pinkfloydpsw's Blog

As politicians, the media and apologist try to convince us that this isn’t about faith, ask yourself this: how could it not be about faith? How does a person get to committing an atrocity of this nature by any other means?

I’m a leftist, as such I tend to accept folks for what they are, whatever your colour, sexual orientation, gender etc is, I don’t much care. Those traits are what you ARE, you were born that way, they are part of your existence and your essence. Your religion is, however, different, different in that you CHOSE to be whatever you are, your choice was based on either what you intuitively feel (without reason or proof), or what you have trusted others to figure out for you. Brendan Cox, although well-meaning and understandable in his actions, has made a fundamental mistake in his logic when he suggests that the tragedy of 22nd March 2017 in London, where 4 civilians and a police person were killed by an attacker, should not be linked to Islam or Muslims in general. What must be borne in mind is that each of these faithful persons has hitched their wagon, to some degree, to the same religious texts that directed the actions of this attacker. We tend to always focus on symptoms when we deliberate this matter, just like political commentary rarely discusses the underlying ideology of a bill in parliament, we rarely discuss the marrow of religions, what drives the religious mind and why it is problematic. I wish to do so now..

Brendan Cox Speaks Out

I said directed because the more watered-down term inspired indicates the possibility of an interpretive mistake by the perpetrator concerning the meaning of the texts, and I do not wish to suggest that when a book says to “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them “ that there is any interpretation made possible by such a command. We must remember that the writings in religious texts are commands, just as it is believed by Christians, that Moses did not descend a mountain with the ten suggestions (allegedly), those that write on behalf of the prophet of Islam are rarely ambiguous in their words; these are categorical imperatives that we are dealing with here, for the true believer there is no conflict between the morals of man and the imperatives of their master, because one is man-made and therefore false and can be easily ignored, and the other is divine and unchallengeable, perfect and unchangeable, rigid and uninterpretable. What we can say is…

• Persons hold beliefs about things in the world
• Actions are based on beliefs about things in the world

So a person making a decision to act in a certain way must believe of that action that it is the correct one, that their belief about things in the world is solid and true, that their actions are justified and that what will follow will be an outcome that is desirable as either an end goal, or is intrinsically valuable (in and of itself, the act). If we accept that the person acting is doing so because of their solid belief in a categorical imperative then they are in some way justified in doing so because they are acting rationally according to the perspectives of all others that would support the command to do so as perfect, divine and uninterpretable. You see the bind we are in here? Either the belief is wrong but the action is justified if the belief is believed, therefore the person is being rational, or the belief is correct and the action is not in keeping with it so the person is not being rational. Now if belief in a higher power is correct and that higher power wishes for unbelievers to be slain then we are irrational for fighting against such things. But if that is true then it positions the higher power as immoral by the standards of mankind, another bind, damn it!!! It’s is a bit like Epicurus’s problem of evil.

What we call fundamentalism is simply true belief, it is the real Muslim that is dangerous, sure many can claim to be adherents to the faith but we are what we do. If we believe we must act so as to ensure a place in eternity, and we truly believe in eternity then our impotence of action now is trivial and easily overcome, you only die once and it is a mere mortal death, nothing compared to eternity. People with this belief system have no reason to cherish or sanctify life in this realm of existence when they have an insight into, and a solid assurance of, such truths. The fact that, majoritarily, those who claim to truly believe do not then act, itself signifies a lack of real commitment to that belief. It is when contradiction and conflict happen that we shake our foundations, that is the essence of the scientific approach. Science can be said to be the mechanism of belief but in reverse, what we can measure objectively becomes truth, or at least knowable truth until disproved. What cannot be said of faith is that it changes with new knowledge, its truth relies on no knowing. How can I be asked to take it seriously then other than in the number of its supporters? And how can I be asked to respect and tolerate it if I am not of it?

Tony Blair took us (the UK) to war based on a belief, the belief that another country, or group of countries, would soon gain the capability to harm our way of life. Add to that the idea that we have a right not to have our way of life violated by another country and you can see where the actions that ensued found their justification. I would contend that this situation is like attacking the chef because of his possession of a knife, the knife gives him a greater ability to harm me than he had before he picked it up, ergo I am of course justified in harming him to prevent possible harm to me. That is a nonsense argument, one where I have made an incorrect judgement, obviously. I haven’t taken into account what he hopes to achieve with the knife, what his motivation is concerning it. With weapons there is no other use but to terrorize, whether that be the terrorism of having them merely in potential or the terrorism of actually using them. NATO countries dominate the world because they have the best weapons and a shared strength in their partnership, a partnership that is itself rooted in ideology (they have the same structure-of-society beliefs, i.e modern liberal democracy and rampant capitalism). In western nations however, there is always the possibility of change, freedom of speech allows minorities to appeal to majorities so that oppression is prevented, the ballot box ensures that we get the leaders we choose on mass and justice is mostly blind to the wild vengeance of the violated. For these reasons alone our society can afford a higher moral perch that that of Sharia based nations. That does not mean that we have cracked it, it just means we are closer to utopia than others are, we still have massive distributive injustices to conquer for just one example. Our ideology is not blameless either its skewed belief forms. It has been our social system’s greatest crime that it has allowed capitalism to commodify the sum of the social world, turning what is simply preference into need, and vice versa in the case of things that cannot be re imagined in relation to money. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would look a lot different if it was ideological, what of basic needs being met rather than belief being supported and respected? The Islamic world may score some greater points in that respect than we do, but that doesn’t mean that it wins this argument overall though.

I am not stating that all Muslims are terrorists or supporters of terrorism, that would be ridiculous. I am saying that in most cases. For all persons of faith, the faith itself normally takes a back seat to the intuitive sense of morality that is inherent in most individuals. When the categorical imperatives of a religion are directly in conflict with human decency, kindness and good conduct what ensues is the real interpretive work, where well-meaning and probably well-moraled individuals grapple with a paradox, emerging the other side of it, if successful, with what can only be described as a comforting cognitive dissonance. There is another reason for inaction on the part of the normal believer, the majority, that is the belief that there is finality to this realm and this time, and that when all is done there will be a division of just deserts for the faithful accompanied by a recompense for the sinner. Nietzsche describes this in The Genealogy of Morals where he questions the motivation behind the very meekness of the meek….

“In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what?—There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their “kingdom” is to arrive—they call it simply “the kingdom of God” – Nietzsche

In Christology, inaction has won the battle against action despite the teachings of skewed moralists and fake sages such as Aquinas, who claimed that the greatest pleasure for the saved in paradise would be viewing the eternal torment of the damned in hell. Nietzsche’s insight was that moral values have conditions for their possibilities, that beliefs change as society changes. The hope of moderate apologist in the west is that the same will happen for the Islamic peoples, the tragedy is that Islam is so against progress that it regresses towards its medieval roots and beyond in the face of contest. No longer do we drown witches, cleanse the impious with fire, kill the homosexual etc. That Christians do not truly believe in the commandments of their books anymore, that there are no real Christians left in Europe, that Christianity has morphed into a personal belief system that takes human morality into account, these are all good things. Post-enlightenment it is impossible to be a medieval-type European Christian, the true Christian believer is now thankfully a thing of the past. When a Christian of modernity claims to love the homosexual, yet hate his homosexuality we witness first-hand the aforementioned dissonance. To separate what is part of a person, their sexuality, from their essence (what they are), requires the belief that we are not naturally sexual beings, it is an attempt to refute nature, an attempt to contend that we come to be sexual beings by some external means, that we have choice in our desires both in preference and in whether to have them at all. We can see this in the 10th commandment of the Old Testament, Thou shalt not covet. This is thought crime. It suggests that I can stop desiring a thing that I desire, now that has got to be nonsense hasn’t it? As anyone who has battled addiction will tell you, the desire for the thing does not go away; it is merely suppressed by another desire that is more important. This highlights something very important about humans, that they are compatibilists. Between their inner wishes and their observable reality lies a cognitive function that resolves conflicts by deceiving the conscious mind, a hoodwink. It is this hoodwink that I wish to examine further, in philosophy it may be seen as weakness of will, contradiction between a belief and the actions that follow, but it may more normally be described in terms of overriding or cascading levels of preference, the preferences related to action works in much the same way. We wish to act, because of the reasons listed above, yet we don’t because a second desire overrides the first, the desire for what is better for us in another way; much like eating junk food is desirable, but being slim, fit and healthy may be greater personal preferences. Because of this we fail to recognize where the weak would not be weak if they had an easier path to their goal or the true courage of their convictions, the conditions do not apply for the possibility of preference one to be realised, yet. And that is the important part, yet, when those conditions do apply, i.e there are enough believers/adherents present in a country to effect real political change beyond simple protection of rights, then the first preference will have greater prominence and relevance. In our hypocrisy we in fact find ourselves criticizing countries where Islam is the dominant ideology, where it dictates the actions of all persons and allows for prejudice, misogyny, oppression, violence, sexual bullying and a whole host of other immoral (from our perspective) practices to flourish. Yet, we expect of those Muslim citizens within European countries that they recognise our culture and our morals as the correct way to construct a society, an economy, a political system and a rights based judicial mechanism. This is naivety, not political correctness or tolerance.

So if we have Muslim citizens and for the most part they are peaceful, then where do the home grown terrorists come from? The key is segregation, the division of persons based on traits of belief. In the UK we have worked hard to integrate new cultures and protect their rights, but we have made one big mistake by being so accommodating, we have allowed believers to segregate themselves and their children. How does it come to be that a person is a radical in a world of information? I can understand the ignorance of a citizen from a nation where media, literature and the internet are all controlled by a tyrannical state, but it is less easy to highlight where our citizens get their ideas from in such a pure form. Everything the inquisitive mind comes to believe is shaken by new knowledge, everything we know is vulnerable to what we may yet learn, but a truth needs no conspiracy, no sponsorship and no contingency theory. Where does solid belief in radical ideas come from if it too has plentiful, abundant and solid arguments against its validity? Only in segregating the subject from the world, protecting him/her against criticism of their belief do we lend it a false validation, one that it could not have gained by itself. The problem with religious knowledge is that its strength is the strength of numbers, a fallacy of compositional mass, it is a brute force system of information. Gravity needs no such support, if nobody believed in gravity then people would still fall toward larger bodies, this applies to everyone universally and has no need of protection in law. Faith based and free schools may seem like a good PC idea but they cannot be, faith cannot be taught as a subject in schools because it cannot be formalised, codified and tested. Religious education is simply a history lesson with no facts, a bad mythology, a bad history, a bad science, a bad philosophy…..

“Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy. But because it was our first attempt, it is also our worst” -Christopher Hitchens

The benefit of mythology is that it is entertaining and the stories told may have wider meanings and moral questions involved, they leave work for the reader to do; we need not believe that Oedipus was a real person to learn something from the work, just as we need not believe that Socrates was anything other than Plato’s character. Religious canons however, try to present themselves and their stories as the answers to moral questions, a final solution; they don’t make us think more, they stop us from thinking, they say this is how it is, how it has always been and how it will always be. A religious scholar may say that the world is flat – I can disprove that by standing on the shore watching a ship come over the horizon and seeing its sails first, but that’s an easy one, how do I disprove the existence of God? The simple answer is that I cannot, but I also cannot disprove Dionysus, Apollo, Cthulhu, The Spaghetti Monster or Russell’s Teapot. It’s true that the absence of evidence for something is not evidence of its absence, so I am back in a bind again, but I don’t care, I will turn to Hitchens again…

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” – Christopher Hitchens

What we have identified is that for most cases the Islamic European individual is overriding a first preference for the dominance and the proliferation of their belief system with a second preference for a harmonious day-to-day existence, the life-without-strife instinct is winning out against the impetus toward violently fulfilling what they believe to be their, and their god’s, rightful goal. But are we, even us lefty atheists, who believe ourselves apriori moral actors, possibly caught up in a dissonance of our own? One where we can believe of other nations that their morals can be different to ours because they live under differently structured societies, while still holding the belief that there are things we will not accept as practices on our own soil? The one country we point to when discussing tyranny is North Korea and the one we avoid criticism of the most is Saudi Arabia, I’m not sure why that is, because these two countries display the same tyrannical totalitarianism as each other, but I suspect it may be something to do with the fact that we don’t trade with one of them in any way. Another country that we actively support in its oppression of a neighbour is the state of Israel, we don’t recognise the right of the peoples they displace as being inalienable, yet we would reserve that right for ourselves in their situation. And this is about rights, if my right to life is violated by your right to tyranny then our shared existence will be a short and unsuccessful one, that is how, internally at least, western nations have remained mostly peaceful since the fall of the last empires, we eliminated the criteria that differentiates between persons based on their measurable differences, what colour your skin is and how your genitalia is configured no longer allow for your oppression. This is real moral progress, something that we can, and should, be proud of.

I sometimes stand in queues, and sometimes I am behind a very shapely woman (you can see where this is going right?), I sometimes have a deep desire to pat the backside of that woman (can’t help the desire, don’t judge), I don’t, why not? I respect the right of that individual to be the owner of their own person as long as they do not violate the rights of others. Even if it was the case that they did violate the rights of others I still wouldn’t attribute to myself the right to violate their rights, I would reserve that right for the state and I would yet further support preserving some of their rights other than that of their liberty or their personal wealth. The right not to be killed, violated, imprisoned, enslaved etc by another person is infinitely stronger than the right not to be treated so by the state, the state can violate these rights to some degree in its parental role but still we will preserve all of these rights to some extent. Even prisoners have rights, and rightly so, we do not wish to make brutes of ourselves via the ecstasy of vengeance. In Islamic countries these rights are not abundant or universal, women are second class to men, the nobility have greater rights than the lower classes, religious scholars dictate rather than follow rules, justice is revenge based and the judge is also the jury. If we wish to find the root of these affects we must only look again toward belief, these are the manifest actions of believers supported by believers, it is not a separated thing. Our own history reflects this same oppression, the bible was used historically to justify slavery since it had nothing to say about its wrongs (but plenty to say about its rights) other than to highlight unbelievers (African Blacks) as heathens and therefore lesser humans than the whites. It is a necessary component of oppression that it dehumanise those that it wishes to exploit in the minds of those who wish to benefit from that oppression and yet live in the continued illusion that they are pious and just. A person cannot consciously believe of themselves that they are evil or wrong. Empires pose as liberating progressive forces working for the betterment of humanity, bringing the good word to the savage, what Rudyard Kipling called the white man’s burden. This of course is mental trickery, its purpose is to justify the unjustifiable, religious texts have always been a bit of a find for oppressors in this regard. So if we can progress past oppression and inhumanity (we may have more work to do though) then why do we not expect the same thing from others? When Americans rally against Muslim non-integration then why are they the bad guys? Could we not concede that the urine-haired, small-fingered imbecile in the big house has at least got one thing right, even though his application of what exactly to do about it reveals other skewed perspectives and preferences he may hold ?

Our failure to link the dominating belief system to the ensuing actions makes apologists of us all and furthers atrocity, as long as we are naive in this way we cannot solve the problem of immoral action. Our failure to attribute our actions out in the world, our foreign policy and our weaponised dominance of the social and economic sphere to what others form as beliefs concerning us may be our undoing. I don’t attempt to justify the actions of terrorists because two wrongs definitely do not make a right, and no action is justified simply by being a reaction, but I must give credence to the words of George Galloway concerning 911, “those planes did not fly out of a clear blue sky”. Mr Galloway was not attempting to justify the actions of Islamist terrorists, he was highlighting where a nation’s continued acts of oppression (militarily and economically), on foreign soil, are sometimes repaid with vengeance. So I will take the moral high ground as an individual who would not act immorally but I will not extend that description to my nation as a whole since we may be also guilty of, in our confusion regarding the rights and beliefs of all, ascribing preference to conditions that are unchosen (colour, sexuality, gender) while also assigning rights to conditions that are unnatural (religion, ideology).

The cries will be “we are too vulnerable to attack, we need to arm ourselves”, there are, of course, many problems with this logic, firstly it is not a coincidence that the one country in the world where people have the right to protect themselves with personal armaments is also the most violent country in the world. Defence is, unlike what Blair and Bush once had us believe, not a stick to beat our enemies with prior to them doing anything, we cannot even correctly identify the enemy, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran etc never attacked us and to the best of our knowledge, we the voter I mean, they didn’t intend to either. The second problem is that this way terrorism wins, if the goal is to terrorise the populous into being more militarised and act from a position of fear then our reactions both validate the terror after-the-fact and inspire confidence in further acts. Thirdly it is fascistic, it gives power to the already powerful persons to curb the liberties of the people, and for their own nefarious purposes they may piggyback the populist wave. Under the rubric of safety we might erode those most precious freedoms that were not won lightly, democracy is not a final destination but more of a constant struggle to prevent tyranny, if we try to prevent the tyranny of external terrorism we open the door to an internal form that is just as savage. Orwell makes this point well in 1984, where the state of Oceania is able to oppress its people perpetually under the condition that it is always at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. We just need to look at the patriot act in the US, where Bush convinced the people to give up liberties in favour of protection from terrorists who were less of a threat, statistically, than those patriots own stairs in their own homes.

It’s not easy to plot a way out of this problem, if we follow Kant’s categorical imperative then I cannot perform an action that I would not make a rule of that is both universal and reversible, so I can’t kill anyone without allowing for myself to be killed for the same reasons (ideology), this way inaction lays and that would be fine apart from the fact that it means inaction for only those that recognise Kant’s imperative. If we look to JS Mill we see outcome as being the overriding justification for action, this is problematic since outcome itself may not be focused on hedonism (pleasure) in this case; not to mention that it positions morality as majoritarian, so democratic and relative in nature, and that also cannot be true for the simple reason that a majority can be dead wrong. Mill’s perspective also allows for atrocity as a method of attaining peace, that too is problematic since it justifies whatever you have to do to get your way, like bombing people or destabilising their political system covertly. Pragmatism is no help either since doing just what works allows for atrocities to be ignored because it is not us that is responsible for FGM and we have to buy oil from somewhere, it is too woolly. A stoic approach can’t help us because we then we would be opposing an injustice by accepting and finding a way to live with it, and that never has worked out well historically. I have no answer, I’m as stumped as you are but I will say this, it isn’t right to call all persons of faith responsible and it also isn’t right to say that the faith and the faithful are free of responsibility. This leads me to a set of conclusions that I might find some comfort in..

• Faith based morality is a falsehood. People will generally act better than it mandates.
• The faithful are engaged in an illusion of insight, they claim to know what cannot be known, we usually call called this wishful thinking, maybe in time we will again.
• Very few believers actually believe what they think they believe. Their faith seems to be a personal one, based on what they desire.
• Most person’s actions are concerned with human moral conduct rather than the imperatives of a bronze age mythology.
• There is, and always will be a resisting force against terrorism in the normality and triviality of the day-to-day existence of peoples who wish to remain liberated.
• History teaches us time and again that religious oppression does not last and neither do religions, for thousands of years before the rise of modern monotheism there flourished all sorts of strange beliefs that now are forgotten, Islam will fare no better if it does not progress, and since it looks like it cannot it will surely be soon over.

Do I take some things on faith, yes, of course I do, the difference is that I have reasons other than my wishes to do so; when the Doctor tells me I have to take three tablets a day for two weeks I trust that he knows what is right because he is a product of both a science and a scientific method, and I mostly trust objectivity. Do I believe that the mind can make some things real, yes, of course I do, again I have other reasons to think that this is so; psychology has taught us that the mind can affect the body, if I believe the pills the doctor gave me will work then they stand a greater chance of working. This is internal, my mind and my body are quite obviously linked, my mind makes my body do things and vice versa. They are either two things that have a full duplex relationship or they are the same thing in the same time and space. None of what I believe allows me to then contend that I can project my wishes out into the universe and see them return to me a suspension of the physical world that is to my benefit. That is exactly what is going on in the mind of the believer, they think that their belief alone will change the world. And isn’t it such a nice coincidence when the religion they happen to be part of tells them how special and how much better they are than others, and how their faith makes things happen? A plentiful bounty for the psyche, and so rewarding. Sartre speculated that existence was without meaning, absurd and uncertain, he also recognised that that very fact may impose too much responsibility upon certain sheep-like individuals, people for whom radical freedom is too great a burden. In Sartre’s opinion bad faith – self-deception on matters of truth that leads people to adopt ideas that are in contradiction to what they actually believe or are – leads to a revolt against freedom whereby the individual plays the role of a moral person without being one, all-the-while knowing that they truly aren’t one. Stoic religion, for this reason, contains a contradiction that is hard to avoid, where we find persons of faith we also find misery and suffering, Mother Theresa was an example of this. In Calcutta, Mother Theresa ran a series of filthy death houses that offered no medicine and no doctors, what they did offer was pain and suffering, the conclusion of which being that piety must require misery and suffering to be godly, but why is this so? Would a good moral actor not feel pleasant about being a good moral actor? No, no matter how much misery is worshipped, there is more misery to be exploited. In this way then religion cannot solve the problems of the world, merely exploit them and in doing so elevate those that wallow the deepest in it. Missionaries travelled the world swapping bibles for medicine, not motivated by the need to help people but on a recruitment drive. I suspect a true moral actor would have given the needy what it is they need without first getting the subject to adopt the scriptures of the setter; that would be the true moral act. As Kant points out, any moral act done for the elevation of the self is not itself moral even if it is correct or in line with a moral law, what is required is the act that is of benefit to the person it pertains to rather than the person who puts it forward. So the act is merely a performance if the actor does not recognise that it is the right thing to do for its own sake rather than because that has what he or she has been taught as being correct.

Why is resistance to an incompatible ideology treated as itself a problem? Many westerners, and most of the western media, praise those groups that demonstrate against white supremacist organisations. When we see a Pro-Nazi rally in Europe the media don’t paint a picture of those persons who are opposing it, with banners and in large numbers, as violators of the Pro-Nazi’s human rights. We take sides because we know the dangers involved in allowing a bad idea to go unchallenged; but that in itself shows a bias that is incompatible with our ideas of freedom, one where no voice is to be muffled before it has spoken. Islamic supremacy is just as incompatible with liberty as any other fascist doctrine; what we have done is chosen to protect a minority, and I agree with that in fundament, but let people speak even if it is bile that they spew, let’s hear them all. The point is that we, as a nation, must allow ourselves to hear every contrary voice, not so that our position is weakened by them but so that we gain validity in the argument that defeats theirs, a hearts and minds approach. While arguing the merits of free speech in 2006 in Canada, Christopher Hitchens made one of the most important points we can recognise on the subject –“Who would you nominate to decide what is good for you, what you can read, what you can view?”  – This single question negates the validity of a parentalism of literature, media and conversation in that it is almost impossible to answer without highlighting one’s own inability of intellect and one’s own desire to be subjugated. If liberal democracy is, and I’m not going to make the claim that it is, the best systematic way to organise a large body of people socially, then it cannot be protected against its critics using laws that are undemocratic. It must continually prove itself to be the best in a comparison against other competing ideologies and paradigms. Avoiding fascism won’t be achieved through being fascist ourselves, a totalitarian system is not proved wrong by using the tools of totalitarianism. Instead of attacking the vocal opponents of Islamism, afford them the opportunity for some tv time in the same studio as the clerics that espouse the peacefulness of the scriptures. Why can we have politicians hauled over the coals on a daily basis on politics shows, over some important yet minor discrepancy between policy and practice, but we cannot allow viewing time for a criticism of the massive problem of compatibility between Islam and liberal democracy? Nearly two billion Muslims need to have their feelings catered for, their sensibilities taken into account when criticising Islam because it is something that they hold dear. What of that? Why is it important? Should it be? No, it shouldn’t and it can’t be, I am allowed to do a book review of Lord of the Rings, and I am allowed to think that it is infantile nonsense, I am allowed to think that white supremacy is morally wrong, I am allowed to criticise fascism, communism, socialism, democracy, capitalism, naturists, vegans, 7^th day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses, blue peter badge holders, children’s TV presenters, the daily mirror, Donald Trump’s hairdresser, the new Top Gear, women’s football, tiddlywinks, labradoodles and their owners, just about anything really, why would I not be allowed to criticise an idea? There are two things we must not speak negatively of, and these subjects tend to be culturally policed as well as being written into law or having laws bent and obscured to pertain to them, Islam and Israel, what is it that they have in common? It is that they have successfully achieved the twin pillars of financial strength and ultimate victimhood, so they are afforded a special dispensation; rights and a protection in both cultural perspective and in law. I stated bent or obscured to pertain to them and I wish to clarify what I mean by that, I mean that I am in total agreement with any law that prevents a minority from facing prejudice for what it is, for example race laws that prevent coloured individuals from being persecuted or gender laws that prevent women from attaining equality and fairness, what I am not in agreement with is using those laws to protect the things that people choose to be such as a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew or any other religious person. Religions are not races, they may be cultural affects that pertain generally to a certain colour of person from a certain region but they are alterable, they are an alignment of a certain group of individuals to an idea and therefore they are no more in need of protection from the laws that are for race and gender that a chess or tiddlywinks club would be. Anti-Islamic racism is a stupid term to even use. We can leave Judaism out of this conversation for one very important reason, they aren’t recruiting, they aren’t trying to achieve world domination through violence (they may be both financially and politically though), I can boycott Israel by reading labels and not buying their produce and nobody is thrusting the Torah in my face while telling me I have to live by its teachings, or be killed.

“Those who oppose Islam will be slain with a fierce slaughter”

So I am to be slain, that’s obviously going to be a problematic situation for me. How then do I become compatible with Islam? How do I be tolerant when I know that this is what its believers believe of me and my rightful fate? A problem with the notion of compatibility is that it violates the very things that we, in the west, hold as being important, the fundaments of liberation, rights and freedoms; hard fought components of modern democracies as we understand them. These are the very reasons we opposed Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China, because they believed of us that we should fall under their form of totalitarian regime, they didn’t want dominion over us but they wanted us to be like them. That’s how ideologies operate, they spread the idea until it is recognisable as an ally wherever it is encountered. It is opposing ideologies that pose the big threat, democracy is more of a guiding idea than a system of total domination, and it is in this fact where we can see its superiority, democracy works from the bottom up in fundament. I would argue that the purest form of democracy is actually socialism rather than capitalism, but that’s a conversation for another time. Islam mandates rather than guides that my wife and my female children are legally my property, to be bargained with, that they are lesser than I and that when disassociating myself with them I must make a financial transaction with, exclusively, another man where they become then his property – if they fail to carry out my orders I can kill them, if they fail to be a good wife then they can be beaten or killed by him. It mandates that my homosexual friends are evil doers because they love persons of the same sex, and that they must be killed. It mandates that anyone who is not of the faith must live as a slave to those who are of the faith, and of course can be killed. It mandates that anyone who has once believed but now doesn’t must be killed. It mandates that women are at fault when they are sexual assaulted because they have inspired the beasts that carry out such acts by being overtly attractive and sexual, and they can be killed for dishonouring their owner (father, brother or husband). It mandates that animal must suffer when being killed for consumption (Halal) by bleeding out while conscious and aware, so in pain. None of these, and other, considerations allows Islam to be compatible with a western liberal democracy where women are not property, people are equal before the law, we do as much as we can to prevent the suffering of animals, homosexuals are not breaking the law by being homosexual and are afforded the same rights and privileges as everyone else (barring their treatment by the church), non-believers and atheists are not second class citizens and we have no slavery other than that of the wage (a slavery that we can change by the ballot box). The idea that a Muslim can live in this contradiction, that a true believer can be comfortably amongst people he or she despises for being an infidel and believes doomed to the fire is laughable, since Islam is not a passive religion like Judaism. It does not show patience in its writings…

“Believers must fight for Allah. They must kill and be killed, and are bound to do so by the Torah, Gospel, and Quran. But Allah will reward them for it”

It has commands that must be followed if the follower wishes for redemption and entry into its kingdom… This is not ambiguity…

“Fight disbelievers who are near you, and let them see the harshness in you”

“Smite the necks of the disbelievers whenever you fight against them. Those who die fighting for Allah will be rewarded”

Why do I care what people believe? Just like I alluded to earlier, I don’t think that beliefs can be detached from actions, you reveal what you believe by the things that you do. In effect you are what you do. So if I for instance have a Muslim neighbour who has a daughter who goes to school with my children, and has been a victim of physical mutilation, am I to contend that my child’s interaction with that person is not influential? That they will not be normalised to that atrocity by my inaction and my lack of words about it? Of course not, it is those that do not speak out that allow atrocities to flourish, I would be guilty in my moral duty since there is no innocence in silence. Another scenario where my Christian neighbour practices his Christianity by lobbying the local council for the closure of a youth sexual health clinic, on the grounds that those youths should be abstinent until marriage, may in fact contribute to a higher rate of STI’s and teen pregnancy. Am I, who believes in freedom of sexuality, to idly let that sort of thing happen without opposing it? The point is that beliefs are not individual and individuated within a society, you are what you do based on what you believe the world and its object to be, you will act out your beliefs, they are an affect of your existence. If this is so then what you believe has a bearing on the social world that is not inconsequential, it is pertinent to the argument I am making. Without a critical and detailed analysis of how beliefs manifest themselves we are adrift in an illusion where we think we are moral actors but for many reasons we may not be. So the argument of why I, and you, should not simply leave people alone to believe whatever they wish is one of harm, real harm rather than offense. I am not simply taking offense, and if I was I would think that that would mean anything anyway, it’s possible, if you wish to, to take offense with anything. It doesn’t mean anything to take offense. Many people phoned into the BBC to complain about a pop band appearing on a TV show wearing skimpy outfits because they were offended, I wonder if the same people watched the Olympic games gymnastics, cycling or swimming events, where the costumes had an even lower thread count than the pop group, they would have? Were they offended then? Did they complain?

The difference between harm and offense is clear, that is why I would never call for a ban on hate speech, because speech is not action. When a person is inspired by the words of others then it is they that is at fault for being gullible and uneducated and it is society’s responsibility to do something about that. Because I have not been segregated nor censored I am not a victim of a bad education, I have read many books, essays, articles and texts that I thoroughly disagreed with and I have had the intellect and knowledge to know why I did, without having my mind changed by them because they are just a small part of a library of knowledge in my mind where many thoughts reside and many ideas conflict with each other before finding conclusion or abandonment. It is that freedom that I would wish for others, the freedom to pursue an idea until it proves itself a truth or a nonsense. It is only then that we can discard stupid ideologies and scriptures, when we have actually read them. The scholars of religiosity know this to be the case, that’s why they try to hide their books behind ideas such as mistakes of translation and interpretation. None of us studied how to read a book, we studied how to read and what words mean as relating to objects, why then would a person have to study how to understand a religious book in a seminary or a madrassa? It’s even given a different name when it is a religious book, the study is exegetics rather than hermeneutics, when it is the interpretation of the written word. Language itself has built into the intention that it be understood, if it cannot be understood then it is badly written or it is on a subject that is very difficult (try reading Derrida). I assume that my essay is understandable to its reader because I wish it to be and so on… Thomas More burned people at the stake, common people who took a differing meaning from the bible through reading translations of it for themselves, not in Latin but English. Was his action to help people’s understanding of what god wanted from them or to protect the power of the church as a political entity from the power of peoples rational minds? The same excuse is made by Imams concerning the Koran, you have to read it in Arabic apparently to understand it, well I don’t speak Arabic so that’s me out, I’ll just have to take their word for it. I don’t want to take anyone’s word for what is in a book, I can fucking read!!!  That’s the sort of power it tries to reserve for itself, that’s a real manifestation of what it is. This differs entirely and in a polar opposite way to science, where everything I measure and claim valid you can measure also to validate or to disprove, that’s how it becomes laughable to meet a flat-earther or a creationist. The protection of knowledge, or maybe I should say information, is an indication of its usability and usefulness as a token of power. Of course the power of getting people to believe things is lucrative, there is money to be made in convincing folks that you can speak on behalf of their dead relatives or find water with a funny looking stick, but for the most part these things are harmless socially because I can choose to criticise them with impunity. In a work based scenario it’s different, we may be at the mercy of forces that we do not control such as the management’s latest cooperation idea of singing kumbaya during morning meetings or possibly a visit from a psychologist selling her snake oil solution to work-based stresses, but at least we are being paid for enduring that. We choose whether we buy-in.

Foucault highlighted this thought, that power is disseminated, rather than concentrated in the hands of the powerful, by the means of information and its controlling mechanisms. For him, where we see power realised we also see where information is controlled, validated, codified and enculturated. Power is everywhere, it is in the information that shapes belief, so the power of an ideology and an idea is to be found in the minds of those who it shapes the lives of. But the information that those persons use to form beliefs about objects in the world is a power in itself, control the information and you control the actions of the populous. Although Foucault’s work is regularly dismissed in the west it is obviously understood in places where tyranny abounds. Why is there so much internet filtering in poor countries with despot leaders? Why do our politicians try to do the same thing to us? Why do those that benefit most from a capitalist society attempt, and mostly succeed, to buy media outlets? Is that all too cynical? Maybe, but Foucault’s insight cannot be ignored easily. Even culturally we can see these effects; I don’t discuss my wage with co-workers, that is the manifestation of a belief, in a capitalist society where everything is mediated in its relationship with exchange value and in a situation where I am not a voluntary participant, the belief that to discuss remuneration is a vulgarity. Why? Because it appears to serve me well to not have others know how cheaply I sell my labour, but the real reason for this situation is that it actually serves my corporate masters well to have me believe that to be a good thing. If I did, and all others did, discuss our wages with each other we would be collectivising, then would arise a different sort of power. Imagine a scenario where a person who is free of faith comes across a religious book prior to being primed with an expectation of what they will come away from in reading it. How feasible is it that they would arrive from reading this book at the conclusion that has become the norm? Imagine again the same thing happening with a work of Shakespeare or Dickens or Orwell, the point is that without telling someone what they should draw from great works they will do so anyway. If I recommended The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy to a friend I wouldn’t then proceed to tell them the story and what it all means. I would let them read it and they would find out. When a person wishes to read a religious text they have to be first instructed on what they are to learn from it, well that’s backwards!

One cannot be a hypocrite. If fifty percent of the folks that turn up during a tragedy, and this does happen, go there to give out food and medicine or to look for survivors, and fifty percent go to a vigil at the local church, then I am not convinced that the church goers are actually helping, but they may actually believe that they are. That’s the problem of belief, that it allows inactive people the compensation of feeling like they are positive participants in matters that matter, while another way to look at it is that they are uninvolved, voyeurs, they perpetuate suffering by watching idly as people suffer. It’s much like celebrities turning to Buddhism because it allows them to view inequality and suffering without guilt, a guilt that ought to be felt by those that can affect and shape the world (them), a guilt that is more normally assimilated, paradoxically, by the powerless. Buddhism teaches that there is suffering, and basically you just accept that it is a part of life, compare this to the stoic values of any Abrahamic religion and the similarities are obvious, they are the religions of the individual who is concerned only with his/her own salvation, they are personal, the problems of the world take a back seat to the immediate concerns of the self. Since they are personal they then reflect the will of the individual that is their most avid preacher. And what of speaking out? What of this essay? What of resistance and debate? It comes to something when the enemy of true freedom would be identified as me or someone like me. I have no doubt that I will divide opinion with this piece, as I have no doubt that I make a target of myself by writing it, but unless the media finally takes responsibility and represent truth with objectivity and impartiality I will end up being the bad guy. Just as Tommy Robinson is the bad guy for linking Islamic cultural practices and Islamic scripture to child abuse in Luton, where he was factually correct about what was going on and why it was not being tackled, or Sam Harris, who has tirelessly worked against the justification of violence by religious means by exposing both the root cause of belief and the practices it inspires to scrutiny, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a victim of FGM, she lectures on the violence toward, and subjugation of, women in the Islamic world. The left must shed its guilt over possibly differentiating between peoples, we haven’t done that and we have no reason to think that by towing this line of political correctness and blind equality concerning ideas that are not equal that we can avoid difference anyway. They, the religious communities and groups, have differentiated between themselves and non-adherents, it is they that demand to be treated differently and have afforded to them more privileges than are afforded to others. All that we should be asking is that we can treat their teachings, their books, their position in the same way that we treat everything else in a democracy, with satire, analysis, criticism, ridicule and disdain.

On a level playing field, if there is truth to scripture then it will emerge beyond the critique…….. but anything that is shaky will, of course, be pushed over.

Paul Simon Wilson