It is also only fair to point out (in a bit of potted history) that Imperial Islam engaged in capturing and selling European slaves in the slave markets of North Africa and the Middle East, and had a lively trade in African slaves long before Europeans became embroiled in the slave trade. Whole villages from parts of the British Isles, including Ireland, were captured and sold in the slave markets of Algiers. According to Wikipedia, the Crimean Khanate had a brisk slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process known as “the harvesting of the Steppes” Slav people were captured and sold in Muslim slave markets. (Memories of these markets still exist in the Yemen, where recently it was proposed that captured women be sold for use as concubines, which would solve the problem of infidelity by Muslim husbands! It would be hard to make this stuff up!) Thousands were taken from Moscow itself for use in this trade.

The frequent accusation that European colonialism is responsible for the present evils of the world ignores completely the fact that for hundreds of years Muslim imperial ambitions gobbled up the entire territory of Eastern Christianity in the Middle East, as well as Persia, Afghanistan and India, Christian North Africa, Spain, and Sicily, and, eventually, Constantinople and the Balkans (including Greece), before Muslim imperial adventures were halted in France (at the Battle of Tours in 762), and at the very gates of Vienna (in 1529!), and that Imperial Islam engaged freely, not only in colonial expansion, but in the capture and use of slaves from conquered peoples, as well as from raiding parties in continental Europe as well as the British Isles.

While not justifying the bitter hatreds and the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, it must be remembered that for centuries Muslims comprised the dominant power in the Balkans, to whom the Serbs and others were subservient. Indeed, an example of this subservience can be seen in the practice of scouring the Sultan’s Christian subjects for strong boys who would, at the age of 12, be given to Muslim families, where they were indoctrinated into Islam and trained as Janissaries, an elite corps of the Sultan’s bodyguards. Many Janissaries rose to high position in the Ottoman Empire, but they were still a sign and symbol of subservience and the status of Christians and other religious minorities as al-Dhimma, the people of the Dhimma, that is, contract status as tolerated aliens in return for payment of a tax (essentially, protection money). The bitterness of the war in Chechnya is partly the result of the long period during which Russians paid tribute money and provided slaves for the Muslim Tatars, and their eventual victory over them and their subjection to Russian rule. Such historical memories run very deep.

Foregoing added on Friday, 24th May, at 20.36 Atlantic Time ——————-

I was going to ignore the outrageous beheading of a British officer soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, on the streets of London by Muslim fanatics, a form of “individualised” jihad which seems to be becoming more attractive to Muslim radicals who seem no longer to have large jihadi organisations able to organise and carry out more ambitious attacks on infidels. However, Medhi Hasan — he of the encounter with Richard Dawkins who scoffed at Hasan’s belief in winged horses (or mules) and Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and then through the seven heavenly realms — who is now the political director of Huffington Post UK, decided to weigh in with the declaration that the men who carried out the atrocity in Woolwich were acting contrary to Muslim teachings. For it says, Hasan tells us, in the Qur’an, that he who kills one man is as if he had killed all mankind, and he cites chapter and verse in doing so, concluding with the ringing pronouncement that:

Thus, the two supposedly Muslim men suspected of killing and mutilating an unarmed, off-duty soldier in the middle of a London street, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), were violating the injunction of their own holy book.

Hasan goes on to approve Prime Minister Cameron’s declaration that

Wednesday’s barbarism was “a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country”.

But we have a right, I think, to ask whether it is plausible to suppose that what these “barbarians” did was in fact contrary to the teachings of Islam, a religion which, historically, is blighted by events such as this, and continues to issue in barbarously cruel acts designed (so it seems) to terrify people into submission to the dictates of God’s last messenger.

As I say in the title of this post, there’s always a proof text around when you need one. Hasan quotes from verse 32 of Sura V of the Qur’an, “The Table Spread,” where this is said — and I ask you to pay close attention to the words, which are not as simple and straightforward in their meaning as Hasan suggests:

For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosover killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah’s sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth. [my bolding]

Indeed, it is quite clear, if further clarity were necessary, that this verse actually enables the kind of barbarism displayed by the cleaver wielding fanatics in Woolwich. It is not a straightforward: If you kill a human being it is as if you had killed all mankind. It is: If you kill a human being, except for manslaughter or corruption in the earth, or if they do not accept clear proofs of the sovereignty of Allah, and thus become prodigals in the earth, it is as if you have killed all of mankind. So the murder of unbelievers, who will not submit to the decrees of Allah, are legitimate targets of Muslim rage, and it is a misuse of the text to suggest otherwise. And, more importantly, perhaps, the decree was to the Children of Israel; it is nowhere said that this applies to Muslims at all.

Indeed, it would not be too strong a claim to suggest that Islam actually enjoins such murder on its followers, for every Muslim is responsible for the state of faith in the earth, and there can be no peace in Islam until the whole world is subject to Allah and his messenger. This seems to be the clear teaching of Islam. Whether it is or not, it simply will not do to have Muslim organisations distancing themselves from the barbarism of the Woolwich murder by suggesting that there is no basis in Islam for such acts. There is ample support for acts of rapine and pillage of those who do not submit and accept the clear proofs of the sovereignty of Allah. Indeed, beheading itself (a particularly gruesome crime) is commended in the Qur’an, doubtless because of its horror value. In Surah 47, verse 4, we read:

Now when ye meet in battle those who disbelieve, then it is smiting of the necks until, when ye have routed them, then making fast of bonds, and afterward either grace or ransom till the war lay down its burdens. [my bolding]

And there is enough evidence in the Qur’an to suggest that war against unbelievers is to be endless, until all have acknowledged the sovereignty of Allah and the finality of Muhammad as his prophet. Trying to distance themselves from the plain evidence of the Qur’an, by suggesting that the kind of thing done by the Woolwich murderers could be done only by “so called” Muslims, is in direct tension with the words of the Qur’an itself. The Muslim Council of Britain has

issued a press release “unreservedly” condemning the murder as “a barbaric act
that has no basis in Islam”.

That’s nice. But it is simply dishonest to suggest that there is no basis in Islam for acts of this sort. The evidence tends to go all the other way. These acts are carried out with a regularity which is appalling. The Tsarnaev brothers in the United States, the Islamist terrorist Mohammed Merah in France, the beheading of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan: all these make it clear that terrorist violence carried out by individual Muslims is not only quite common (and probably increasing in frequency), but also rooted in the principles of Islam, and it does no good whatever suggesting otherwise. It’s a bit like saying that the criminalisation of women seeking abortion has no foundation in Christian doctrine. The first step for Muslims to take, if they really want to dissociate themselves from the kind of atrocity carried out on otherwise peaceful London streets, is to acknowledge the origins of this kind of violence in Islam, and then to devise ways of defusing Islam’s obvious commitment to jihad against unbelievers.

As Ali Miraj says in an article in the Independent, “Woolwich is only the latest act of barbarism: Muslims, we must take on this cancer in our midst:”

Woolwich is a seminal moment. In a speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, I referred to the perpetrators as “knife-wielding nutters”. We now have “cleaver-brandishing maniacs” on the streets of London. The horrific attack on an off-duty soldier and the blood-curdling justification of it was designed to shock and instil fear.

The usual round of condemnation from Muslim leaders has begun and Muslim members of parliament will be rolled out to proclaim that this is nothing to do with Islam. That is not good enough. Violent extremism is a cancer in the midst of Muslims and it must be excised.

It is simply not good enough to go through the pious denials that such acts are incompatible with Islam. Perhaps they are incompatible with Hasan’s vision of Islam, but, as Muslims are always careful to point out, there is no central authority in Islam, so Islam is as Muslims do and believe; and it is quite clear that the kind of terroristic violence carried out by the Woolwich murderers is quite consistent with Islam’s expression elsewhere. Indeed, reading through a history of Islam is to be faced with repeated outbreaks of such terroristic violence in the name of God, all justified by the founding principles laid down by Muhammad. It is just silly to claim that this has nothing to do with Islam.

My own fear, often expressed, is that Islam itself is inconsistent with democratic governance and freedom of expression and belief. The pressure that the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation continues to bring to bear on the world community to outlaw blasphemy and criticism of religion indicates that Islam worldwide holds itself to be in a special realm apart, demanding the right to practice its follies without criticism of any kind. This is a guarantee of further atrocities of the kind perpetrated recently on London streets. One commentator in an English newspaper suggests that this atrocity is justified by what the British military has been up to in foreign parts, but this is just further pandering to the idea that criticism of religion and its follies should be qualified by providing other explanatory frameworks in the attempt to understand them. Thus the Tsarnaev brothers were faced with alienation, anomie and culture shock. It had nothing to do with Islam. Well, I agree with Ali Miraj. This is a cancer at the heart of Islam, and it is high time that Muslims accepted that the cancer is eating away at the heart of their faith, and began to do something about it. Avoiding the issue, as Hasan so sedulously does, is not the answer. It is a big part of the problem.

However, I am still troubled by the idea that assisted dying for the terminally ill is a satisfactory form of assisted dying legislation, and I am dismayed that organisations like Dignity in Dying in England, and Compassion and Choices in the United States, are content to consider, as sound, assisted dying legislation in which a terminal prognosis of 6 months to a year is required before someone is eligible for assistance in dying. (I wrote a note to Sarah Wootton regarding this, but have not received a response.)

There are two major problems with such legislation, and it is high time that people recognised them for what they are.

The first problem is that such legislation would not cover people such as Tony Nicklinson or Paul Lamb, whose case is still being heard on appeal; nor will it address the needs of anyone who is suffering intolerably but would not be given a terminal prognosis of the kind required in so many current legislative proposals. I find it difficult to understand why anyone who supports assisted dying considers such legislation to be sound, as Sarah Wootton, of Dignity in Dying (UK), has said of Lord Falconer’s bill now before the House of Lords. It is not sound, because it does not make provision for many suffering people. The heart of the any such legislation must be, not any specific condition or prognosis, but the fact of intolerable suffering as viewed by the suffering persons themselves.

And this leads on to the second major problem. The fundamental argument that is made ad nauseam by those who oppose assisted dying is that legalised assisted dying will place society on a slippery slope that will inevitably lead, in the end, to people dying who do not want to die. The proposed legislation (and existing legislation, such as laws in Washington and Oregon) defines an <I>objective</I> condition which must be reached before assisted dying may be considered a legitimate alternative. Yet it is well known that there are people, like Tony Nicklinson, who will not fit the proposed legislative decisions that seem to be all but universal in current thinking about assisted dying.

However, if slippery slope issues are real concerns (which, in general, they are not), defining an objective condition (for example, terminality within a certain period — prognosis which contemporary medicine is reluctant to make in any event) as in some sense intrinsically worthy of assistance in dying, is effectively to have defined that state as, in some sense, worthy of assisted dying, and thus as life unworthy of life. This is a serious error. Assisted dying should be premised on individual informed decision and consent, based on personal evaluation of the value of continued life. Certainly, some assessment of the seriousness of the person’s suffering will have to be made. No one wants to help someone with transient depression to die, when it is well known that such obstacles in life’s road can be dealt with and overcome. But there are many people who are severely handicapped, such as those with locked in syndrome, who may justly feel that life has become intolerable, even though no terminal prognosis would be forthcoming. These people are as worthy of our compassion as those who are in the last stages of dying, or whose death is imminent within a prescribed time.

Now here is where the problem becomes especially acute, especially in Britain. There, the law governing abortion was, in the imaginations of those who approved the law at least, believed to be applicable only in extremis. Yet its use is much more widespread than that, and might have been predicted to be. Thus, in the opinion of many people, because of their unrealistic expectations, the present abortion situation in Great Britain provides a good example of a slippery slope. Of course, if they had done their research, they would have been aware that women did not seek illegal abortion only in extreme circumstances, so the appearance of a slippery slope is deceptive. Nevertheless, this example is repeatedly used by opponents of assisted dying to show how dangerous the legalisation of assisted dying would be. By tying assisted dying to terminality the attempt is being made to avoid this supposed “problem.” But it is not a problem, and only uninformed expectations regarding the legalisation of abortion had made it an apparent one. The same thing will happen with respect to assisted dying. Assisted dying may be legalised, and if anyone seeks to broaden the scope of assisted dying legislation, opponents will immediately raise the spectre of a slippery slope. “See,” they will say triumphantly, “this is what we warned about, and now we can see how right we were.” But the problem is being built in, because it is well known that not only people with terminal illness seek assisted dying. So it is important to get this right in the first place, instead of setting the stage for either a renewed legal battle to have the parameters of legalised assisted dying widened, or surreptitiously to permit the broadening of assisted dying to cover those who are already seeking the legalisation of assisted dying even though they are not terminally ill.

So, to put the point clearly. Assisted dying should be provided for those who, in their own belief, are suffering intolerably, a suffering that can be reasonably affirmed by physicians or others who care for them, and the right to assisted dying should be based exclusively on informed, voluntary consent, and not on specific conditions such as terminality within a stated period of time. Anything less than this is not enough, and is a serious misunderstanding of people’s desire to have legal assisted dying available to them when their suffering becomes intolerable, and death is the only way to mitigate that suffering.

I am still concerned about Islam, and the misunderstanding that seems to be widespread about the dangers of this religion. Of course, I understand that some people, like Rahman, will immediately say that Islam is made up of as many different belief systems as there are Muslims, but this is a way of avoiding the subject of the religion itself, as some sort of a unity, despite its lack of a centre of authority. Indeed, the fact that it lacks a central authority, aside from the central role that the Qur’an, the Sira and the Sharia play in Muslim life and belief, may serve to make Islam more, and not less dangerous, precisely because there is no way of controlling the most extreme forms of the religion, forms which are, in fact, endorsed by those central texts and traditions. And while Rahman and Paxton continue to struggle over the proofs for the existence of God — a completely hopeless task which has no end, and no very clear parameters either — Islam carries out its nefarious business in the world.

Now, someone will doubtless suggest that speaking about Islam’s “nefarious business” is itself Islamophobic, but this would be simply to misunderstand the religion itself, which obviously includes a significantly large fundamentalist radical dimension, whether all Muslims share it or not. It has to be remembered that Muhammad was a warlord, and not a particularly nice one at that, commending all sorts of wicked acts against his unbelieving neighbours, and that it is this man who represents, for Muslims, an ideal of humanity. It should therefore occasion no surprise that this ideal is used by some Muslims to justify acts of suicide bombing and the contemptuous use of “kuffar” women. Indeed, one imam in Oxford states the problem with unusual clarity when he points out that in many mosques, this kind of treatment of “kuffar” women is actually commended by many imams. This is reported in the Telegraph:

The activities of the Oxford sex ring are “bound up with religion and race” because all the men – though of different nationalities – were Muslim and they “deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases”, Dr Hargey said.

That attitude has been promoted by religious leaders, he believes. “On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.”

People tiptoe around the issues and refuse to discuss the problems exposed by the scandals such as those “from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby”, he wrote.

In all cases the perpetrators were Muslim men and the victims were under age white girls.

To pretend it is not a problem is the Islamic community is “ideological denial”, Dr Hargey said.

Yes it is ideological denial, but the acknowledgement must go deeper than this, because, at the heart of Islamic texts (as of those of any great religion) there are violence of god traditions which can easily be unpacked in terms of real violence of humans against humans, and it is not only foolish, but dangerous to deny this.

[Please notice, as an aside, the role that the burqa plays in this, and how it not only endangers Muslim women, by suppressing their individuality and freedom, but how it plays itself out in the surrounding community, where other women are thought of and treated contemptuously, because they do not dress up in bags as decent women are supposed to do. This makes the burqa and other concealing clothing a source of direct harm to non-Muslim women, and should be recognised as such. In the light of this, there is ample reason to ban the use of concealing clothing. Liberty may justly be limited if it is likely to lead to harm to a significant number of people, and the demonstrative differentiation between "decent" women, who cover themselves, and those women who may be deemed obscenely indifferent to men's perception of them, enforced by concealing clothing, is obviously related to the grooming of girls (thought of as "meat") for sexual use and abuse. This obviously puts all women at risk, and, eventually, if allowed to continue, will force all women to dress in concealing ways simply to enforce the belief that they are somehow no longer marketable commodities.]

Islam is a special case of this, and we need to be ready to see, not only how close to the surface these aspects of Islam really are, but how pervasive they are. We also should recognise how these traditions of sacred violence are being denied by the suggestion that the use of a religion’s violence of god traditions is not the responsibility of the religion itself, but the individual responsibility of those who (individually) take those traditions seriously. We need to remember Rahman’s claim that the Qur’an is the direct word of God that comes to us without cultural or historical mediation. If, then, these traditions are translated into violence by those who accept them with devotion, we should not be in the least surprised.

This is evident in the way that the Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are being spoken of as “self-radicalised.” According to the International Business Times, even President Obama is using this language:

The recent bombings at the Boston Marathon are an example of the dangers of self-radicalized individuals, President Barack Obama said in a press conference Tuesday at the White House.

Speaking of “self-radicalisation” is a way of separating radical Islam from Islam itself, as an extreme, radical or deformed species of Islam. And yet there is ample basis within the Qur’an, the Sira and the Sharia, for the kinds of extremism practiced by the Tsarnaev brothers.

In an article entitled “The Myth of Muslim Self-Radicalisation,” published in the New English Review (of which, by the way, Ibn Warraq is a member of the editorial board), Jake Neuman points out that there is plenty of source material in the Muslim sacred corpus to justify the kinds of terrorism practiced by the Tsarnaev brothers. Not only Muhammad’s own example, whose use of terror in the furtherance of his creed is well-known, but the Qur’an itself is replete with all sorts of encouragement to slaughter unbelievers, and thus to terrorise them, practices which, as Bat Ye’or points out in detail in her book The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, were a regular, if marginal aspect of life in the lives of those living under the yoke of Islamic rule. In other words, terrorism in Islamic society was never a majority pursuit, but it was always one that was honoured because it was in accord with revelation. To suppose that the Tasarnaev brothers are outliers, self-radicalised loners, or acting contrary to the revelation of their god as Muslims receive it, is to mistake something that has typified Islamic rule from the beginning as unusual and exceptional.

To quote from Neuman’s article:

The myth that Islam is a peaceful religion and Muslims are just like any other people is the greatest myth that’s ever been foisted on kafir societies. Yet it is Muslims – and only Muslims inspired by Islamic teachings – who commit senseless massacres of people in such an horrific manner. The following is just a mere fraction of the authoritative teachings of Islam. Teachings not of peace and love but of murder, terror and destruction.

Bukhari: 4852:220: “Allah’s Apostle (Prophet Muhammad) said, “I have been made victorious with terror”

Quran 3:151: “Soon shall We cast terror into the Hearts of the Unbelievers”

Quran 9:111: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Qur’an: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? then rejoice in the bargain which ye have concluded: that is the achievement supreme.”

Quran 9:5: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”

Reading such verses and believing in them – and the many other similar verses found in the Koran, the supporting “sayings” of the hadith, the evidence of the Sira, all of which the “good (or ‘true believer’) Muslim” must believe to be true (and seek to emulate) – does not amount to “self-radicalization,” the radicalization results precisely from reading and believing the Islamic Trilogy.

Of course, it may be suggested that this is to take these quotations out of context. However, since the Qur’an is thought to be a timeless revelation, though parts of it may be given historical context in the Sira, the words themselves have a permanent and universal application.

Lest it be thought that Neuman’s quotes are selective, it is perhaps worthwhile referring to the following from Sura VIII of the Qur’an, entitled “The Spoils of War”:

65 O Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight. If there be of you twenty stedfast they shall overcome two hundred, and if there be of you a hundred stedfast they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve, because they (the disbe­lievers) are a folk without intelligence.

…

67 It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land. Ye desire the lure of this world and Allah desireth (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty, Wise. [my italics]

68 Had it not been for an ordinance of Allah which had gone before, an awful doom had come upon you on account of what ye took.

69 Now enjoy what ye have won, as lawful and good, and keep your duty to Allah. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

For those who are interested, I use Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’an, and it is clear, based on these brief extracts, that there is a level of Islamic sacred text which sanctifies violence against unbelievers. This is a straightforward justification of what would normally be taken to be unjustified murder, pillage and rapine, and though Pickthall footnotes the passage as referring to the Battle of Badr, given its presence in a sacred text its scope is universal, and licences the slaughter and pillage of unbelievers as such. So it should come as no surprise to find that imams in Britain have commended treating unbelieving women as chattel, for there are deep currents within Islam itself which commend this kind of behaviour. Of course, this does not mean that all Muslims support or would indulge in such behaviour; but it is to say that Muslim sacred texts do, and the idea that those who read such texts and use them in supposedly “radical” ways are “self-radicalised” — and not, therefore, radicalised by Islam itself — is disastrously misleading, excusing a religion for which, taken as a whole, there is simply no excuse.

It is this kind of thing, by the way, that leads Geert Wilders to think of the Qur’an as fascistic and dangerous. I think it is, and it is time we stopped ignoring the plain meaning of religious texts, for that meaning will be adopted by some believers, whatever a majority may say. This is why it is unfair for people like Jonathan Rée to speak of A.C. Grayling as having a fundamentalist streak. In his Guardian review of Grayling’s new book, The God Argument, Rée says this:

Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes.

Rée simply misses the point. It’s not that Grayling misses the nuances of interpretation that those who read the scriptures or understand theology in more figurative ways reveal. The problem is that the literal text remains, and will have its effect. Suggesting that religious texts can “flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes” is all very well, and it is doubtless true. But the texts themselves, as sacred, can be used in a much more single-minded fashion, as Christian fundamentalists and Muslim radicals demonstrate, and it is this use to which religious fervour is most likely to be attached. And the point is that religion, at its worst, is a form of ideological zealotry. This is what drives religious belief. No one who thinks of the scriptures of any religion as “teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes” will ever capture the religious imagination, which teems with unreflective passion and fervour instead, and looks to holy writ to support actions prompted by such religious emotion. Anyone who has managed a congregation of religious believers knows this. Academic discussion of the complexities of the scriptures is all very well, but it doesn’t bring in dollars, and it is dollars and numbers of ardent believers that allow religions to flourish or to be seen to flourish. And this leads to people who murder abortion providers or blow up people who are enjoying the exhilaration of watching a marathon. And dismissing those who do such things as outliers, or as individually radicalised, simply overlooks a central feature of all religion: that it is driven by a universalising enthusiasm that gives meaning only to the extent that others share it. Fundamentalism thus lies at the heart of religion, and no amount of clever hermeneutics will change that. Religions whose texts provide the occasion for violence — as Islam does with almost monotonous repetitiveness — will in fact produce people whose religious fervour will be expressed in violent and destructive ways.

Suggesting that those, like the Tsarnaev brothers, are marginal figures, self-radicalised by their disappointment with life in America, is simply to ignore the most salient feature of their actions: that it was driven by religious belief and devotion. The only reason for suggesting otherwise is out of concern for other Muslims who do not act violently, so as to protect them against an anticipated backlash, if it ever came to be believed that Islam as such actually leads to such violence. However, it does lead to such violence, and does so repeatedly, as often, it must be granted, against their own fellow-believers as against nonbelievers. What is surprising is that this sort of religious violence has not led to a more serious backlash than it has. Indeed, the instinct seems to be to protect Muslims from the contempt that their religion deserves. Part of the reason for this is humanitarian. Another part, I suspect, is the fact that, if Islam comes under too close a scrutiny because of its proneness to violence, other religious traditions will be given similarly close critical attention, and to avoid this it is thought better to whitewash one religion than to call all religions into question. I recall objecting to the Vatican’s Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian as calling into question the Anglican Church’s continued relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in theological education. The response I got was that the Anglican Church also has skeletons in its closet, and nothing more was said on the issue. I find it hard to believe that reluctance to challenge Islam on its violence of God traditions (which is, upon examination, but a strict reading of the sacred writings of Islam) has a similar rationale.

I want to thank everyone who has read and followed the blog, and the many who have made the discussions so rich and rewarding. Over the last two years and six months (or so) I have written something over 840 posts. I have backed up all the posts which I wrote myself, including the quotes which were included in them. The words come in total, to 1, 386, 095  words. That is surely enough for now. I do need to do other things, which constant attention to the blog has prevented me from doing, including, if it is still possible for me to do this at my age, to write a book about assisted dying. I have already mentioned my renewed interest in photography, and we will have to see where this leads me. I suspect that the reason that I found my transfer to Freethought Blops so distressing was the fact (although I did not know it at the time) that I was coming to the point where I did not want to be committed in the long term to the blog.

Once again, my thanks to all those faithful readers who have followed the blog over the last couple of years. You have been a great community of people, and have shown yourself to be intelligent, alive to the difficulties facing us in the world today, willing to think passionately and clearly about issues that concerned me, and I am grateful for your participation, without which this would have been a very lonely exercise in talking to myself. I offer you my heartfelt thanks.

I do this with great trepidation, striking off in a completely new direction, and my hands are trembling as I type these words. I feel a great sadness, but I do feel the need, nevertheless, to move on towards an unseen and unknown destination. I would like to thank, especially, Ophelia Benson and Jerry Coyne for their encouragement and support. In adding the military last post as a closing flourish, I do so full in the knowledge that this is a major ending of sorts in my life. It is remarkable how blogging can define a person. I hope those of you who are disappointed will not feel any sense of betrayal at my decision to move on. Thanks, once again, one and all.

The Last Post

On an earlier post two commenters have been duking it out over the argument from design. I do not intend to repeat their arguments and counterarguments here. There is a simple reason for this. The design argument cannot prove what it sets out to prove, and anyone who has thought about it for a moment must know why. According to one of the discussants, Rahman,

There must be a reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life.

And, of course, no doubt there are — reasons, that is. But there is no obvious reason why we should think that there must be a — that is, just a single, quite overwhelming — reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life. This is an illegitimate step in the argument.

Take the argument that the other discussant, Paxton, uses, to show that the argument from design is simply irrelevant to an explanation of how things are. AC Grayling uses this argument in his new book, The God Argument, and it basically goes like this. If you go back into the past and try to determine the reasons for things being as they are, you will come upon an entire series of quite contingent events. For instance, why are you here? In order to answer that question you will be taken on a long search though an unimaginably long series of quite contingent events, people being in the right place at the right time, being in the mood (or not) for sex, plus the completely chance occurrence of the sperm that resulted in you being born fertilized the egg instead another of the hundred or so thousand or million that might have, and that perfectly contingent event was in turn dependent upon similar quite contingent events going back, in an unbroken line, to the first denizens of early organic environments.

The problem is, quite simply, that the whole endeavour of a search for roots and reasons wouldn’t have started off unless you were here to set off on it. In other words, you are here. There are reasons why you are here, possibly many millions of them, and all of them quite contingent. You might well not have been here had one of the links in the chain have been slightly different. Someone else, or no one, might have been here in your place, and it would then be that person who would be (or perhaps not, since he or she might have different interests) setting off on the search for the …. Snark — is it?

One of the things about the design argument is that it begins with an established fact: the world as it is, with you in it. Is it mysterious that the world as it is exists? Yes says the design argument enthusiast, because he has a cause in mind that would determine the world just as it is, in all its complexity and significance. So, in a sense, the designer enthusiast already has an answer, and he needs to come up with reasons. So, it’s fine tuning, is it? But how fine? Did the design enthusiast really think that it is so finely designed that every single contingent event that produced him (or her) was a part of the plan, so that the design enthusiast is absolutely determined to be here? And if not, what does the designer do?

Well, says the advocate of fine tuning, the designer sets the main parameters going, so that all these contingent events could eventuate in … well, precisely me! But if they are all part of the design, in what sense are they contingent at all? Suppose we imagine, as the religious are wont — for reasons past understanding – to do, that the designer is the god of traditional theism, and has all the perfections, perfections which are, when looked upon as absolutes, convertible with each other and therefore one. As such, this being is not only the origin, but also the end of all things. So far so good. However, not only does this subvert our original assumptions regarding contingency, it makes everything necessary. But necessity and contingency here cancel each other out. We began by assuming that for the world to exist as it is, there must be fine tuning involved in its coming about that the world as it exists came into being. But now everything, even chaotic universes, are necessarily so, for some possible worlds are arguably chaotic, certainly places of minimal order in which life will not develop. If this one is fine tuned, and its being so requires intelligent agency, then the same agency must create unintelligible or minimally intelligible universes as well. But does chaos necessitate an intelligent creator? It would seem not, but this seems to be the conclusion of the argument from fine tuning. The only other alternative seems to be that each universe somehow contains the explanation for whatever order exists within it.

The point is, in case you hadn’t noticed, that the argument from design by fine tuning sneaks in a presupposition, as I have already suggested. As Kant thought, all the other arguments for the existence of god presuppose the ontological argument, and sneak it in surreptitiously. The reason for this is probably because that is the way we think. We think in terms of causes and effects. This is how we make sense of the world. So we extrapolate backwards as far as we can go (or as deep as we can go towards the “ground of being” – it really makes no difference), beyond the limits of thought itself, and we conclude that there must be an intelligibility at the heart of things, and this intelligibility we call god.

But we forget that we did the extrapolating, and the intelligibility is what we contributed in the first place. Our desire for absolute explanations is certainly intelligible. Everyone, as Aristotle said, desires to know. But it does not follow that absolute explanations are available to us. At a certain point we need to make a leap, but the leap is not uncomplicatedly justified. Just as the ontological argument depends upon taking existence as a property of things (yes, I know, it’s all a lot more complicated than this suggests), which apparently makes the leap to perfect being plausible, so the design argument seems to suggest that our way of understanding the universe is, somehow, without qualification, objective — or, in other words, independent of our ways of knowing. It is not clear that we can ever achieve that kind of independence and objectivity.

That’s why there are so many problems of reflexivity involved at the limits of knowledge. Take the problem of “free will,” for example. Some people, chuffed about the ability of science alone (as they think) to achieve knowledge, think that they can simply cancel through their own minds, reasoning, and intelligence, and attribute everything to the motion of atoms and molecules, without noticing that even doing that is, in some sense, to rise above the movement of atoms and molecules or other particles. Science has, after all, been supremely successful in solving any number of problems about the way the world works, so the urge to extend it to everything is almost irrepressible. Technology is all around us to show that the scientists have got an incredible lot of stuff right. So they think that the same kind of reasoning that produced those results will be successful in explaining everything, including human thought and reasoning. Indeed, it will, in the end, be able to show that science is the product of evolutionary forces, and that, not only is free will an illusion, but that reason is also an illusion, and so is the application of the scientific method. Reasoning is simply a recursive procedure repeated through increasing levels of complexity. We just think that this is something that we are doing, not recognising that science is something that is being done to us, or through us. The really difficult part of this is the same thing that applies to the question whether a god’s knowing something before it happens necessitates its happening. Given the fact of evolution, and the fact that we are evolved animals, and that “reasoning” is what this particular species of animals does, including scientific reasoning, is science a human achievement, or is it merely something that happens to us, and our belief that Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and so on, came up with the ideas and explanations that they did was really simply evolution (including memetic evolution) passing through them (as it were)?

The question is an important one. Are we intelligent beings, or are we simply highly complex robots? And how would we tell the difference? Is there a god, or does everything just happen by necessity? Are we playing a game, or does the game play us?

Katherine Welby’s remarkable blog post and interview about her depression rings true to anyone who has ever been ill in this way but it also illuminates the complex ways in which religious belief can twine round the condition, providing either a vine to tangle your feet in or a beanstalk to climb out on.

Now that, gentle reader, is all just puffery, nor is it clear in what way Katherine Welby’s “remarkable” blog post or interview (both linked in the quote from Brown) really does illuminate the complex ways in which religion helps or hinders those with depression. And that, I think, is perhaps the most telling thing about this. I certainly don’t wish Katherine Welby any harm, and hope she gets the help she needs for her depression, and if she finds hope in religion, well and good. But let’s not build this up into something of earth-shaking significance, please!

For the daughter of a priest, then bishop, then archbishop (a man who came to his religious vocation later in life), who herself read theology at university, it should not surprise anyone that Katherine Welby thinks in religious categories when she considers the ins and outs of the depression that has blighted her adult years. Having episodically suffered from depression myself, and even thought seriously about ending my life on several occasions, it does not surprise me that she has sought solace in religion, and in religious community. But the anodyne things that Brown says about Katherine Welby’s way of dealing with her depression — all of them gleaned from her blog – through Bible, faith, and church community, is pathetically shallow. Welby herself says that “the Bible is key,” because, as she justly points out, the Bible isn’t a story of perfect human beings in perfect accord with their lives, who go about praising god all day long. The Bible is unquestionably allzu menschlich, to use Nietzsche’s phrase — all too human. Entirely human in its questioning, doubting, failing, despairing … And to the extent that this can allow people to recognise and accept their humanity without condemnation, that’s all very well, of course. That’s a source of strength for Katherine Welby, as she says, and doubtless it can be.

But she acknowledges another side to this particular coin. If the Bible is all to human, it is also all too religious as well, and so it is not at all surprising that she has met with the shadow side of religion, where the accusing finger points at those who have not been able simply to fall back confidently into the supporting arms of Jesus. And, as Welby notes, this is not something that church people are particularly good at, that is, at being screwed up and depressed, without a rosy disposition and confidence in the future. But she doesn’t seem to see that she does the same thing, and her own words could easily be turned to the same purpose, and to box people in. Listen:

The bible is my key. Reading the psalms (that oh so regularly quoted ‘you can yell at God, look’ book) I find that I don’t need to have hope every second of the day. In my hopelessness I just need to acknowledge that God is bigger than my illness and he will come through – eventually. Not always easy, but always possible.

“He will always come through — eventually.” And that’s simply not so. Just because the book of Job ends up with Job being restored to health and good fortune, with daughters even more beautiful than the ones killed at the beginning of the story, doesn’t mean that Job ever sees a smidgeon of justice. Wealth is not an answer to disaster, nor is the declaration, ”I’m bigger than you — where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” a particularly comforting response to the fact that I am finite, fallible and faulty.

I remember my father saying to me, on one occasion when life no longer seemed worth the candle, in the words of St. Paul: “I am persuaded, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” I quote from memory, so I’m not sure I’ve got the words right. I have to say that I did not find the words particularly comforting, and they seemed to me accusatory, rather than affirming, especially at a moment when life simply lay over me like a black pall that would not lift, no matter what I did or thought. And certainly being told that I should be content with that state didn’t really lift my spirits, and I do not, to this day, know why he thought those were appropriate words to remind me of at just that moment. Nor do I see how acknowledging that god is bigger than one’s illness works. If god is bigger than one’s illness then why the hell doesn’t he do something about it?

One of the things that resolved the problem for Elizabeth, when depression at the steady decline of her powers was about to overcome her, was just the opposite. She decided that she was bigger than her illness, and it was being bigger than her illness that brought her through. “I have MS,” she would say with determination, “MS doesn’t have me.” She could rise above her illness, which at first caused very severe depression, because, though the illness at first seemed to have taken over, she was so much more than her illness. She was not content to be characterised as someone overcome by a disease. She could surmount that, and when the time came that she realised that the illness threatened more than she would be able to overcome — when she would no longer be bigger than her illness — she decided that it was time to go.

That’s one of the many things that I learned from Elizabeth, and probably why I am still around to tell the tale. For, after having lost the one true love of my life, I was, not to put too fine a point on it, depressed. Still am, to a great extent. I still find gatherings of people oppressive, for at every gathering someone, the most important person to me, is always absent. But I have insisted, day after day — though the last few weeks after my fall have threatened that — of getting out of bed and occupying my day with study, writing, thinking about things that are important to me, and trying to express those thoughts as clearly as I can. The Bible, I have to say, would have been an impediment to me in carrying out those daily routines that give shape to my days. Weeks and months, and certainly years, have very little shape at all, but I can manage the days, for the most part. But trying to pretend that there’s actually a power that is greater than my depression or my sense of loss: that would be to consign my sense of loss and its attendant depression and sadness to a back alley which I would have to do my best to avoid, for fear of the outcome. Because the Bible, human to its core, no doubt, doesn’t give me permission to be depressed, as Katherine Welby thinks — this kind of thinking: ‘I share your faults, you share mine, so we’re not all that unusual,’ doesn’t really work for me — and the book of Psalms, from which Welby takes such sustenance, really doesn’t give permission to be angry at god, or to doubt god, so much as, precisely as Welby says, to try to force us to put our troubles in proportion, by comparing them to the greatness and mysteriousness of god.

Certainly, the Psalms ask why the evil prosper while the good suffer; they reflect upon danger in battle, and take comfort from the presence of the Lord, who, though thousands fall all around me, will protect his faithful me. And the rich, of course, though they seem to prosper, will not, in the end, be the fortunate ones who will enjoy the favour of the Lord. As in Job, these things, though mysterious and troubling to us, are hidden in the greatness of god. The problem with this understanding of god is that it works at cross purposes with the meaning that Katherine Welby claims to find in it. As she writes on her blog:

I have a God who will stand with me every step. It is just a shame that so often his people will not … I don’t want to be told that I ‘have not a correct faith’ or ‘do not understand God’s love for me’ one more time.

The opening phrase is one that I find very strange. “I have a God who …” And is that really the god of the Bible? What does it mean to say that my god is different from your god, and that “I have a god who …”? Andrew Brown remarks:

This kind of trampling on the weak is certainly a feature of some kinds of Christianity. But so is its opposite. And Welby’s belief that she was never closer to God than when she was close to despair is echoed in many accounts.

But let’s be fair to the “trampling on the weak” Christians. Take Job, for instance. What are we to take away from a reading of the story? That god will come to our rescue in the end? That being depressed and angry at god is okay? Or that if we are angry with god, or believe that no such being could possibly exist, since there is no justice in our suffering, we are wrong, and simply misunderstand god’s goodness and power, which is working itself out in our lives whether that seems clear to us or not?

I don’t want to say to Katherine Welby that she’s wrong to find comfort where she claims to find it. What I’m saying to Andrew Brown is: Let’s not make a big deal out of one woman’s way of finding relief, as though the religious answer is (or can even reasonably be seen to be) a satisfactory way of resolving the terrible contingency and unintelligibility of suffering. For in the end what Katherine Welby really shows, and she would recognise this if she would only parse that “I have a god who … ” carefully,  is that we are really greater than our sufferings, and if we want to deal with them, the task falls to us. Thinking there really is a power greater than ourselves who will resolve our problems may be the way some people describe how they cope; it doesn’t offer a satisfactory answer to the suffering that so many people endure. Nor does it describe what Katherine Welby is doing. If she hadn’t been the daughter of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, no one would have attended to her words at all, but since she is, her words are given more than deserved authority. But what her words really lack is careful theological attention, which leads her, and her readers (and viewers) to put the stress in the wrong place – on religion instead of on what one religious person has done with her religious vocabulary.

Brown ends his bit of paddling around in the shallows with these words:

Depression is, among other things, excruciatingly painful. That’s not something that normally turns people towards God. But it can also involve a loss of value, of worth and of meaning. The sufferer is worthless, their life is valueless, their world is meaningless. These are not ideas to play with, but feelings that play with you.

And God, if he exists, is the ultimate guarantor of worth. That’s a very large part of his job, along with sustaining the universe in being and so on. So faith in God can’t cure depression, but it can be a reassurance of what is hardest to suppose and impossible to believe – that there is a world beyond, outside the chilling fog.

Yes, depression can be painful. Indeed, I find it hard to describe the pain of losing the one person whom I had loved, and by whom I had been loved, with more depth, joy and intensity than I had thought possible. And no, it’s certainly not something that normally turns people towards god. Why should it? Indeed, one of the most mysterious things about Job is how it made its way into the Bible, because Job is, if anything is, an immediate and direct repudiation of god, which is why Herman Tønnessen called Job “a masterpiece of existential blasphemy.” Finding comfort in Job is hard to do. The monster who, at the end of Job’s appeal for justice, points his accusing finger at Job and speaks of its power in creation, but says not a word about Job’s suffering, is like the Christian who points the accusing finger at someone who is depressed and charges them with blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (who, in Christian understanding, at least, brings life, joy, love and self-control). Once you recognise, as Tønnessen says, that the being confronting you is nothing more than a “cosmic cave dweller” and “a ruler of grotesque primitivity,” you realise that you are yourself greater than that. Katherine Welby’s real story is the triumph of the human spirit, if it is about anything, read through the filter of god talk.

He entitles his piece:

I want to be a burden on my family as I die, and for them to be a burden on me

Well, bully for him! That’s clear then, and his children will no doubt, when the time comes, appreciate the burden they have to bear. Of course, he may go out like a light, especially if he insists on flying so near the sun like this — or is it just the heat from his rhetoric simply melting the wax on his wings? But it’s all the usual stuff. Misdirection not to find directions out, but simply to mislead. The Anglican Church of Canada plays the same game, suggesting in its coy words that assisted dying represents a failure of community — which means, of course, abandonment, by those who can read between the lines. Here’s the key:

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other.

But it’s not called “looking after each other” if what the person who is suffering is asking for is help to die. It’s called coercion, then — which has a very different resonance — and if someone is being coerced into being a burden, then Fraser has simply has missed the point about what looking after each other is all about. Moreover — and this, coming from a priest, is inexcusable — it simply papers over the cracks with regard to how people die. Sometimes the burden, if Fraser really wants to know, is borne by those who are dying, and if those who are watching someone die in misery doesn’t notice this, then they are simply not watching closely enough!

Of course, he knows all about it, because he paints the picture grimly enough in these words:

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other. Obviously, I know people are terrified of the indignity of dying and of being ill generally. Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings and mood swings is a threat to our cherished sense of personal autonomy.

But this is where the liberal model of individual self-determination breaks down. For it is when we are this vulnerable that we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after. Lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it, is when we break with the idea of René Descartes’ pernicious “I think therefore I am”.

But he can forget his pointless reference to Descartes. And, besides, what is pernicious about Descartes “Cogito”? Nothing at all, and bringing it up at this point shows that he just doesn’t get it. If Fraser thinks that a philosophical reference that is just marking time in the context has anything to contribute to the discussion then he just doesn’t understand. And “our cherished sense of personal autonomy,” which he so thoughtlessly dismisses, as though much of our suffering is not the product of losing control over our bodily functions, and sitting in faeces, unable to do anything for ourselves, and has no consequences for our sense of who we are, and how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, has simply not been paying attention when people are really suffering, amongst which the assault on our dignity by our disintegrating bodies is an important dimension. And suggesting, then, that “we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after” simply states the problem. What people are asking for is choice. Doesn’t Fraser see this? Say what you like, when this kind of thing happens, the sense of disintegrating personhood, and the dignity with which we have lived our lives, is a vital aspect of suffering, and it is an aspect that some of us would gladly do without.

But no, Fraser will not have it thus:

We are not solitary self-defining intellectual identities who form temporary alliances with each other for short-term mutual advantage. My existence is fundamentally bound up with yours. Of course, I will clean you up. Of course, I will hold your hand in the long hours of the night. Shut up about being a burden. I love you. This is what it means to love you. Surely, there is something extraordinarily beautiful about all of this.

“Shut up about being a burden. I love you.” This is not a loving response. It is dismissive, expressed from a position of advantage and normalcy which will no longer exist for the suffering person, especially once it is said, and being made to go on suffering in a way that simply denudes the person of any sense of self or substance is an act of unjustified coercion, and will not be perceived as love at all. Love me all you like, but leave me in charge, thank you very much, and don’t pretend that forcing me to go on being a burden is seen by me as an act of love. If I find no more of value in this life, and find being “cleaned up” so degrading and undignified that I would rather be dead, then being cleaned up is an offence, not a kindness, and certainly not an act of love. Where did this man learn the meanings of words?

What Fraser has to remember is that, besides being incontinent, many other things are going on simultaneously in the dying person’s body. They may be completely paralysed. They may be completely dominated by pain and discomfort. They may be experiencing completely intolerable effects from the drugs that are being used to control pain. There is any number of permutations of terrible circumstances that simply overrule the individual ability to cope, such that, not only do they not want this act of care and concern; they simply want dying to be over with. One patient I know, while suffering all sorts of other indignities, had such a reaction to pain medication that she was not only in a continual state of hallucination, but she was intolerably itchy to boot. Her whole life was just a mass of disagreeable and intolerable bodily breakdown. She would not have thanked Fraser either for his love or his care, and would have found — indeed, did find — her continued life, which no one dared shorten, an intolerable process over which no one had any control, she least of all. Some people vomit faeces, a quite intolerable effect of some conditions. Is Fraser for one moment suggesting that caring for each other is enough to overcome some of the worst conditions that this feeble frame of ours is prey to?

Besides that, he comes out with the old cock-and-bull story about the value of pain:

Likewise, I have no fondness for pain per se. And I can even imagine taking a draught of something myself one day, were some pain to become utterly intolerable. I do understand. And, yes, even understand that helping others to do it can sometimes be an act of mercy.

But it is also right to push back against the general assumption that pain reduction is unproblematic. For pain is so much a part of life that its suppression can also be a suppression of a great deal of that which is valuable. Constantly anaesthetising ourselves against pain is also a way to reduce our exposure to so much that is wonderful about life.

Does the imagination of idiots like Fraser never rise above this kind of banal claim about the pain and the wonders of life? It reminds me that one of the members of the House of Lords’ debate on the voluntary euthanasia debate in 1936 — notice that, those of you who think we need a longer discussion of these matters! — Lord Horder, to be precise, said this:

Illness and even pain are for many people a new and a not unhappy experience  of the spirit, and we know that it is well within the ambit of the doctor’s conscience to see that the fight [col 494] is not too hard to be borne; and to call this function of the doctor an intolerable burden to the doctor, as did the noble Lord in his opening speech, is untrue. [my italics]

Like Fraser, he thinks he can define, for another person, how they should die, even suggesting that it may be ”a new and not unhappy experience,” and, consequently, how they should be refused the right to die as they choose. The emptiness of the arguments is simply stunning.

And this is what is so plain about Fraser’s completely irrelevant lucubrations on community between the suffering and the carer: he simply doesn’t get it. Can it be that a priest of his long standing has never encountered the kinds of suffering which causes so much distress that people want help to die? If so, he’s had a free ride as a priest for too long. Time for him to work at the coalface for a while in order to see what it is like to die. But only then, after wading through all that pap, do we come to the real point:

Finally, [says he, as though we had gone through some intelligent discussion, or at least preliminary to such a grand conclusion] the contemporary “good death” is one that happens without the dying person knowing all that much about it. But what about the need for time to say goodbye and sorry and thank you? It is as if we want to die without actually knowing we are dying.

And this just shows that he simply does not understand, for being able to choose the time and place of one’s own death, rather than declining into insensibility and drugged stupor, the person who chooses to die can make provision for decent farewells to loved ones and friends long before they have reached those unhappy states, not trying to do so through gritted teeth in the presence of an overwhelming pain, or having already succumbed to drugged somnolence.

And this just shows that Fraser hasn’t the least understanding — but not the slightest understanding! – of what is meant by assisted dying. It’s not the last desperate act of a person who has no inkling of what is happening until the very last moment, when farewells are almost impossible; it is, rather, a conscious act of taking the decision to die upon oneself, instead of leaving it up to the vagaries of the dying process, or to the all but certain stages that the trajectories of some diseases will follow to carry one away either gasping for breath or crying out in pain. Fraser seems to have not the slightest idea of how people die, or, if he does, he deliberately hides it from his readers the less to worry them at the end of life. But it is just as well to know, beforehand, just how terrible death can be, not so that we can be afraid of it — which seems as far as Fraser’s puny imagination will take him — but so that we can be prepared for it, and take our leave before the worst overtakes us.

And this is how he ends his abortion of an article:

Much of this originates in the excessive fear we now have of dying, a fear that is amplified by the let’s pretend game that we play when we remove death from public view. It is precisely this fear that operates when adults worry about taking children to the funeral because “it will upset them”.

As with many things like this, it is a reflection of adult anxiety rather than the child’s ability to cope. And the message it communicates is that death is something strange, weird, and spooky. This only serves to incubate our fear and encourages us to devise further strategies to keep the full knowledge of its reality at bay.

Those who speak about assisted dying speak intelligently about the likelihood of suffering at the end of life, and they seek to avoid it. It’s not a let’s pretend game at all. Ask any number of specialists about the kinds of death that awaits you, given your condition, and they will be able to tell you within an ace of the truth what in fact will likely befall you. This is a game for adults to play, not for children like Fraser, who is still spouting religious irrelevancies in the face of death. He should be ashamed of himself. His resignation from the canonry of St. Paul’s suggested that this was an adult human being, quite prepared to take adult responsibilities upon himself, and live with the consequences. But now he has reverted to his pusillanimous clergy-self, and, instead of looking at this whole matter steadily, and seeing it as a whole, has simply caved in to the prejudices of his tribe. Such men and such idiocy we can do without. I guess, now that he has been appointed to Durham, his spine has already been removed, and he has joined the ranks of the spineless, committed to the “faith of the church” as it is proclaimed, this time, from Lambeth, but looking all the same like the bastion of idiocy from which the English Church liberated itself some four centuries ago. Loose canon perhaps; spineless bishop in the making.

It has been said that a translation of the Qur’an is not the Qur’an, but an interpretation of the Qur’an. So Pickthall’s “translation” of the Qur’an is called The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. For that, after all, is all that it can ever be. The Qur’an is in Arabic, which is, in some sense, though Rahman denies it, the language of God. Evangelical Christians often say that the Bible is inerrant in its original text. Both Muslims and Christians, although they acknowledge the existence of both translation and interpretation, deny that it applies to the sacred text in (at least) its sacred meaning, as though text and sacred meaning are somehow miraculously conveyed merely by reading the text in a certain frame of mind.

Some Christians have got themselves into a bind by supposing that the true meaning of scripture is hidden from those who are unworthy. But how is worthiness to be characterised, so that we know who indeed has grasped the true meaning of scripture, the original meaning intended by God, whatever, presumably, its human “authors” thought? This is what I call the “hermeneutic auction,” and it is a defeater for any sense of sacred truth. Why those who believe that God speaks through texts, do not recognise the problem, is itself a problem, for there are clearly dynamics at work that tend to send interpretation spiraling out of control.

Take, for example, issues of ethics in the Roman Catholic Church concerning the end and the beginning of life. Similar things might be said, as well, about Islam and Judaism, since Christians, Jews and Muslims (inclusive) tend to hold that abortion is forbidden, and that suicide is a grave moral error. It is occasionally acknowledged that people who kill themselves sometimes do so because they are mentally disturbed, and so allowance is sometimes made for this possibility. But abortion, which is a conscious choice by someone, is apparently never justified under any circumstances, if the practice of the Roman Catholic Church is anything to go by. Protestants, on the other hand, sometimes provide some latitude for choice in the matter of abortion as well as in the matter of self-deliverance, though it is not quite clear how these exceptions get through the fine mesh of the Protestant moral conscience. Latitude is sometimes allowed as a matter of “compassion,” but it is hard to see how compassion can make a difference. If abortion is contrary to the will of a god, then presumably there is an ultimate, indefeasible prescription which it would be wrong to ignore. Compassion could cover a multitude of sins, and if obedience to a god is the issue, that is obedience to a being than which nothing greater can be thought, whose writ is universal and absolute, where is the room necessary for raising doubts about this or that individual case?

The problem is written right into religion. If there is a being who rules the universe, whose purposes are achieved by the universe unfolding as it does, where is there room to make individual decisions which bend or break the rules established by this being? That is the Roman Catholic point of view, and you can see that it makes perfect sense. You might say: “Well, but don’t forget that we do things for reasons, and the gift of rationality is one of the god’s gifts to us. So, it makes sense, doesn’t it, to suppose that we were intended to use our reason and intelligence, and think things through for ourselves? Why else have the capacity to think rationally?” The problem with this is that it seems to deny that we need a revelation at all, that is, a distinct, holy text the meaning of which is absolutely assured. After all, if we can think things through, why would a god reveal himself in such a peculiar way? Wouldn’t the god have realised in advance that, if he gave us a revelation in a textual form, we’d use our common sense, and interpret it in ways that seem to make the best sense to us? And wouldn’t he realise, further, that in doing so we’d get hopelessly confused, because there would be so many different interpretations. and agreement on the meaning of the text would be impossible to achieve? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that that is what would be likely to happen?

Now, imagine, if you will, what would happen if this got to be a habit, and diverse peoples got the idea into their heads that the god had given a communication to them (for every them), rather than to others, and that, notwithstanding the fact that agreement is hard enough given only one text, each held their text to be the unique revelation of the god! Not only would we have a disagreement over interpretations, but we would have a disagreement over which text to interpret! And yet each interpreter of each text would hold that they had received the true truth about the god and the god’s desires. Indeed that’s one of the interesting aspects of the Muslim holy book. It spends an incredible amount of time dithering on about unbelievers, those who do not have, we have to assume, the truly true truth, which is given …. Oh dear! Here we have the problem all over again. For to whom is the truth given? Obviously, if I think the holy text simply has to be interpreted in this particular way, then I must think that that’s the truly true truth, and everyone else must be an unbeliever! What would help make my reading of the text the really true, truly true truth?

Here’s where the hermeneutic auction comes in. What I have to do is to convince you, and as many other people as possible, that I am right, and that if anyone reads this text in a different way, that that person, or that group of people, must be wrong. Suppose it done several million fold. Now we have a very large group of people all believing the very same thing (well, roughly, anyway). Is this the word of god? Suppose someone else pulled off the same stunt, and came up with a several million fold group of people who believe something quite different from my group of believers, basing themselves on the very same text. They’re wrong, of course, because I know the truth. That’s the starting point of this, after all. But that was the starting point for the other person too. The hermeneutic auction isn’t like a normal auction, because here I’m selling … what? Ideas. Beliefs? Ways of life? World views? No, none of these things. Power. And adherents to the belief comprises the coinage of the auction. The ability to convince large numbers of people that you are right is what any interpreter must produce, and they represent the “cash” transaction of the hermeneutic auction. But notice, the only thing I can really offer is power, on condition that you join me. The problem is that they can get the same thing from the other person too, because that’s what they have on sale, and the question is whether you’ve backed the right belief, or just a “pig in a poke”. And you can tell that you have the right belief by the number of people it attracts, especially people who are urgently proselytizing others so that the group gets bigger and bigger. That’s why mega-churches are becoming so popular, because, even if you’re really a small splinter group, the size that really counts with the individual is the local appearance of numbers and power. That’s why Muslims speak proudly of the large number of adherents, and also why the Vatican boasts about the number of Catholics throughout the world. They are, effectively, saying: “See, this is a measure of the truth of our beliefs. Could so many people believe, and be willing to undergo hardship and persecution, if the beliefs were false?

This recognition of the cash-nexus conception of hermeneutics, where individual believers play the role of cash, came at roughly the same time that the apparent unity of the Western Church was in the process of breaking down. Here’s an example from the seminal Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, from his great work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He is writing about the interpretation of scripture, and, while it may look innocent in context, it was truly explosive, and it did, in fact, explode, later, in the hands of such as Hobbes and Spinoza. Anyway, here is Hooker:

Shall I add further, that the force of arguments drawn from the authority of Scripure itself, as Scriptures commonly are alleged, shall (being sifted) be found to depend upon the strength of this so much despised and debased authority of man? Surely it doth, and that oftener than we are aware of. For although Scripture be of God, and therefore the proof which is taken from thence must needs be of all other most invincible; yet this strength hath not, unless it avouch the selfsame thing for which it is brought. [That is, the power of scripture lies in the truth of the interpretations: "the selfsame thing for which it is brought]  If there be either undeniable appearance that so it doth, or reason such as cannot deceive, then Scripture-proof (no doubt) in strength and value exceedeth all. But for the most part even such as are readiest to cite for one thing five hundred sentences of holy “Scripture; what warrant have they, that anyone of them doth mean the thing for which it is alleged? Is not their surest ground most commonly, either some probable conjecture of their own, or the judgment of others taking those Scriptures as they do? Which not withstanding it to mean otherwise than they take them, it is not still altogether impossible. So that now and then they ground themselves on human authority, even when they most pretend divine. [Everyman edition, vol. 1, 274-275; my italics]

Note how this completely undercuts the claim to base anything surely upon a supposed scriptural text, since it is always open to interpretation, and may thus be a matter of human authority alone, and not divine, as the interpreter supposes. Hermeneutics is really in the nature of an auction. There is no sound reason for accepting one interpretation over another, if what is being sought is something so firm and of such authority that nothing can move it or call it into question. All that one can go on is the number of those who accord authority to the text so read and understood. This is what allows Maryam to say that while there is no established authority in Islam, not anything goes. That’s because there is a consensus upon which religions build. Of course, when the religion itself is in a transition, then the question as to the authority of a given interpretation comes under severe test and question. And, besides, since there is no ultimate authority, why should the consensus be taken to be authoritative? It’s all a bit of  “catch as catch can,” when it comes to interpretative scope. Perhaps the most daring interpretation is the one which attracts the greatest approval, and, in this case, who is to say that that interpretation is beyond the “not anything goes” — which itself is but one more interpretation in the hermeneutic bidding wars? But notice also that it is at least plausible, as Hooker says, that any interpretation is open to the possibility of being false.

To my mind, of course, this means that the idea of sacred scripture is incoherent, because there simply is too much scope for personal interpretation, or authoritative imposition of an approved interpretation. But approved by whom and for what purpose? If there really is no authority in Islam — and Protestants long ago appeared to give up adherence to final authorities — then what interpretation can produce its bona fides, besides the one that garners the greatest following? But why on earth should one accept what a majority accepts? It is not a test of truth, and can be, at most, a test of strength. This is scarcely a solid enough foundation upon which to build a superstructure of faith and practice. So, please, before you opt for any notion of a sacred text, be aware that you are making yourself a hostage to the fortune of your preferred interpretation, against all the others that can be produced, and may, in the end, achieve a larger following than your own. As I say, this indicates that the notion of “holy text” itself is incoherent. People who think of certain texts as worthy to be put in this protected category, have but a step or two to break their chains. I commend the iconoclasm. It was already smashed, did you but know it.

This bias is I’m afraid, reflected in all your opinions – muslims bad, westerners good.

This, however, is not the case. But I would say, without reservation, that the Enlightenment (one of whose principle founders was Benedict de Spinoza (or Baruch de Espinosa), a Dutch Jew of Portuguese stock) is better than Islam and Christianity, or any number of other religions put together. Not only that, but it is worth defending against the incursions of religious beliefs and practices from whatever quarter. What troubles me so much about the growing presence, in the heartland of traditions whose sources lie within the history of the Enlightenment struggle with religion, and its partial liberation from religious prescriptions, of pre-Enlightenment religious traditions which are striving to roll up the Enlightenment and put it back into the box from which it came.

Indeed, I have been at pains to point out, over the last two years and a few months that I have been writing this blog, that not only is the presence of a very conservative Islam putting increasing pressure on what might be called “the Enlightenment settlement” in Western democracies, but, in part, I believe, prompted by this presence, Christianity, in its various forms, but especially in its Roman Catholic and evangelical forms, has been making increasing demands to public recognition in law and cultural practice. The recent signing into law, by the conservative Governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback, of a bill that defines life as beginning at fertilisation, is an example of this increasing intrusion of religious belief into the political sphere, which is a direct challenge to the Enlightenment principle of the separation of religion from the political realm. The Governor said, on the occasion of signing the bill into law:

All human life is sacred. It’s beautiful. With this, we continue to build this culture of life in our state.

This is not only a violation of the privacy and liberty rights of women; it is a direct challenge to the Western tradition of Enlightenment values of individual liberty and rational discourse. The sanctity of life principle is essentially religious, and, however valuable we think life is – and it is, in general, justly considered to be a great good – we cannot impose on women an obligation to bring each pregnancy to its “natural” termination, whether in spontaneous abortion or birth; nor may we impose on every person in states that they consider to be conditions of intolerable suffering the duty to live until their “natural” death. Both of these prescriptive attitudes are religious in origin and function, and have no place in liberal democratic jurisdictions.

Enlightenment values have priority, not Western or Eastern, Christian or Muslim, Sikh or Hindu. And the priority of Enlightenment values is such that they should provide protection for the freedom and equality of all. Practices which abridge this freedom and equality should be prohibited, especially when they may be seen as deliberate challenges to the possession of such freedoms and such equality. This is why I believe that the burqa should be banned in all free societies, and why, in general, religiously distinguishing dress, and practices, should be reserved to private space.

In the comment stream under an earlier post, “An Unpopular Position: Ban the Burqa,” Maryam Sundara had a great deal to say that was taken by some to be a reasoned presentation of a woman’s point of view. I do not myself think that it is a reasoned point of view, from whatever source. Maryam Sundara also has a blog which concentrates on woman’s place in Islam. In it she takes up a point of view that is so at odds with Enlightenment values that, if it does indeed express an orthodox Muslim point of view, it shows Islam to be implacably at odds with the Enlightenment tradition of reason and freedom. Of course, Maryam tries her best to make veiling the bodies and faces of women not only reasonable, but even affirming. Thus:

This is a mistake that many people make: they do not understand why Muslim women observe the veil.  In Islam, women are veiled because women are the hearts of the society. Woman symbolises the inner meaning of life. Woman is the kernel protected by the shell. Woman is the soul that inspires and enlivens the community as a whole. In fact, the Arabic word for ‘soul’ (nafs) is grammatically feminine, and also the word for ‘life’ (hayât) is feminine.

But this is mere persiflage. The Roman Catholic Church does the very same, when it speaks about women, whilst denying them leadership positions in the church, a practice which, as we are finding out, conceals a multitude of sins.  Here, for example, is Pope Bergoglio on the role of women:

This is beautiful, and this is the mission of women, of mothers and women, to give witness to their children and grandchildren that Christ is Risen! Mothers go forward with this witness! What matters to God is our heart, if we are open to Him, if we are like trusting children. But this also leads us to reflect on how in the Church and in the journey of faith, women have had and still have a special role in opening doors to the Lord, in following him and communicating his face, because the eyes of faith always need the simple and profound look of love.

It’s really a deprecating put-down of women, but people have interpreted this as a significant shift from the position of Pope Ratzinger. The woman’s role is “in following [the Lord] and communicating his face” – and why? – “because the eyes of faith always need the simple and profound look of love.” It is the role of women to give witness to their children and grandchildren, and they do this by offering their simple (yet profound) love. As I say, it’s a not so subtle put-down. The importance of women in the church is to be loving mothers and grandmothers! It’s just that simple. And people have interpreted this as a seismic shift in the church! The heart weeps! It is no different from Maryam Sundara’s

Woman is the kernel protected by the shell. Woman is the soul that inspires and enlivens the community as a whole.

Which, I have said, is mere persiflage. It is a way to ennoble women by giving them no active function within the society at all, but to be still at the heart of society as its “animating” principle. Religions regularly do this to women, because, it is thought, women and men are fundamentally different. Women can’t be priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches, nor in many Anglican and Protestant ones. Jesus wasn’t a woman, and it was Jesus who offered the sacrifice of himself, and only a man’s sacrifice, apparently would do.

Indeed, Christians speak of their god in purely masculine terms (though the Jewish scriptures, by contrast, provide feminine images of the divine). God is one, yet comprises Father, Son and Holy Spirit (I can still remember the Bishop’s directive which said that we could not substitute the words “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” for “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” in the Christian rite of baptism), a triad in which each flows into the other, as the Athanasian Creed makes very clear – yet, you might well think, very confusedly:

3.  And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in  Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

4.  Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

5.  For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.

6.  But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.

7.  Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.

8.  The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.

9.  The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.

10.  The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.

11. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.

12.  As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.

13.  So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.

14.  And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.

15.  So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;

16.  And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

So much for three-in-one. But the upshot is that a god worshipped in these terms cannot be represented by a woman, so a woman may not lead the eucharistic assembly, or, as the first letter to Timothy makes clear, rule over men:

But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. [KJV, 1 Timothy 2.12]

Well, that’s clear enough, and popes are not about to bring about change in this respect.

But still, woman’s place is important, vital even, “the soul of the community,” according to Maryam, or women are those who give that “simple and profound look of love,” which opens the doors of the Lord to the next generation.

Which leads me to interject the new Jesus and Mo cartoon, notice of which just this moment came in from jesusandmo.net:

Of course, Mo is uttering a deepity – to show that just replace ‘deeply’ with ‘profoundly’.

And so, of course, are the pope and Maryam Sundara. Here is one of her comments from the earlier post on banning the burqa (sorry to quote at such length):

If I were a Chinese person, I would know that there are certain things that define me as Chinese: Chinese food, Chinese music, Chinese dress, Chinese art, Chinese literature, Chinese poetry, Chinese architecture, et cetera. If I were a Chinese, I would be proud of my being a Chinese. I would try to be ‘as Chinese as possible’. I wouldn’t try to prove to the world that I am ‘equal to Americans’ – and that my only difference with Americans is the shape of my eyes.

It is true that there are sub-cultures within Chinese culture. It is also true that each individual is different. But there are certain traits that Chinese people have in common (which are quite noticeable when you compare them as a whole with Americans or with Indians). There are Chinese people with a European mentality. There are women who are a bit masculine (but that’s an exception to the rule)

Also, there is nothing wrong with learning from other cultures. There is nothing wrong with women learning from men. If I have a house, I can invite guests: I can learn from them and they can learn from me. But one important point:

I should have my own house first.

Then only I can invite guests and learn from them. I should have my own separate space – my own separate identity. Then, only I can learn from other people, other cultures, or the opposite gender. 

When you say that men and women should always mix together, you are depriving women (and men) from their right of having a separate space and a separate identity. You are limiting this space only to toilets and spas. If we do not have women-only schools and colleges, how can women have an independent intellectual space? How can they learn to think independently as women? Why should women not have a separate and independent ritual space? Why should they be deprived of this right of having their own space?

When Chinese people learn everything about their own culture, they can communicate with Americans. They can tell them about Chinese culture. They can learn about American culture. (But if they don’t know about their own culture, they’ll just merge into American culture) – Once women have their own identity in its fullest sense – they can communicate with men. They can learn from men and men can learn from them. Otherwise, they’ll just become second-rate males – as they have now become. [my emphasis]

Of course, the last comment – “Otherwise, they’ll just become second-rate males – as they have now become.” – is just nonsense. There is simply no evidence for that. Indeed, according to a recent study, it is simply false that men and women are different in the sense often alleged – as in the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. There is simply no basis for the claim. Indeed, says the study:

For 122 different characteristics, from empathy to sexuality to science [to] inclination to extroversion, a statistical analysis of 13,301 individuals did not reveal any distinct differences between men and women.

This is not at all unexpected. In other words, there is simply no basis for the claim that “they’ll just become second-rate males,” for whatever axis you choose, you will not find significant differences between men and women, so the idea of men learning from women and women from men, if this is supposed to delineate sex-specific differences, is simply a fantasy created in the dark satanic mills of the misogynistic past. So there is absolutely no reason for supposing that, in order for a woman to have her own identity, she must be segregated from the community of men.

But notice, especially, the qualification: “I should have my own house first.” This is damning, because, in Islam, the assumption is that the man provides for the woman, and the woman responds with obedience by staying in his house, unless he gives permission for her to leave, and then only under severe restrictions. At the heart of Islam is an ideology so centred in men and their sexual needs that paradise is widely thought of in terms of the satisfaction of men’s sexual desires. Whether the Arabic word ‘hur’ refers to raisins or virgins (a question Ibn Warraq considers in an interesting Guardian article), commentary on the Islamic paradise is often man-centred and overtly sexual, as Ibn Warraq also notes:

Modern apologists of Islam try to downplay the evident materialism and sexual implications of such descriptions, but, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam says, even orthodox Muslim theologians such as al Ghazali (died 1111 CE) and Al-Ash’ari (died 935 CE) have “admitted sensual pleasures into paradise”. The sensual pleasures are graphically elaborated by Al-Suyuti (died 1505 ), Koranic commentator and polymath. He wrote: “Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [ie Muslim] will marry seventy [sic] houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetising vaginas.”

So much for being the soul of community! Of course, Sundara will also be able to quote verses from the Qur’an which will call this male fantasy into question, but what she cannot call into question is the kind of male-centred society that Islam has created by its strict segregation of women and men, and the oppression of women that has been consequent upon this. This tendency, present in both Christianity and Islam, to separate men and women and to allot to women the lesser part, is directly contrary to Enlightenment values of individual autonomy. The idea that we can conveniently separate society into men and women and their distinct spheres of interest and competence is directly contrary to the ideals of the Enlightenment, ideals which are increasingly coming under serious threat from the resurgent religions all around us.

And lest it be thought that this is no danger to our freedoms, it is obvious that these freedoms are already deeply under threat. Every act of terrorism leads to a reaction which limits freedom in serious ways. This has been pointed out in detail by AC Grayling in his book Liberty in the Age of Terror. No, I’ll stick by my view that the burqa (or whatever such clothing is called in different parts of the Muslim world) should be banned. In general, as well as being, for some women, an act of devotion, the use of concealing clothing is also a political statement, and a conscious rejection of the surrounding society which is taken to be haram, or unclean. Maryam Sundara has enunciated this rejection in fairly graphic ways in her defence of the Islamic tradition of misogyny (though of course she does not call it that). About Islamic tradition I am completely indifferent, as I am indifferent to the Christian tradition represented by the Roman Catholic Church. Insofar as such forms of misogyny insist on being expressed in public ways, they are a challenge to the Enlightenment tradition. And the only tradition which can at once respect different cultural practices – no one, I hope, wants the world to be a drab place without cultural differences – and yet overcome aspects of cultural practice which are misogynistic or otherwise oppressive, is the Enlightenment tradition, devoted to ordering society in such a way as to be consistent with the greatest individual liberty for all people. Islam is now challenging this tradition, and to the extent that it is, we must oppose Islam, and so I do. I also oppose the Roman Catholic Church, which I believe is an imminent threat to individual freedom wherever it is dominant, and seeks to intrude itself in places where it is not. These drives to achieve religious supremacy – and bear in mind that in some respects, both Catholicism and Islam have achieved religious supremacy in certain respects even in North America and Europe, though there are many who continue to affirm that neither is a real threat to us – should be opposed, and where it has been successful, it should be denied them.