathomable mystery at their heart as a means of keeping the faithful in awe. Even the most astute apologists of Christianity have had a hard job sorting out the pseudo-profundity of doctrines like the Trinity or the Eucharist in the long history of Christian apologetics.

Here the focus will be on why tolerance is often downplayed in favour of respect. Tolerance is in fact much more important and can go along with lack of respect, and even disrespect. This is strikingly expressed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the secular Turkish Republic: “I have no religion; and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea …’. Clearly this is to show religion no respect. He continues: ‘Let [the people] worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided that it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow man”[1]. Having no respect for religion is quite consistent with having respect for a quite different sort of “object”, viz., the rights or liberties of people to indulge in religion if they wish.

What need to be spelled out are the different kinds of respect we can have for a diverse range of different “objects” of respect, such as God himself, or the right to disbelieve in God. But before this, two other matters. What reasons do atheists have for their lack of respect for God? And what is the difference between having no respect and having disrespect?

1 Atheism and the Sacred

Atheism at least involves the claim: God does not exist (this will not be argued for here). A more comprehensive atheism rejects all divinities, all forms of religious spirituality and all forms of religious eschatology – in fact it rejects the whole framework of religious thought and practice. Included in these rejections would also be the claim that anything is sacred, whether it is God, his various prophets, holy books, their doctrines, etc. The religious do not really spell out what they mean by sacred. But we can suppose the following: that some object is sacred just means that the religious take their God to love that object, or approve of it, or command believers to revere it. But if there is no God, then there are no objective grounds for anything to be sacred. Instead something is sacred only because religious believers sanctify it. There is only what people take, or believe, to be sacred, or project onto the world as sacred; the sacred is merely a human construct imposed on the world that is alleged to have objective existence – but does not.

This has an important link to respect. As anthropologists point out, the sacred is surrounded with a host of rules that tell us what we ought to do in the way of observances concerning the sacred, and what we ought not to do. The latter are bans, prohibitions and taboos directed at preventing profanation and blasphemy of the allegedly sacred. Thus Jesus Christ threatens us, at Matthew 12: 31 & 32, when he says that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost will not be forgiven either in this world or the next. (Here blasphemy can be as tame as simply denying the existence of the Holy Ghost.) Sometimes the ban is even extended to any kind of questioning or criticism of the sacred. Importantly, those who sanctify some object often demand that others also sanctify it in the same way; or at least they demand that others respect the sacred. Not to have respect, or to actively disrespect, gives offence to the religious, and this raises their anger.

What are the grounds of the demand for respect? There are none, as will be argued.

2 The Incoherence of Respecting the Non-Existent.

Normally people who think that God exists, accord God some respect. But it is possible that a person believes that God exists but accords him no respect. Perhaps because of a version of the argument from evil, they take God to be responsible for the world’s evils. If it is in God’s power to have lessened or prevented these evils, but he does not, then the theist might abandon their respect for God – while still maintaining that God exists.

This is not the atheist’s position. In what follows it is not even necessary to assume atheism, viz., that God does not exist; all that is required is that a person believe that God does not exist.

Can a person claim both of the following: ‘I respect the fairies, but I do not believe they exist’? No; this seems incoherent. Surely one would respond: ‘if you do not believe that fairies exist, you are being incoherent in according them respect, or even disrespect’. Similarly, can a person claim both: ‘I respect the gods, Zeus, Baal and Wotan, but I do not believe they exist’? This is incoherent in the same way. There is something distinctly odd about exercising all the trappings of respect for a God that one also believes does not exist.

The atheist lack of respect for God, or religion, turns on the following: if a person accords respect to some object, then they must also believe that the object exists. And this is logically just the same as: if a person does not believe that an object exits, then they cannot also accord respect to that object. Nor does it follow that they accord disrespect. So, one atheist argument for why we owe religion no respect turns on the claim that it makes no conceptual sense to respect, or disrespect, what one also believes does not exist.

Two further points are related to this. (a) There are some beliefs that one cannot share because one does not respect them. Many neither share nor respect the beliefs of flat Earthers, the beliefs of those who think that Alien abductions occur, the beliefs of those who hold that we all go to Heaven after death or the beliefs of those who think that Jesus Christ is our saviour. (b) One cannot respect belief systems which one also thinks lack all epistemic credentials in that they are false, or they have little or no evidence in their favour and much against. This will include the mindless accordance of respect to all religious doctrines since they are inconsistent with one another.

3 The Jesus Christ Fallacy.

The above turns on avoiding the Jesus Christ Fallacy stated in Mathew 12: 30 and Luke 11:23: “He who is not with Me is against Me.” On this view neutrality is impossible; there is no third position in which a person is neither for nor against Jesus Christ (JC). Not only is this a display of megalomania; it is also commits the fallacy of inferring that if one is not for JC then one must be against JC.

Consider the two propositions about some person A: ‘A is not for JC’ and ‘A is against JC’. These are not equivalent. Nor from the first can one validly infer the second. The contradictory of ‘A is for JC’ is ‘A is not for JC’; it is not ‘A is against C’. To make the fallacious inference is to ignore a logical point, the difference between contradictory and contrary propositions. Two contradictory propositions cannot be either true or false together; but two contrary propositions, while they cannot both be true together, can be false together. Thus ‘A is for JC’ and ‘A is against JC’ are contraries and can both be false together; there is the possibility that A is indifferent to JC in that A is neither for nor against JC. To make the fallacious inference is to ignore the indifference option through confusing contradictory with contrary propositions.

A similar fallacy is made concerning the topic under discussion: we owe religion no respect. If A does not respect religion it does not follow that A disrespects religion. To so infer is to commit theJesus Christ Fallacy. It is open to A to be indifferent to religion, or to be bored by it and so pay no attention to it. Independently, there is the very interesting issue of active disrespect for religion through satire, lampooning, blasphemy and profanation – but this is not the topic here.

4. Six Kinds of Respect – and “Respect Creep”

The above sets the scene for determining what the slippery and highly ambiguous word ‘respect’ means when it is claimed that religion is to be owed respect, or no respect. There are many distinct meanings to be found in most dictionaries, six of which are relevant to our purposes here.

Respect1 In this sense a person pays attention to some object X, or they have regard to X, or they give careful consideration to some detail or aspect of X. Thus: a person can pay respect to just one feature of, say, a car, e.g., its colour, or its make, but not pay respect to any other feature of the car (such as its fuel efficiency). In this sense an atheist can pay respect to the Bible. Like Hobbes, Hume, Gibbon and many others, they can pay careful attention to what the Bible says but remain sceptical of, or disbelieve, its various claims.

Respect2 In this sense a person does not interfere with X, or they actively (not passively) let X be. Thus a person can respect another person’s betting on horses, or going to their chosen church, even though they think both bets are an utter waste of time! They do not interfere with the other’s gambling or going to church; they simply let others be to do their thing.

Respect3 In this sense a person is considerate, polite, civil or courteous towards other people. So to those who proffer their religious beliefs one can simply say politely: ‘Thanks, but no thanks!’ But when one finds, say, evangelicals at the door who remain intrusively persistent, and so impolite, a modicum of disrespect can become appropriate.

Respect4 In this sense one person can have admiration for another, or their abilities. Thus one can respect another’s piano–playing in the sense that they admire it. Again, one can Respect4 a person’s skill, for example in cracking a safe, but not Respect4 them as a person.

At this point one must be aware of an important phenomenon that Simon Blackburn calls ‘respect creep’[2]. Respect4 goes along with Respect3; admiration for a person commonly goes along with politeness towards them. But the converse is not true; one can have Respect3 for a person in the sense of being polite to them but not have Respect4 in the sense of admiring them. It is fallacious to respect creep from the third kind of respect to the fourth.

Respect5 In this sense a person has deferential esteem or reverence for some X. For example, Zoroastrians have Respect5 for their prophet Zoroaster, and their Zoroastrian God, Ahura Mazdah, in that they revere both. But do any of us pay respect to this prophet or god in the sense of revere either of them? In the case of the Zoroastrian God, apart from a very tiny minority the rest of us do not accord it any respect because we do not believe that it exists; we are atheists with respect to Ahura Mazdah.

What of respect creep? Respect5 for a God or a prophet goes along with Respect4, being an admirer, and Respect3, being polite about them. But the converse is not true; admiration of, or politeness towards, X can obtain without reverence for X. Respect creep from the first four senses to the fifth is fallacious.

Respect6. Respect5 is a factual matter which may be indulged in by an individual or a group. Some person or group may, as a matter of fact, revere the Zoroastrian God, just as another individual or group may, as a matter of fact, revere the Christian God. Importantly Respect5 is a factual and not a normative matter. What Respect6 adds to Respect5 is a normative dimension which goes beyond the individual factual nature of Respect5 in that it is deemed to be universally binding on all others – something all others ought to do.

Respect6 does this in two ways typical of the demands associated with the sacred. First, those who Respect5 (revere) X, demand that all others also ought to revere X. Or, secondly, the demand may be slightly weaker: those who revere X demand that others not criticise, insult or denigrate X, or at least conform outwardly to the demands of reverence (think of all the times atheists have been stuck at a table at which grace is being said). The demand can also extend to prohibitions against lampooning, or poking fun at or satirizing X in any way (for example the Danish cartoons). Here the demand for reverence by others comes into conflict with, and attempts to restrict, free speech in ways which the other kinds of respect do not.

Upon what grounds can those respectfully reverent towards X demand the same reverence of others? Logically there are none. Here the demands do not concern the respect of paying attention to (Respect1), or letting be (Respect2), or being polite (Respect3). These one can independently grant readily enough in many circumstances. Rather, one is obliged to admire (Respect4) or revere (Respect5) what others admire or revere, or at least outwardly conform.

What is deeply problematic about Respect6 are the fallacious grounds on which Respect5, reverence and esteem, is extended beyond the individual and the factual and is turned into an imperative applicable to all. This commits two fallacies. The first fallacy is to infer a general claim applicable to all from the basis of particular cases of reverence (no matter how many there may be). In particular, the personal avowals ‘I respect X’ or ‘X is worthy of respect’ entail nothing about what attitude others ought to respect or find worthy; it remains entirely open whether anyone else makes, or does not make, the same avowals in their own case.

The second is the is-ought fallacy of inferring from the factual Respect5 to the normative Respect6. Commonly in the case of religion, such a demand is illegitimately founded upon the sacredness with which religions are imbued and their associated taboos. It is also an extreme case of illegitimate respect creep from acceptable kinds of respect to the unacceptable. Such respect creep is pernicious; those who revere some X demand that everyone else also revere X, on pain of some kind of sanction, punishment or threat of intimidation or actual intimidation.

This kind of respect creep is well described by Salman Rushdie:[3]

‘respect’ is one of those ideas no one is against … everybody wants some of that. … But what we used to mean by respect … a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention … has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word. … Religious extremists, these days, demand respect for their attitudes with growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected …. But now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs – to hold that they are suspect, or antiquated or wrong, that in fact that they are arguable – is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off limits as ‘disrespectful’ and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of respect’.

Ominously Rushdie goes on to describe an example of respect creep which culminates in the universal demand for reverential respect: ‘…in recent times both the American National Endowment for the Arts and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of ‘respect’ as a touchstone for their funding decisions’. Those who do not display this “new” kind of respect are to be penalised.

Believers might pay religion respect in all six senses. But atheists need not pay religion respect in any of the six senses; and this will include not paying attention even to the vast industry within philosophy that has, from medieval times, bolstered religion. As Grayling points out, such lack of respect ‘… will inflame people of religious faith, who take themselves to have an unquestionable right to respect for the faith they adhere to, and a right to advance, if not indeed impose … their views on others’.[4]

5. Categories of “Object” of Respect

Not only are there different kinds of respect, but there are also different categories of “objects” of respect that also add to the confusion over the use of the word ‘respect’. By ‘object’ is meant the logical or grammatical sense of ‘object’ and not the physical or material sense. This can be grasped by considering the incomplete sentences ‘Person A respects ….’, or ‘A does not respect …’ and noting the different ways in which the blank can be filled by different categories of “object”. So far we have spoken broadly of respecting religion, but this covers many different categories of “object”. Here are six of them.

1. Divinities: God, the gods, spirits, angels, etc.

2. Persons: prophets, saints, monks, Popes, priests, Imams, etc.

3. Ordinary objects: holy books, icons, totems, sacred places & buildings (e.g., Lourdes), etc.

4. Actions: performing the Eucharist, praying, specific rituals such as genuflexion, etc.

5. Person’s rights and liberties to act, believe, disbelieve, poke fun, etc.

6. Acts of believing and the contents of belief.

The first four categories obviously yield possible “objects” of respect or disrespect. Consider God in the first category. The American satirist H. L. Mencken wrote a piece called ‘Memorial Service’[5] which is a roll call of over 140 past gods that were revered by millions of people, but now no one reveres them at all: Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Wotan, Baal, Mithra, the Zoroastrian God Ahura Mazdah, (well, a few of the reverent are left), Huitzilopochtli (a Mexican God to whom thousands of the reverent were sacrificed), and so on. Even the religious who currently revere some god revere none of these other gods. So do we owe respect to any of these gods? None of us do – unless one argues for a syncretism in which all gods are one and the same! Atheists have good grounds for respecting none of them.

The fifth category is important and concerns rights and liberties of people as “objects” of respect. The kind of respect involved here is hardly the reverence of Respect5 (though some misleadingly put it this way). Rather it is the more secularized Respect1, in which each of us is to pay careful attention to the rights and liberties of others in our dealings with them; or it is Respect2 in which each of us is to refrain from interfering in the (lawful) activities of others. Atatürk’s remark illustrates these points. He has no respect for one kind of “object” religion, but he has respect for another kind of “object” viz., the right or liberty of people to believe in religion, or not as the case may be.

The sixth category raises some important issues only a few of which can be addressed here. The term ‘belief’ is ambiguous in ways not often recognised. Philosophers distinguish between the content of a belief and a person’s act (or state) of believing that content. To illustrate the difference, suppose a person A believes that Christ will return one day. The proposition that Christ will return one day is the belief content; in contrast the person’s act (or mental state) is A’s believing that Christ will return one day. A question now arises: Which is a possible “object” of respect, the content, the act, both of these, or neither?

The claim that will be advanced here, but not fully defended, is that it is incoherent, or meaningless, to respect belief contents. In contrast since a person’s act of believing is an act of theirs, it can be a possible object of respect or lack of respect. To illustrate the difference, consider an uncontroversial example of a belief content: that 2+2=4. Can person A coherently respect that 2+2=4? In the case of Respect1, all this means is that A pays attention to the (correct) belief that 2+2=4 when A does mathematics, or performs addition. This is coherent; but other kinds of respect generate incoherence. People cannot sensibly let be or interfere with the belief content that 2+2=4, or admire it or revere it. Some mathematical nerd might revere or admire that 2+2=4; but this means that they are a pathological case.

Similarly the proposition that Christ will return some day, might be accorded Respect1, in that one has to pay attention to it when dealing with Christians; but it is incoherent to admire or revere that propositional content. This point can be extended to all the belief contents expressed in holy books or religious doctrines. Other than Respect1, it is incoherent to accord respect to such belief contents. One might possibly respect different “objects” such as the person Christ, or the Bible which tells us that he will return (if it strictly does); but none of these objects of possible respect are belief contents. Trickier is the difference between true belief contents and the facts they express. Can facts, the items that make up the world, be possible objects of reverence? Yes. If we assume that it is a fact that Christ died on the cross then, on the interpretation that Christians give it (viz., through it God lets sinning humanity off the hook), that fact can be an object of reverence; but it is not an object of reverence for those who do not grant that interpretation. But the facts that make up the world are not the same as the belief contents that we can entertain; the former are possible “objects” of respect but the latter are not.

Matters differ when it comes to acts (or states) of belief of a person. Consider the act, A believes that Christ will return some day. One might Respect1 A’s particular act of belief in that one pays attention to it and gives it consideration when one comes to deal with A (for example, one knows that A is a bit touchy about this belief). Also one might Respect2 A’s act of belief in letting A hold their belief, or disrespect it in attempting to prevent such acts of belief on A’s part. This becomes important when according respect to another “object” viz., A’s right or liberty to act in certain ways, including acts of believing. Further, it is possible to Respect4 (admire) or Respect5 (revere) A’s activity of so believing (believers do admire the strength of their acts of belief). But equally as well these can be “objects” of disrespect – and even dismay especially in the case of dogmatists. But at least it makes sense to respect, accord no respect or disrespect, the mental acts of persons, in contrast to the belief contents of those acts.

The above only touches upon the important and subtle difference between acts and contents of belief as “objects” of respect. The ambiguity of the word ‘belief’ disguises this difference which in turn leads to a host of confusions. On the whole, it is meaningless to respect belief contents; but acts of believing or disbelieving (not to be confused with the persons who believe) can be coherently accorded respect or disrespect. This last point can be extended to cover many other kinds of mental acts such as protecting one’s beliefs from criticism, or refusing to evaluate them, or engaging in a critical evaluation. Consider fundamentalist religious believers. They might protect the proposition that Christ will return some day from critical examination, or resist examining it. But note that protecting that claim from criticism, or resisting criticism, is not a propositional object: it is an activity (directed upon a belief content). And this activity is something that is a possible “object” of respect (in the sense of letting it be), or of disrespect (in that others attempt to overcome the resistance to criticism). The same applies to religious doctrines and the propositional contents of holy books, as distinct from the books themselves as objects. As argued, it does not make sense to respect such contents. But enabling or resisting criticism of the contents are different “objects” altogether which are open to respect or disrespect.

6. Tolerance – but No Respect

All of the above points come together in an account of tolerance that need not involve respect. There are three broad aspects to tolerance. Tolerance requires (1) that there be something to which one objects, but (2) one puts up with the objectionable. Putting the matter somewhat paradoxically, toleration involves tolerating what one finds intolerable. The trick to tolerance is (3) how to achieve the right balance in tolerating the intolerable by setting the right limits to tolerance.

The “objection” component of tolerance can be illustrated in the case of Atatürk’s wishing all religion at the bottom of the sea. Supposing that Atatürk’s lack of respect for religion is well grounded, then these grounds can also provide good reasons for objecting to religion. Here the “objection” component cannot be watered down to something like indifference; one cannot sensibly tolerate that to which one is indifferent. Having a well founded objection to some X, like good grounds for lack of respect, is an essential component of tolerance.

The second aspect of tolerance requires one “to put up with” that to which one objects. One has to put up with the objectionable if one is powerless to do otherwise. But being powerless is not a component of tolerance as normally understood. One has to be in a position to act against the objectionable either because one already has sufficient power to so act, or if not so, one can act politically to obtain such power in the long run. What the second aspect of tolerance requires is that one refrain from either exercising successfully one’s powers or acting to obtain them. Here the acceptance component is a matter of not interfering with or (actively, not passively) letting something be, when one could interfere. Putting this in terms of respect, one gives Respect2 to the liberties and rights of others to believe and act as they choose without interference.

For what reason might one so restrain oneself? Suppose one were to object to a human rights violation but one also restrains oneself from acting against the violation; though one might do this for prudential reasons, such restraint is not an acceptable part of toleration. There are limits to toleration. Spelling out these limits is a complex matter not attempted here. But it leads to the third aspect of tolerance in which the right kind of balance is to be struck in tolerating the intolerable. One way of achieving the balance is through the recognition of the autonomy of others, even when the autonomy of others involves matters to which one has objections. In particular, others are autonomous agents when it comes to their holding religious beliefs even though one has no respect for religion and wishes it at the bottom of the sea. And conversely one is an autonomous agent in having no respect for religion; but this is a matter to be accorded Respect2 by the religious even though they may have objections to one’s stance. Tolerance is a two-way street.

Autonomy for all goes along with tolerance on the part of all. But it is a tolerance that involves only Respect2, that of the recognition of the autonomy of others, in particular their rights and liberties. It does not involve other kinds of respect, and may even involve absence of these kinds of respect or positive disrespect. This applies in the case of religion – it is owed no special respect. Importantly for a tolerant society, respect creep to Respect6 with its demand for universal respectful reverence for any or all religious stances simply has no place.

Within a liberal society in which there is tolerance there is, of necessity, scope for each to have objections to the positions of others. There is no scope for suppression of any sort. Nor is there scope for the universal demand of respect for any one point of view. Nor is there scope for a mindless respect which encompasses all points of view, especially since these are often inconsistent with one another. Tolerance is quite consistent with according religion no respect.

Notes:

1. Andrew Mango, Atatürk, (Woodstock NY, Overlook Press, 2002): 463.
2. Simon Blackburn, ‘Religion and Respect’ in Louise Anthony (ed.), Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2007): 179-193.
3. Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line (London, Vintage, 2003.): 145-6.
4. A. C. Grayling., Against All Gods ( London, Oberon Books, 2007): 17
5. This is collected in Christopher Hitchens (ed.) The Portable Atheist, (Philadelphia PA, Da Capo Press, 2007): 143-46.