The Golden Strawberry

Martin Bauam's updated version of Hamlet reveals: "Dere was somefing minging in de State of Denmark."...

Mr Baum's other titles include Macbeff, Much Ado About Sod All, De 'Appy Bitches of Windsor, De Taming of de Bitch, Two Geezas Of Verona and All's Sweet That Ends Sweet, Innit...

Mr Baum's version of Romeo and Juliet sets the scene for the star-crossed lovers with: "Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families.

"And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other." '

Maybe Gordon Brown could quote some of this to try and get the 'common touch'.

Cory

Before I write about my interview with Mark Steel, comedian, Independent columnist and occasional broadcaster, I ought to start with a disclaimer. I love Mark Steel passionately, and have done since I read his book Reasons to be Cheerful when I was seventeen. It changed my life, turned me into a lefty, and showed me that you can put across your point of view in a funny, forceful way. So if you hate the articles I write for Redbrick, blame Mark Steel; it’s probably his writing style that I imitate subconsciously.

Reasons to be Cheerful, published in 2001, details the main political events of the past twenty-five years. Steel tells of his small part in those events, as a Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) activist. How could an impressionable seventeen year old not love its first paragraph, which is one of my most favourite passages in any book ever. If Gordon Brown wants a motto for Britain, he could do worse than this:

My views have changed beyond recognition since first reading Reasons to be Cheerful. But has the author changed his political views since he wrote the book?

“I don’t think so; not fundamentally anyway. But if you don’t change your views at all, you are either not listening to people, or being dishonest to yourself. Most say that they haven’t changed their views when they obviously have. Like all these radical students who become cabinet ministers and suddenly start supporting unsupportable wars.

“I interviewed Peter Hain for a programme I did for Radio Four about Rock Against Racism (RAR). Hain was one of the three founding members. He was Northern Ireland Secretary when I interviewed him, and he had two guys from Special Branch with guns in his office. One of them said, ‘Thirty years ago we would have been chasing him, now we are protecting him.’

“It was the day when Parliament was voting on Trident [In March Parliament voted to renew Trident, the UK’s Nuclear submarine system, at an estimated cost of £20 billion]. Peter Hain did this fantastic piece about RAR and the Anti-Nazi League, and how important it was in combating the National Front. He praised the SWP for its role in the RAR campaign. As soon as he finished his mobile goes. It’s an MP, and Peter Hain is trying to twist this person’s arm into voting for Trident”. Not exactly the act of a left-wing firebrand, is it?

What does he think are the “Reasons to be Cheerful” for us at the moment? “I chose the title at the time because things obviously weren’t all that great. I find feel-good films – ones that end with everyone sat around a fire with a fluffy dog – the most depressing kind of film. Life just isn’t like that. The true feel-good film is full of pain and nastiness, like a good blues song. The point I was trying to make was that the little contributions can change the world. All those little Tom Paines and little Tony Benns really do make a difference.”

Steel is at the University of Birmingham to talk at a “Troops Out” meeting arranged by the Stop the War Coalition. It is part of a nationwide tour of universities, in which he speaks along with Ben Griffin, a former Marine and Stop the War activist.

It seems strange that despite the opposition to the Iraq war increasing, that the numbers at anti-war protests have fallen in that time. Did he think that the 1 million strong march in 2003 made a difference? “I think it did make a difference. Demonstrations always make the other side nervous. The Project for the New American Century had every intention of attacking Iran, but four and a half years down the line it still hasn’t happened. So the anti-war movement has had an impact”.

“The troops in Iraq aren’t there to liberate the people of Iraq. The American establishment don’t give a toss about them. They went there because they (America) are an empire, and they want to control as big a piece of the globe as possible.

In the talk later Steel says, “All the reasons they gave for the war have been proved wrong. The United Nations announced that there is now more torture taking place in Iraq than under Saddam.

This is an achievement of pure genius, as spectacular as Puff Daddy covering a Sting song and making it even worse. When Blair was justifying the war by reciting the levels of torture under Saddam, no one realised he meant Saddam wasn’t doing enough.”

We move from Iraq to the state of the left. This is the subject of Steel’s next book, What’s Going On? Another book with a musical themed title, it is due to be released next summer. “There seems a massive confusion in the left. More people are hostile to world domination by the demands of big business, and are hostile to war and global warming. The confusion is about what to do, and who to vote for. In the past those with a social conscience would vote Labour, but now that’s not the case. The Labour left has never been weaker. The Scottish Socialist Party, which was doing well, imploded in a row over whether Tommy Sheridan went to a swinger’s club.”

It’s typical of the left, I reply. (Despite being a part of the left, whinging about how useless parts of the left are is one of my favourite hobbies). “Yeah. I say in the book, in other parts of the world, if the left gains life, its leaders would be shot or put into exile. Now, the parties just disintegrate in a row over a swingers club. Or Big Brother”.

This is a reference to Respect MP and party leader George Galloway appearing on the reality show, and neglecting his constituency to impersonate a cat on national television. Since the interview with Steel, Respect has imploded. One faction of the coalition locked the other faction out of its national offices, in a row which has moved from obscure left-wing blogs to the national press. All of this would seem to prove Steel’s point about the state of the left.

Despite all that, talking to Mark Steel did make me optimistic again, and made me want to campaign and try to change the world. I don’t get that by listening to politicians – for some reason Alistair Darling and Jack Straw don’t inspire the same fervour in me. I suspect I’m not the only person for whom this is the case, and that Mark Steel has lit several torches that still burn. Reasons to be cheerful indeed.

Atheists are fighting back. So long a shunned and persecuted minority, especially in the United States (where, disgracefully, religious observance is still a de facto requirement for the holding of public office) people of unbelief have begun to assert themselves publicly and resist clerical bullying. This has been spurred by the publication of several books, the most recent (and best) being Christopher Hitchens ‘god Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything’.

Hitchens is a throw back to the old eighteenth century man of letters, in the vain of Samuel Johnson and Percy Shelley. Hyper-educated, always pissed-off, able to wax lyrical about anything from the Bolshevik revolution to the Dreyfus Affair: he has no equal in Anglo-American journalism. His book is theologically literate and refreshingly worldly- combining a superb amount of scholarship and reading with a deep and broad knowledge of the world, gained from his extensive travels as a foreign correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. The tottering and crepuscular edifices of the world’s three major religions give Hitchens ample opportunity to display his legendary wit and sharp turn of phrase. For example, Hitchens proposes that the motto of the Catholic Church should be ‘no child’s behind left’, a reference to that organizations disgraceful record with regards its cover up of Clerical rape of children. The text is littered with classic one-liners like these. Indeed, humor and irony has always been a key weapon in the heathen’s rhetorical arsenal, Voltaire had it in spades, as did Bertrand Russell and the great Karl Marx. Hitchens deploys his own ample reserves of these tried and tested weapons-of-clerical destruction with scalpel-accurate precision and brutal effectiveness.

There seem to me two arguments afoot about the recent spate of proselytizing atheist books. The first one is the age-old question: is religion moral? Does it improve people’s behavior? Can a good life be lived without it? In this sense, Hitchens (and Richard Dawkins in ‘The God Delusion’) are simply carrying the torch passed to them by their illustrious heretical forebears: Russell, Voltaire, Spinoza, Lucretius and Socrates. This argument is as old as philosophy itself, and, as Marx said, its commencement marks the beginning of all criticism. Where faith ends, philosophy begins. These books are wonderful primers for a life free from faith and religious dogma. In essence, they are continuations of Bertrand Russell’s maxim, that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge, free from fear of death and the constricting iron-age doctrines of faith preached by Priest and Church.

I have chosen a side, as most people who think seriously about this question do at some stage in their lives. The intellectual case against religion and the faith impulse is overwhelming. Darwinian biology has provided us with an explanation of our origins far more simple, beautiful and eloquent than anything contained in a man-made holy text. Religion and science are not, as Stephen Jay-Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, once said, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: two spheres of human thought that deal with separate areas of life and experience. Religion claims to have all the answers, it always has done, and probably always will. The meaning of life, origins of the cosmos, the creation of mankind, how to live a good life – priests and mullahs have issued edicts and commands on these questions for thousands of years, thus fulfilling a basic human hunger for Answers. Of course, the religious explanations satisfied people in bygone eras, when our species was still in its infancy, unaware of the world and its structure. With recent adherence towards free inquiry and empirical observation, we no longer need such crude answers. God is dead, and science killed him.

The Churches know this, and have been fighting a desperate rear-guard action to stem the rising tide of enlightenment – witness the current controversy over the teaching of ‘Intelligent design’ to children in the United States . Hitchens describes this sinister phenomenon well when he says:

‘Intelligent Design’ is a desperate ploy by desperate men who know they have lost the argument and are trying to hold up their crumbling Churches by resorting to dishonest word-play. It is a sign of the times: religion is losing its iron grip on humankind.

A recent survey conducted at Piermont College in California by Phil Zuckerman, a distinguished sociologist, puts the figure of non-believers at between five hundred and seven hundred and fifty million – bear in mind that this excludes such thickly populated countries as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. This makes unbelief the fourth largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Most importantly, it is by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Give atheism the same amount of time Christianity has had, about two thousand years, and there may be no theists left at all. One can only hope (and continue our rational inquiries and patient tests into the Universe).

The second question thrown up by the critics of the ‘New Atheists’ (a false term – they are part of a very old and very venerable radical tradition) is a strange one. They are accused of employing language that is too forceful; of being arrogant, of ‘offending’ people by their (allegedly) harsh tones and by doing the cause of atheism more harm than good by alienating moderates, who will be put off by their suppose ‘self-righteousness’.

This is a cowardly and ahistorical criticism. It is uttered by people who do not appreciate the great struggles of the past, when religion had to be forcibly separated from power. Religion is not a benign force which will give up its stranglehold on our species without a fight. It is run by cynical men who have seen an opportunity to grab power over the credulous and exploited it, thus causing immeasurable suffering to millions of people over the centuries. It is up to those of us who see things clearly to spread the fruits of reason to people who are still living in darkness. We can employ strident language and we can be just a principled and passionate as those we oppose. Remember, though, that the New Atheists have only published several books, they have not excommunicated anyone, or declared a jihad or launched a holy war. The secularist, reason-based way of doing things is undoubtedly the more civilized one.

If all this book does is inspire the non-believers and fails to persuade anyone to abandon their blinkered faith-based worldview, is it a failure? Avowedly not. Atheists can organize, we can campaign for secularism and the removal of religious indoctrination (not the teaching of religion, which is very important for an informed intellect) from schools. We can, and must, defend the iron wall that separates religion from state power; and we can celebrate our position as free human beings, capable of forging our own world through our own efforts – free from superstition and dogma.

The most beautiful chapter in Hitchens book is entitled ‘A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational’. It is a love letter not only to the great heroes of the past who have done so much for human freedom to think and speak, but to Reason itself. This is what Hitchens book is about, not so much an attack on the evils of religion, because that can and has been done and is obvious to anyone who cares enough to engage their brain on the subject. More so, it is an inspiring defense of Reason, and of humankind’s ability to apply its intellect to the world surrounding it. Using this precious gift, we can build a freer, more prosperous and just world. Hitchens thinks religion is the prime obstacle to this ‘New Enlightenment’; his new book makes an extremely strong case for this interpretation.

-posted by Adam

I felt I just had to write something about this continuing farce, which makes a mockery of Academe's supposed dedication to the pursuit of truth and high standards of historical scholarship. I have read both The Case for Israel by the celebrated fraud Alan Dershowitz (who was on OJ's defence team) and Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah.

One book is a well-written, scrpulously researched, utterly devastating and precise work of historical scholarship. The other is a fraud, devoid of any meaningful content and lacking in even basic standards of historical sourcing and footnoting.

Of course, Finkelstein's demolition of Dershowitz should have ruined the latters career. No scholar should hope to hold his place (and at Harvard, no less) when his work has been shown to be such a disgrace. Dershowitz copies entire sections from Joan Peters From Time Immemorial (itself a fraud, as Finkelstein has demonstrated in the past) with impunity. Dershowitz is not a scholar, he is a lackey for the Israel lobby in the United states. His book was not an attempt to write history, rather, it was a dishonest lunge to blacken the historical record and blame the victims for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now Finkelstein, who (used) to teach at De Paul University, has been denied tenure for the forthcoming academic year. This is an utter disgrace, and it was not motivated by, as the letter which fired him states 'concerns touching upon his scholarship'. No, this a lie. Finkelstein has been part of a witch-hunt, organised by Dershowitz (who is still smarting from the destruction of his reputation) and others, to close down the debate about American Jewry's role in the continuing humiliation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state.

It is that simple. Finkelstein is a brave man, and I fully support him during this time. I hope another University gives him the full professorship he so richly deserves. Dont let the bastards grind you down, Norman.

-posted by Adam

I looked at technorati to find out who linked to us, in order to re-jig the blogroll. I discovered this Meme from August, in which we were tagged by Baby Washington. Well, better late than never. So here are my choices:

1. One book you have read more than once

Jennings goes to school by Anthony Buckeridge. Fossilised fishhooks! I loved the Jennings books between the ages of about 10 and 15; marvellous ripping yarns that have informed my writing style since. Recommended to small inky-fingered children everywhere.

2. One book you would want on a desert island

Orwell In Tribune by George Orwell. It's so damned fantastic, and has articles on everything from communism to toads to second-hand books. To think that he was writing these columns weekly, whilst writing 1984 and Animal Farm, almost makes me want to throw my laptop across the room in frustration. Inspirational would be a better word to describe it though.

3. One book that made you laugh

Incompetence by Rob Grant. You may recognise that name - he created Red Dwarf along with Doug Naylor. Either this or Colony is guaranteed to make you chuckle too often in public. Incompetence is set in "a Europe of the near future, in which nobody can be sacked on the grounds of age, sex, race or incompetence". I took this on holiday and read it three times in two weeks.

4. One book that made you cry

I honestly don't think any have. This isn't because I'm macho, I just usually avoid sad books which will make you cry. Instead, I re-read Incompetence.

5. One book you wish you had written

1066 and all that by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. This is the sort of alternative history I would love to write, but would probably lack the means - and the talent. Mostly, this is a parody of student's mistakes and malapropisms, such as "John was so bad that the Pope decided to put the whole country under an Interdict, i.e. he gave orders that no one was to be born or die or marry (except in Church porches)." My favourite-ist part of the whole book is:

THE INDUSTRIAL REVELATION

During these Wars many very remarkable discoveries and inventions were made. Most memorable among these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for 25 hours a day in factories without many of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revelation and completely changed the faces of the North of England.

6. One book you wish had never been written

Any by Richard Littlejohn. Do I have to pick one? Well, OK then.

7. One book you are currently reading

Peter Rex's biography of King Edgar, which is worth a read even if you aren't as unhealthily obsessed with tenth century Anglo-Saxon England as I am.

8. One book you have been meaning to read

The Future of Socialism by Tony Crosland. I know it's one of the intellectual cornerstones of modern leftish thought and all that, but I just haven't felt in the mood to really get stuck into it.

9. One Book That Changed Your Life

Has to be Reasons to be Cheerful by Mark Steel. It taught me many, many things. It told me that you can be funny and make a political point, and that being left-wing was the way to go. Although my views have evolved since reading the book, and re-reading it now I can see a few problems with what Mark Steel has to say, it would be stupid and wrong to play down the effect this book had on my life. And it, along with the Jennings books, my parent's puns and Red Dwarf, was probably among the main inspiration for my own particular sense of humour. Mark Steel may not have found another convert for the revolution in me, turned me into a political animal with his own lefty blog. And for that I'm eternally thankful.

10. Now tag five people

Hmmm.... how about Pub Philosopher, Don't Trip Up, Doctor Feelgood, Mission: Ramble and Adam. Enjoy!

Cory

I recently read two thoughtful and important books which deal specifically with the issue of Faith and religon. The first was written by Richard Dawkins, the celebrated populariser of evolutionary biology. It is called 'The God Delusion'. Snappy title, no? Dawkins is one of the best non-fiction writers working today; the quality of his prose and the lucidity of his written thought processes make the complex topics which he often deals with relatively easy to digest. Dawkins states his purpose in the preface:

My purpose in this book is to convert people. I hope a theist who picks this book up will put it down an atheist.

I do not find this elitist or arrogant. As an atheist myself, I would obviously welcome more apostates and infidels to the heathen fold, and Dawkins is just the man for the job. A professor in evolutionary biology, he holds strongly (and correctly) to the Darwinian line and offers a convincing explanation for the occurance of religion within a Darwinian context. Dawkins effortlessly flattens all the intellectual pretensions offered by the various 'great' monotheisms for their God. He joyfully and ruthlessly exposes the bible for the vile piece of bronze age mysogny and bigotry that it is; the Abrahamic God of the holy texts is revealed to be a wilful, jealous and vicious monster; anyone who comes into this book believing the Juedo-Christian tradition to be the source of what decent people would consider the good parts of our moral code will leave it free of illusions. We are good despite of any faith we might possess, not because of it.

There is one glaring problem with Dawkins' book however, one that is exposed very well by another book called 'The Conservative Soul' by an always readable Anglo-American political philosopher and blogger called Andrew Sullivan. This book is not solely about religion; it is about the Anglo-American Conservative tradition. It is one writer's attempt to reclaim it from the disgusting theocrats who have hijacked it for short term party political gain and in so doing unleashed a the terrible monster cocktail of reliigon combined with politics upon America and the world. Essentially, this book can be boiled down to the following phrase: skepticism is the only possible position to take with regards your own abilities to interpret the world; this skepticism therefore must inspire a separation of religion and politics , and that this skeptical mindset was best crystallized in the American constitution.

Sullivan devotes a good portion of his new book to faith, because faith has always concerned itself with politics. Sullivan is a Roman Catholic despite being a gay man and refuses (perplexingly)  to abandon the church which has done so much to hold back the movement for gay liberation throughout the centuries.

So, here we have a thoughtful, gay, obviously sane and secularist political philosopher who also happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic. The nature of this contradiction tears a hole a mile wide in Dawkins' book:

There are lots of sane religious people.

Dawkins seems to miss this. So focused is he on the intellectual lunacy of organised superstition that he misses the rather blatant fact that a good proportion of religious people are sensible whilst still clinging to their delusions. They set aside the contradictions and fallacies endemic to their chosen faith and live their lives according to the (few and far between) good bits. Sullivan is an excellent example of a very clever man who has made peace between his faith and his intellect. Now, do not misunderstand me here, I am a resolute anti-theist and would love to see religion disappear from the human consciousness, but I can also appreciate Freud here and accept that it is a curse our species will probably always have to deal with. And, whilst it is with us, I would prefer to see the liberal tradition triumph over the fundementalist one.

Dawkins takes a very positivist view of the prospects for the human race; he is pretty damn confident that one day we shall be able to explain everything through our application of the scientific method. One day, we shall create a 'crane' for the creation of the Universe, just like Darwin provided us with a 'crane' for the proliferation of species on our planet with his theory (now proven to be fact) of natural selection. I am not so sure. Obviously I would not be arrogant enough to claim I know how the Universe was created (like religious people). The blatant stench of untruth that surrounds the holy texts and the unbelievable sight of people still acquiescing to them in this day and age removes them from contention; but I do not share Dawkins optimism about our prospects. The sheer fact that he has had to write a book called 'The God Delusion' in a desperate attempt to shake people out of their fantasies in the year 2006 is a testament to the weakness and stupidity of the human race. We are all tailless mammels after all.

I suppose this could qualify as a book review. So here are the scores:

The God Delusion - 4 Golden Strawberries out of 5 ****

An excellent primer for any atheist. Slightly optimistic, and without any social explanation for why people cling to their delusions today, it is nevertheless an excellent read. Buy copies for all your theist friends.

The Conservative Soul - 4 Golden Strawberries out of 5 ****

A very well written and deeply personal account of one mans political philosophy. Shows the liberal and humble side of Conservatism which is so conspicuously absent from modern day American politics.

-posted by Adam

Long article here in the New York Review of Books about terrorism; its aims, tactics and capabilities. The author agrees with the theses of the books he is reviewing. Suicide terrorism does not represent insanity, nor does it constitute a grave threat to the West. Instead, it is a shrewd and calculated method of warfare used by the weak to strike at the strong. The author claims that Iran, a country currently in the grip of Islamic theocrats and holocaust deniers represents no great threat to the United States:

Compared, say, to the threat of atomic obliteration posed by the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1989, the possibility of an Iranian attack on the United States does not seem very large. Even a nuclear-armed Iran would never dare strike the superpower because it would risk annihilation in response. Obviously America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States. And perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran's oppressive and unpopular government.

Yet the Cold War was between two relatively stable power blocs with each bloc run by a group of people who had no interest in suicide. Iran and the terrorists of Al Qaeda are of a fundementally different mindset. The USSR was run by atheists who maintained no belief in an afterlife and, therefore, had no wish to see a mushroom cloud outside the window of the Kremlin because a good chunk of the world rejected the tenents of Marxism-Leninism. Do we give Osama Bin Laden or the Mullahs of Iran the benefit of the doubt and believe that they love life just as much as we do?  Seeing that Bin Laden has expressed his desire for a universal Caliphate that would wage war against the infidel West countless times, we would be foolish to do so. Or, instead, do we look at their operational record and apocalyptic rhetoric and decide to face the threat rather than try to contain it?

The article constantly scorns the Bush Administration's use of the phrase 'War on Terror':

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism," says Richardson bluntly, "has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure." In declaring such a war, she says, the Bush administration chose to mirror its adversary:

Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.

In essence, America's actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden's organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower's undivided attention. Even as it successfully shattered the group's core through the invasion of Afghanistan, America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics.

But this is a war, one that the West did not start and one that the United States had no material or ethical interest in pursuing before it was declared. The Cold War was a period of foreign policy realism; it was perfectly acceptable for the US to back brutal dictators in the third world as long as they made anti-Soviet noises. The containment of Bolshevism overrode all other foreign policy factors. This cynicism and realpolitik, with men in suits in the West deciding which mass murderer would rule over which poor country, gave birth to the Horrorisms we now live with today.

And a proper analysis of the actual ideology professed by Bin Laden and his ilk is precisely what is missing from the NY Books article. Martin Amis does a good job of it here, in his Observer essay:

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

For Rodenbeck (the author of the NY Books piece), Islamist terrorism is something to be beaten by methods more familiar to the police than to the military. He is right to an extent, but he tends to underestimate the capabilities of worldwide terrorist networks. Proof of their determination, their savagry and their callousness can be seen in any of their works. Indeed, one needs only to look at the cataclysm of Iraq, encouraged as it was by the fools in Washington, to see what happens when large numbers of Islamists engage in terrorist activities in concentrate. Ethnic strife it may be, but it is fueled by religious zealotry.

The declaration of a war on terror has not been the problem, nor has the use of the military and armed force. The problem has been the hubristic and imperial over-application of these assets in a manner not conductive to the destruction of such a slippery foe. More caution, more skepticism and less charging about like a bull in a china shop with regards the US army and the Arab world would perhaps prove to be a more fruitful long term strategy. But make no mistake, this is a war and we must prosecute it. The Theocratic wing of Islam must be destroyed. Not 'by any means' but by the right means. Backing Muslim liberals and ensuring that the zealots have no place to hide are two wings of the same strategy.

-posted by Adam

Das Kapital on stage. Does it get much more boring than that?

Surely Marx: The Musical is only a matter of time...

Cory

I would not consider myself a conservative in any sense of the word, but I do recognise that conservatism is an important and coherent (at least as coherent as socialism and social democracy) political philosophy. I support the Euston Manifesto's attempt to build bridges with certain conservative groups over the war on Islamic fascism and the threat it poses to both our political traditions. Any attempt by moderate conservatives to rescue their philosophy from the religious fundementalists in America has my full support. 

One of these principled persons is the blogger and public intellectual Andrew Sullivan. He has a new book out entitled The Conservative Soul.

Andrew discusses his new book in this talk at the Cato Institute in Washington. David Brooks, columnist at the New York Times, provides a cogent and piercing critique of his thesis, which Sullivan deals with ably and eloquently. An excellent discussion. More of this type, which creates more light than it does heat, are sorely needed in our politics.

-posted by Adam

With the publication of Richard Dawkins’ new book (which I have purchased but yet to read), those who accuse him of being shrill and ‘fundamentalist’ have been once again crawling out of the woodwork. One of these is Theo Hobson who posts regularly on Cif.

His latest post is an essay attacking the so called ‘dogmatic’ secularists. Dawkins, Russell and Hitchens spring immediately to mind. Hobson makes the argument that these acolytes of atheism do more harm than good in public debate; they needlessly polarise things and hinder the battle against religious extremism by lumping the liberals with the fundamentalists.

I agree with Hobson to an extent. He is right to say that liberal religious believers are not as dangerous as fundamentalist members of the faithful. A housemate of mine who describes himself as a ‘Liberal’ Christian is not as likely as Osama Bin Laden to blow himself up in a marketplace for his god, killing hundreds of people along with himself. This much is self evident. On the global scene, there is a civil war going on within Islam between its liberal and literal wings. Bear in mind that the first people to be killed by hard-line Muslims are nearly always other Muslims, not Westerners. It is simple common sense that the West, having been drawn into this war by the Fundamentalists (part of me is glad we are involved; we can help the good guys win), should be backing the Liberal, reforming wing of Islam.

Where I disagree quite forcefully with Hobson, however, is in this rather sinister collection of sentences:

Intelligent secularism has no interest in denying the existence of God. It does not preach the good news that science is all you need. It knows that a simple opposition between faith and rationality is philosophically naive (it is acquainted with Wittgenstein as well as Bertrand Russell). And it knows that there is not a simple opposition between religion and modern liberal thought. 

A campaigning, crusading Atheism is needed. Not just to call for the separation of church and state and opposition to politicised religion, but one to actually argue forcefully for humanism and against superstition. A movement which seeks to engage with religious people and dissuade them from their faith; which is strong enough not to be deterred by the massed ranks of clerics and priests and mullahs and not be intimidated by their threats and bullying; and which will not resort to their tactics of childhood indoctrination and pleas to the unknowable and brutal violence. Instead it will use the tools of the Enlightenment: free inquiry, scepticism and the doubt present in all human minds. Humans do tend to know when they are being lied to. They can smell a rat, if their sense of smell is operating properly. Eyes need to be opened, awareness raised and backs straightened. We must stand on our own two feet and look at the world without fear and without making up miracles in a Universe already full of them.

Dawkins looks like he does this very effectively in his new book. Indeed, in the preface he says:

 I suspect- well, I am sure- that there are lots of people out there who have been bought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents religion and wish they could, but just don’t realise that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness- raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. 

Hobson is right that in the short term that religious extremism is the current biggest threat. But he is wrong when it comes to the long game. Religious extremism will continue to rear its ugly head for as long as Faith in the supernatural exists – religious moderation, in other words, is the inevitable wellspring or fundamentalism. A liberal religious person is a hypocrite by definition. He or she has rejected the more absolutist and downright insane demands of the god of their respective religious texts and has travelled half way down the path to humanism.

We must back the liberal wing of all religions simply because we can then convince them of the merits of atheism afterwards. You can’t argue with a man wearing an explosives belt. You can argue with a man who has admitted to himself that he is human and therefore has his built in bullshit detector turned on, rather than forcefully repressed by blind faith.

Dawkins, Hitchens et al perform an extremely valuable public service. Hobson is absolutely wrong when he says that

‘Every bishop must smile when Dawkins lets rip, a little more assured of the intellectual high-ground.’

 The faithful never had the intellectual high ground and they have high jacked the moral high ground for far too long. It is time we reclaimed our compassion in the name of humanity and recovered it from the clutches of the gaunt priests and frothing mullahs. Dawkins, I am with you.

-posted by Adam

(a full review of the book will follow when I've read a bit more than the Preface!)