1) The US presidential election is a genuinely terrifying spectacle for the rest of the world to watch, and is ultimately lost by Barack Obama to whatever ignorant chump the Republicans eventually nominate.

The religious right frame the election in apocalyptic terms, declaring Obama to be the antichrist and claiming that if he is allowed to win another term, God will withdraw his special protection from America spelling the end of the American way of life and the beginning of an eternity of tyranny. The business establishment, despite faring pretty well under Obama, decide that they’d still rather have a good old Republican in the White House committed to reducing their (already low) taxes still further. Consequently they pour money into the Republican campaign.

The result is that the Republicans fight the most cynical and dishonest campaign in US history, making hysterical claims which ought to fail even the most cursory scrutiny and playing dirty tricks that would have made Nixon blush. The media, afraid of being labelled as partisan, fail to report this (Fox has the chutzpah to go further and pin the blame for the lies and dirty tricks on the Democrats).

The Republican win decisively puts an end to America’s position as an important world power, but it takes them several decades to realise this.

2) Attempts to do something about the problem of climate change / global warming continue to fail.

The anti-AGW movement continues to frustrate all attempts to recognise and deal with the problem. Obviously they don’t have the science on their side, being driven entirely by hatred of Government and of taxation. However, they’re well-funded and aided by a media establishment which at best feels it has to present their side of the argument for “balance” and at worst actively supports it because they don’t like Government or taxation either.

Scientists are not media-savvy and are consequently unable to frame the discussion in terms that are favourable. Instead, they are constantly fighting the anti-AGW claims that it’s a conspiracy to ensure they keep getting their grant money, that it’s a religion that no-one within the scientific community dare question and so on.

Meanwhile, nature ignores the “argument” and keeps trapping more energy from the sun than is radiated into space, thus causing the average temperature of the planet to increase in order to restore equilibrium.

3) As austerity measures fail to fix the problems of the economy, attacks on the poor and unemployed increase.

Capitalism has always had a problem with poor people. On one hand, they provide a pool of available labour who will work for comparatively little. On the other hand, they’re an obvious reminder that capitalism really doesn’t work very well – every person without a job being evidence that the magic system of market forces has failed to create something for that person to do.

The obvious solution for this is to blame the poor for their predicament – their lack of employment is clearly nobody’s fault but theirs. After all, other people have managed to find jobs! So, as punishment, welfare programmes are slashed to provide an incentive for the poor to go out and find jobs. This is facilitated by a beautifully cynical piece of framing – by reminding us that benefit fraud costs the UK economy something like 1bn/year, we get taxpaying middle-class Britain all worked up about the greed of the poor instead of asking questions about the extent to which tax avoidance and evasion by Vodafone, Goldman Sachs et al is harming the economy (hint – a lot more than 1bn / year but then poor people can’t afford to take HMRC employees out to lunch).

Compounding the attacks on the poor are the appearance of companies like wonga.com and borro.com which are essentially legalised loan sharks and 21st century pawnbrokers. The result is an increase in suicides, home repossessions and social unrest with consequent increases in police deployments to “maintain order”.

4) Despite a massive security operation, we are unable to prevent a successful terrorist attack against the Olympic Games.

Firstly, I stress that I have no inside information here, and I certainly don’t want there to be a terrorist attack on the Games or anything else.

However, it is undeniable that some political and religious ideologies are pretty evil, that some such ideologies have determined and fanatical followers, that the Games are a massively inviting target, and that it is impossible to know that we have all ne’er-do-wells under surveillance or to figure out where they’re likely to strike. We will end up guarding all the wrong targets, not through incompetence, but because we genuinely won’t know what the right targets are until they’ve been hit. For the terrorist, the “right” target will be whatever we’ve left unguarded, and we can’t possibly guard everything.

In related news, the “war on terror” will remain unwinnable, not that this will stop the defence industry continuing to do rather well out of it.

5) The coalition falls apart in the second half of the year, the resulting election leaves Labour at the winning party but short of an overall majority, they’re forced to join with the Lib Dems and everyone feels very awkward.

Like parents determined to stay together for the sake of the kids, the coalition survives until after the Olympics so that we don’t look like a completely dysfunctional laughing stock in the eyes of the world. However, it turns out that even Clegg has a limit to the things he can support and when the Conservatives propose replacing the NHS with a US-style privately run healthcare system / selling all of the nation’s comprehensive schools to a consortium lead by McDonalds and Coca-Cola / building gas chambers to deal with the problem of the long-term unemployed (delete as appropriate), the Lib Dems pull out of the coalition.

However, since Labour aren’t offering anything radically different (and no-one is prepared to read the riot act to the “Great British Public” and put them right on a number of important points), the resulting election is inconclusive. So we end up as a laughing stock anyway, but at least our noses aren’t rubbed in it when the entire world is watching.

The city does quite nicely out of it though.

6) The world will not end in 2012, but panic about it will demonstrably kill people.

There will be at least one incident of a mass suicide of people who’ve come genuinely to believe that Mayan 2012 nonsense so, in a sense, the prediction will come out right for them in that their personal worlds will end.

Elsewhere, isolated and backward communities will find excuses to execute witches and wizards who are rumoured to have something to do with the prophecy. There will be panicked stampedes by crowds at events to mark the end of the world. Hucksters will find a way to make a quick buck out of it as they always do.

There will be some grim amusement to be had from watching cretins who believe the world was hand-made by God 6000 years ago ridicule the Mayan claims.

7) Despite gains in public education about the dubious merits of alternative therapies, they will remain popular, and their practitioners will remain quick to call their lawyers when criticised.

Homeopathy feels itself to be under attack from the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, because the ASA is insisting (not unreasonably) that the homeopaths should be able to supply evidence for the claims they make and the homeopaths do not have any (at least, none that’s actually worth the paper it’s written on). The British Chiropractic Association made colossal idiots of themselves over the Simon Singh case. Nonetheless, there are many quacks out there (it should be said that in most cases, I believe the quacks have deluded themselves before deluding their patients) and the battle for evidence-based healthcare is far from over. It doesn’t help when outfits such as the Burzynski clinic in Texas get such an uncritical write-up from the press.

Perhaps it will take a high-profile celebrity death, one that could clearly have been prevented had the celebrity opted for scientific medicine instead of mystic mumbo-jumbo, really to turn the tide?

All the heavy-handed recourse to lawyers is, of course, grist to the mill of the Libel Reform Campaign and is thus ultimately counter-productive for the quacks. Still a bit tiresome though.

8) HMV announces that it will no longer sell CDs in many of its stores to make room for DVDs (to be phased out themselves within a few years) and fancy headphones.

I will be sorry to see the end of CDs. I like being able to get the measure of a new acquaintance by checking through their CD collection for warning signs (Coldplay, U2, Sting, Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers etc.) which may require gentle correction. I know that the day will come when music is all bought digitally from our corporate overlords (Apple, Amazon), and the DVDs and ultimately books will all suffer the same fate. This will be a sad day, and not just for those people who remain unconnected to the Internet or otherwise unable to access the on-line stores. If I end up trapped in a nightmare relationship because I don’t discover until it’s too late that my new partner’s music collection consists entirely of X Factor winners and pan-pipe Andrew Lloyd-Webber classics, I will blame the ghost of Steve Jobs.

9) No-one uses Google Plus.

Sorry, Google. Facebook has won this one.

10) Many of these predictions are wrong. Conversely, a cataclysmic occurs which no-one (including the professionals) saw coming.

Self-explanatory.

The first problem that you run into when reading the Qur’an is that it’s in Arabic. As the introduction to my English translation says

“The Qur’an was the starting point for all the Islamic sciences: Arabic grammar was developed to serve the Qur’an, the study of Arabic phonetics was pursued in order to determine the exact pronunciation of Qur’anic words, the science of Arabic rhetoric was developed in order to describe the features of the inimitable style of the Qur’an, the art of Arabic calligraphy was cultivated through writing down the Qur’an, the Qur’an is th basis of Islamic law and theology … the entire religious life of the Muslim world is built around the text of the Qur’an”

The Qur’an is, or at least seems to see itself, as the third part of a great theological trilogy beginning with the Old Testament and continuing with the New Testament. Like the concluding part of any trilogy, it inspires strong emotions in those who enjoyed the first two parts but don’t like the direction taken by the third (perhaps because of a change of director, or because it features an army of small furry creatures). In this instance, the main objections seem to come from people who felt that the Old and New Testament were a conceptually perfect pairing and didn’t need anything adding (actually, some of these people seem quite happy to stick solely to the Old Testament).

The circumstances in which the Qur’an were produced are perhaps better known than those which gave rise to the Bible but are not without their mystery. At the time, most people in the Arabic world were polytheists with a chief God “Allah” and a number of secondary Gods. A man called Muhammad, who was given to periods of quiet meditation in a cave near Mecca began to receive revelations of Qur’anic verses (the first was in 610 CE). Over a period of 23 years he had many such revelations, witnessed by others, during which he would recite new verses. These were memorized by his growing band of followers, but were not collected systematically in a book until just after Muhammad’s death, although individual written records were made at the time. Thus, we can perhaps be more confident of the authenticity of the text in the Qur’an than we are of the Bible, where determining the original text is an insoluble problem. The word Qur’an means “reading” or “reciting” – reading the Qur’an aloud was and still is an important aspect of Islam.

The book is divided into 114 sections, called suras, ranging in length from a sentence of two, to about 20 pages. Each one is, I believe, a separate revelation. Unlike chapters in the Bible, they do not purport to be any kind of chronological account of anything, each one being a self-contained message. Also, they do not appear in the Qur’an in the order in which they were revealed – Muhammad eventually arranged them into the “correct” order. Because the book is ostensibly written by God, it refers to “We” and “Our” (meaning God’s) and speaks of Muhammad or “The Prophet” in the third person. This means that references to “you” are ambiguous – God could be talking about Muhammad or he could be talking about people in general. In Arabic, this distinction is clear from the choice of words, but to represent this in English the translator has had to disambiguate some of the references by explicitly adding the target e.g. “This is a Scripture which We have sent down to you [Prophet] so that …” – one example of the problems of not being able to read it in Arabic.

Each sura has a name, usually derived from a word or reference in the text of the sura, and each is divided into verses, called ayas. These may be referenced in a style similar to the Bible e.g. 32:15 is the 15th verse of Sura 32 (“Bowing Down in Worship”).

Muhammad’s revelations of a single God didn’t go down well with the polytheists of the time, which led to friction between them and his followers, and this is explicitly referenced in the developing text. Indeed, some of the suras represent God’s answers to questions Muhammad had about the problems his community (or he) faced and thus they ought to be interpreted in the correct historical context. So, an injunction such as “Kill them wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is more serious than killing.” (2:191) is not a general order to kill unbelievers, but answers the question of whether it is lawful to fight back if they are attacked in the sacred precincts of Mecca. The previous verse makes it clear that they are only to fight in self-defence and warns them “…do not overstep the limits: God does not love those who overstep the limits.”

The questions I had about the Qur’an were broadly as follows:

1. What is it all about?
2. How is the Muslim God different from the Christian God?
3. Where does Islam lie on the scale of “religion of peace” to “fight the infidels”?
4. What does Sharia law actually involve?

What is it all about?

As described above, it consists of 114 suras, each written as if dictated by God. Reading it is consequently a rather odd experience. For example, you don’t get arguments from Muhammad arguing for the existence of God, you tend to get God himself instructing Muhammad on what to say:

“Say [Prophet], ‘Just think, if God were to cast perpetual night over you until the Day of Resurrection, what other god than He could bring you light? Do you not listen?’ Say, ‘Just think, if God were to cast perpetual day over you until the Day of Resurrection, what other god than He could give you night in which to rest? Do you not see? In His mercy He has given you night and day, so that you may rest and seek His bounty and be grateful.’” (28:71-73)

This gives a weird, peering-behind-the-curtain aspect to the whole thing, or maybe it’s like breaking the fourth wall.

It’s not chronological, and it is actually quite repetitive with very similar looking arguments for God’s existence cropping up in a number of places, usually along the lines of the one mentioned above (which I do not find terribly persuasive). There are frequent reminders that God is omniscient, but also merciful:

“Remember that God knows what is in your souls so be mindful of Him. Remember that God is most forgiving and forbearing” (2:235)

…is a fairly typical example. We are often reminded that God “has full knowledge of everything”. There are many tantalising glimpses of paradise, usually described something like this:

“…Gardens of lasting bliss graced with flowing streams. There they will be adorned with bracelets of gold. There they will wear green garments of fine silk and brocade. There they will be comfortably seated on soft chairs. What a blessed reward! What a pleasant resting place!” (18:31)

In addition to the depictions of paradise, the Qur’an is also at pains to point out the world of torment awaiting those who disbelieve (often translated as “evildoers” which amused me slightly in the light of GW Bush):

“For those who defy their Lord We have prepared the torment of Hell: an evil destination, They will hear it drawing in its breath when they are thrown in. It blazes forth, almost bursting with rage. Its keepers will ask every group that is thrown in, ‘Did no one come to warn you?’ They will reply, ‘Yes, a warner did come to us, but we did not believe him. We said “God has revealed nothing: you are greatly misguided”.’ They will say, ‘If only we had listened, or reasoned, we would not be with the inhabitants of the blazing fire,’ and they will confess their sins. Away with the inhabitants of the blazing fire!” (67:6-11)

God seems to take quite a delight in describing the misery and humiliation of those who are condemned to hell, and often reassures Muhammad that he’ll have the last laugh as the sinners realise there’s no escape for them. He doesn’t like disbelievers, which can be deduced from the fact that the entry in the index of my translation for “disbelievers” is the longest entry, longer even than that for Muhammad and about twice as long as that for believers:

“disbelievers: activities known to God; condemnation; sometimes permitted; amazement at the Resurrection; arguments rejected; arrogance contrasted with God’s pride in his creation; arrogance linked with those of previous generations and of Satan; attempts to oppose God and Muhammad futile; and believers; belittling of the Qur’an; challenged as to their questioning of God’s power over them; claims that a true prophet would be wealthy denied; claims about goddesses and angels refuted; classification; condemnation; abandonment by God; those who lead others astray; consignment to Hell; denial of the Day of Judgement; destruction; because of their rejection of the truth of the Qur’an and the resurrection; disobedience, contrasted with the obedience of creation ordained by God; disputes between the oppressors and the oppressed at the Day of Judgement; disputes in Hell; eternal torment; eventual punishment; as evildoers; fate delayed by God until the Final Judgement; as examples to those who disbelieve currently exhorted to believe; failure to see the significance of God’s signs; fate; on the Day of Resurrection; foolishness in denying the Resurrection; and God’s revelation; good actions outweighed by bad faith; hearts hardened by God; judgement; lack of belief in God as creator; lack of success in war dictated by God; life in Hell compared to the believers’ bliss in Paradise; misconceptions regarding revelation and Muhammad’s nature; nature known by God; not to be helped by believers; obduracy; prayers ineffective; punishment [20 entries!]; in the afterlife; for barring believers from Mecca; contrasted with the rewards of believers; on the Day of Judgement; inevitability; for opposition to God and Muhammad; of previous generations, seen as a warning to disbelievers in the present; shown in the story of Moses; reactions on the Day of Judgement contrasted with those of believers; reactions to the giving of the Scriptures; record held in their left hands at the Day of Judgement; rejection of prophets and punishment; relations with God; reminded of the fate of previous generations of disbelievers; repentance; response to God; rewards; scoffing met with punishment at the Day of Judgement; guided by own desires; stubbornness and mocking of God’s revelations; terror at the Day of Judgement; as those who are not in God’s light; to be left to God’s judgement and not to Muhammad’s preaching; to be left to their own devices; torturers condemned; unjust nature”

In the light of this, it’s rather hard to take the edict “There is no compulsion in religion…” (2:256) seriously (though it goes on to suggest that, actually, believing in God is a jolly good idea).

How is the Muslim God different from the Christian God?

This turns out to be simple to answer – no different at all. The reason I described it as the “third part of a trilogy” is because God is the same and makes explicit reference to things that he did back in the Bible, mostly involving smiting the unbelievers, and usually repeated several times. The story of Moses throwing down his stick and it turning into a snake occurs at least 5 times (7:107, 20:19, 26:32, 27:10, 28:31). Iblis refusing to bow down when ordered to by God crops up multiple times as well (2:34, 7:11, 15:31, 17:61, 18:50, 20:116, 38:74).

Yes, God is still the vain megalomaniac we know and love from the Old Testament. He makes it clear to Muhammad that he (Muhammad) is the latest in a line of prophets:

“In matters of faith, He has laid down for you [people] the same commandment that He gave Noah, which We have revealed to you [Muhammad] and which We enjoined on Abraham and Moses and Jesus: ‘Uphold the faith and do not divide into factions within it’” (42:13)

…and he likes to remind him of the fates of those civilisations which failed to heed the warnings (see quotation from 67:6-11 above).

Where does Islam lie on the scale of “religion of peace” to “fight the infidels”?

This is a hard question to answer. As with the Bible, the Qur’an says a great many things, which is grist to the mill of those people who like to take things out of context, re-interpret and impose new meanings on them in ways which were not intended by the author. I have already mentioned the case of “…kill [unbelievers] where you encounter them”, a statement which would be easy to use to demonstrate an inherent violence in Islam if one chose to ignore the context (I only have the word of the translator about the context surrounding this statement, it is possible therefore that other authorities would interpret it differently).

Another example is the so-called “sword verse” which begins:

When the [four] forbidden months are over, wherever you encounter the idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post;…

…which seems pretty damning, but it continues…

…at every lookout post; but if they repent, maintain the prayer and pay the prescribed alms, let them go on their way, for God is most forgiving and merciful. If any one of the idolaters should seek your protection [Prophet], grant it to him so that he may hear the word of God, then take him to a safe place for him, for they are people who do not know.(9:5)

Again, context is important – the idolaters mentioned in this passage are a specific group of people with whom Muhammad and his followers had skirmishes. However, it’s easy to see how passages such as this could be interpreted either by non-Muslims to suggest that Islam is a violent religion or, indeed, by Muslim clerics to suggest the same thing.

On the other hand, the Bible certainly speaks approvingly of wholesale slaughter of people who weren’t God’s “chosen people”, which one might interpret as tipping the wink to Christians who have a mind to spreading Christianity by force, and history furnishes us with examples of those who have sought to do that [crusades, Spanish inquisition]. I think that ultimately, people will read into both books the messages they want to hear – liberals will insist that the religions are forces for good and emphasise the importance of morality and kindness, whereas reactionaries will conclude that they have a divine duty to wage holy war on the unbelievers.

Of particular interest is the question of whether there are, in fact 72 virgins, as a reward in paradise for martyrs. I must confess that on reading it through I failed to spot a reference to 72 of anything. However, there are certain passages which seem to be broadly in the right area, such as this one which describes the fate of two of the three classes into which people will be divided on the Day of Judgement:

On couches of well-woven cloth they [the people closest to God] will sit facing each other; everlasting youths will go round among them with glasses, flagons, and cups of a pure drink that causes no headache or intoxication; there will be any fruit they choose, the meat of any bird they like; and beautiful-eyed maidens like hidden pearls: a reward for what they used to do. They will hear no idle or sinful talk there, only clean and wholesome speech.

Those on the Right [the second best class], what people they are! They will dwell amid thornless lote trees and clustered acacia with spreading share, constantly flowing water, abundant fruits, unfailing, unforbidden, with incomparable companions. We have specially created – virginal, loving, of matching age – for those on the Right, many from the past and many from later generations. (56:15-40)

Needless to say, for the remaining people (those on the Left) it doesn’t end well. For those interested, this article from the Guardian and the video on this page provide further details.

What does Sharia law actually involve?

As mentioned, the Qur’an forms the entire basis for Islamic life, including the system of “Sharia” law. Since the Qur’an doesn’t cover every possible situation, presumably there has been quite a bit of extrapolation and interpretation by generations of Islamic scholars to flesh the teachings out into a comprehensive system of law.

At the moment, Islam is the main boogeyman in the US, invoked by politicians and pundits as a pernicious force bent on taking over America. To that end, a number of politicians are seeking to bring in laws explicitly banning Sharia law. It’s actually quite ironic that the religious right has taken against Sharia law as they have, for there are a number of laws that I imagine they’d embrace enthusiastically if they were put forward as some kind of “Christian contract with America:

“Cut off the hands of thieves whether they are man or woman, as punishment for what they have done – a deterrent from God: God is almighty and wise.” (5:38)

“If any of your women commit a lewd act, call four witnesses from among you, then, if they testify to their guilt, keep the women at home until death comes to them or until God shows them another way. If two men commit a lewd act, punish them both; if they repent and mend their ways, leave them alone – God is always ready to accept repentance, He is full of mercy.” (4:15-16).

According to the index, “lewd act” is a reference to homosexuality. I can think of at least one Christian commentator who could get behind that one.

Having said that, one of the more notorious tenets of Sharia law is that, allegedly, a woman who is raped is deemed to have committed adultery unless she has four witnesses to prove otherwise. I’ve been unable to find the basis of this, though I did spot this intriguing passage:

“As for those who accuse chaste women of fornication, and then fail to provide four witnesses, strike them eight times, and reject their testimony ever afterwards: they are the lawbreakers, except for those who repent later and make amends – God is most forgiving and merciful” (24:4-5)

…so it looks like, if anything, the burden of proof is the other way around. It’s possible that there’s been some creative reinterpretation along the way, or maybe I’ve missed something.

Men are permitted to have multiple wives up to a limit, but will be pleased to hear that slave-girls do not count towards the total.

You [Prophet] are not permitted to take any further wives, nor to exchange the wives you have for others, even if these attract you with their beauty. But this does not apply to your slave-girls. God is watchful over all (33:52)

Some edicts seem objectionable to modern sensibilities such as this, when dealing with the recording of contracts:

Call in two men as witnesses. If two men are not there, then call one man and two women out of those you approve as witnesses, so that if one of the two women should forget the other can remind her. (2:282)

The introduction mentions this passage and points out that given the custom of the times, in which financial business was handled exclusively by men, this is sensible advice since women would have had less experience of the process. So although you can accuse the whole system of being patriarchal and unfair, this passage should not be taken as deliberately offensive, it’s actually only accidentally offensive.

There’s also the vexed question of a woman’s “charms” and those to whom they may be displayed. For the record, the list runs as follows:

…they should draw their coverings over their necklines and not reveal their charms except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers, their brothers’ sons, their sisters’ sons, their womenfolk, their slaves, such men as attend them who have no desire, or children who are not yet aware of womens’ nakedness; they should not stamp their feet so as to draw attention to any hidden charms. (24:31)

To its credit, there’s quite a lot of emphasis on fairness in everyday dealings. Muhammad is described in the introduction as a “respected businessman and peacemaker”, hence advice like this:

“Honour your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges. Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with accurate scales: that is better and fairer in the end. Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these.” (17:34-36)

“Give full measure: do not sell others short. Weigh with correct scales: do not deprive people of what is theirs. Do not spread corruption on earth.” (26:181-183)

God is also capable of leniency (somewhat surprisingly):

“You who believe, eat the good things We have provided for you and be grateful to God, if it is Him that you worship. He has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked. But if anyone is forced to eat such things by hunger, rather than desire or excess, he commits no sin: God is most merciful and forgiving.” (2:172-173)

Summary

As with the Bible, the Qur’an is an interesting book and the world would probably be a better place if more people read it dispassionately and critically (if only because it would save us from people arguing about things they believe to be in it but which actually aren’t). Chris Morris has an amusing anecdote about his dad’s-army-side-of-jihad comedy Four Lions, one of the characters in which is based on a BNP man he encountered while researching the film, who read the Qur’an out of curiosity and “accidentally converted himself“. So far I’ve not found Islam any more or less compelling than Christianity having read the holy books of both, but I feel fractionally more knowledgeable.

My final feeling is that there is a grave error being committed, or so it seems to me, when people decide that their entire lives are to be governed by words written down many centuries ago. The idea of a bunch of people in the modern world choosing to base their worldview around bad science fiction or intercepted radio transmissions from another civilisation would seem quite foolish. Yet people happily put their faith in texts which are equally remote from modern-day reality and refuse to surrender their dogmatic beliefs, preferring to go through huge contortions to make them fit the facts. Maybe someday we’ll grow out of religion, but as long as people prefer to surrender their capacity to make moral judgements to texts like the Qur’an and the Bible (and -  coming next to complete the religious trilogy -  the Talmud) it won’t be any time soon.

The Sheldonian was pretty full (I estimated around 800 people). As promised, there was an ostentatiously empty chair at the front ready for Dawkins, if he suddenly decided to change his mind. To prevent the event turning into a one-sided harangue, a panel of 3 Oxford academics had been rounded up to provide commentary and questions on Craig’s talk.

The title of the talk was “Is God a Delusion?” and was ostensibly a critique of Dawkins’ book, though it seemed to me that it mostly involved rattling through some of the standard arguments for God and explaining, in each case, why Dawkins was wrong. I attempted to take notes throughout the talk but this was tricky given the speed and the fact that an iPhone keypad is not massively well suited to the task. Therefore it’s possible that I may have some of this wrong.

First up: the cosmological argument. This suggests that everything that begins has a cause, the universe had a beginning (and, it was claimed, no theory of the universe escapes the problem that it must have a start), therefore the universe has a cause. Hence God. But surely God must have a cause? No, silly, the cause must trancend time and space, being outside of both. This is, of course, special pleading that God is somehow different. In any case, all we can establish by this argument, if you want to take it seriously, is that something caused the universe to begin, we’re pretty ignorant about what that thing actually is, but we can give it the label God. We could just as easily call it the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Great Green Arkleseizure.

Next, Craig touched on the moral argument for God. In so far as I can make it out, it went something like this: without God there is no objective morality, we have objective morality, therefore God. Craig described this as a strong argument – I may have snorted with derision at this point. Dawkins has pretty strong moral beliefs. Where did they come from, eh? EH?

Thirdly, the teleological argument – that the fundamental constants of the universe are exceptionally find tuned for our existence. Craig suggests that there are three possible explanations for this; physical necessity, chance, or design. Physical necessity he rules out on grounds of implausibility. He spent quite a while attacking chance as an explanation, claiming that theories which allow for a plethora of universes (e.g. oscillating universe, baby universes in black holes) are all flawed. He invoked quantum theory in his defence. It’s not clear to me to what extent that Craig has actually studied physics – my usual instinct when a non-scientist mentions quantum theory is usually that they really don’t know what they’re talking about, but I could be wrong. Which leaves us with design. Dawkins doesn’t like design because it implies a designer, but to Craig it was the simplest of the possible explanations. What about asking who designed the designer? To Craig, such a question is unsporting – “a basic principle of philosophy is that to recognise an explanation is the best, we don’t need an explanation of the explanation”. Suppose we required an explanation of every explanation in science? We’d get nowhere (this is to ignore the fact that all such scientific recursion would eventually bottom out with observations about the real world that one would have to be particularly perverse to reject). So we should just accept the design explanation and leave it at that. This seemed like pretty brazen special pleading to me…

Also, on the teleological argument front, Craig criticised the criticism that the designer was necessarily as complex as the thing being designed. He felt this criticism was “plainly false”. If the creator is a “pure mind” or “consciousness without a body”, asserted Craig, it is clearly very simple as it has no physical parts. Notwithstanding the obvious criticism that it’s not obvious in what kind of substrate this “pure mind” could exist, or how it could effect real physical change, it’s simply not the case that such a mind would be simple. If this thing is omniscient, it seems to me that in order not to be completely tautological (God is the universe itself), the divine mind needs to represent within it the knowledge of every single entity in the universe of which it’s possible to have knowledge – essentially the wavefunction of every particle whether real or virtual, each one (in principle) a continuous function over all space. That would require a pretty big memory – indeed, it’s hard to see how the memory can be smaller than the universe.

Finally, the ontological argument. A cartoon version of it is this: imagine the most amazing thing possible (hint – God), conclude that this amazing thing must have the property of existence (otherwise it’s not the most amazing thing possible), conclude therefore that it exists, therefore God. Again, this doesn’t seem to me like an argument, more like an exercise in sophistry.

After Craig, the three academics had a go. Firstly, Daniel Kane (I may have the name wrong) took issue with Craig’s version of the cosmological argument – he felt that there was no problem with the concept of oscillating universes (i.e. universe ends with a big crunch, a new universe is then born in a new big bang, an idea dismissed by Craig). He also pointed out that, with respect to the teleological argument, postulating a huge number of universes in a multiverse didn’t run foul of Occam’s razor as we were still dealing with entities of one kind, whereas if God is intruduced, we’re multiplying the kinds of entities. He didn’t have a problem with the “infinite series of past events” difficulty, pointing out that we have actual infinities to deal with in space (i.e. number of points on a line) which don’t cause us problems in practice.

Secondly, Stephen Priest, a philosopher. He seemed to feel that the universe couldn’t be understood without theology. He claimed that very few people understood philosophical questions and that there were two huge things which needed to be understood – quantum physics and Heidegger’s thinking. He ended by citing three big philosophical questions: “Why is it now now”, “What is it to be?” and “Why is something you”. I recall him being entertaining but I couldn’t quite see the point of it all. Maybe I’m stupid.

Finally, John Parrington (a scientist). He took issue with the problem of finely tuned constants, pointing out that there could be other combinations of the constants which would sustain life, just not necessarily life as we know it. He felt that it was a mistake to choose God over the multiverse theory, it could just be that we don’t understand physics sufficiently. He said that as a biologist, he never saw the hand of God, just the appearance of design which is explained by evolutionary theory along with plenty of bad design, junk DNA etc.

Craig responded to the universe point with more sciency words – quantum fluctuations, entropy and all that. Apparently a contracting universe is highly unstable. Not sure what Craig’s physics credentials are to enable him to make these claims, though I’m sure that mine aren’t sufficient to address them. On spacial / temporal continuity, he claimed that there was no reason for believing space to be continuous therefore there are no real spacial infinities, but the problem of temporal infinities remains. I would have though that if we have no grounds for believing space to be continuous, then we have no grounds for believing time to be continuous either.

At this point there was a pause for people to submit questions. I remained unimpressed by him arguments for God, though prepared to give him respect for being several steps above the Christian apologists that one finds in America.

After the break came the questions. These elicited a number of claims from Craig, such as the idea that the principle that things have causes isn’t a physical principle, it’s metaphysical and the idea of being arising from non-being is simply magic, therefore the universe has a cause. Obvious retort – what is God here, if not just another name for “the magic thing that we’re invoking to explain the universe arising apparently from nothing”? He also observed that science hasn’t proved the soul doesn’t live on after death – well, no, neither has it disproven the existence of a small teapot orbiting the sun but that doesn’t mean we have good grounds for accepting it.

The most interesting moment, for me, came right at the end when the issue of God creating evil and the accusation from Dawkins that Craig is willing to be an apologist for the stories of genocide against the people of Canaan carried out in God’s name. My notes (slightly edited for spellings etc. of his answer are as follows:)

“Will answer from Christian perspective – God didn’t invent evil, he created moral beings. Evil = not being oriented towards God – is misuse of free will. Denies saying God commanded genocide. Was dealing with narratives in Hebrew Bible talking of God’s command for Israelites to go into Canaan and slaughter Canaanites. If you take Bible to be historical, how could God issue such commands and why? Is there inconsistency? Argued that in context of narrative, God kept people in Egypt for 400 years because Canaanites hadn’t reached sufficient iniquity and then used Israel to bring his judgements as he would later use other nations to bring God’s judgement to Israel. Canaanites were very evil – bestiality, human sacrifice etc. story comes after judgement on Sodom and Gomorrah – Abraham’s argument with God ["would you spare Sodom for 50 good men - how about 40 etc."], bargaining like a “middle eastern merchant”. So God is reasonable, and won’t judge unless people are utterly completely deserving. And judgement was not to commit genocide – command was to dive them out of the land. God was destroying these nation states by dispossession them of their land and giving the land over to Israel as the promised land. If Canaanites had simply fled, unpleasantness would have been avoided. Nothing in narrative to suggest women or children were killed. Was dispossessing of land. So how could just and holy God order such a thing? Well, our moral duty is [defined as] doing God’s command [reminded me of Nixon]. How could a God command children to be killed? Children die all the time. God under no obligation to prolong life – God has right to give and take life at any time. Children recipients of a greater good – life carries on beyond the grave. Doing children a favour. God had morally sufficient reasons for this. These people were due for judgement. Emphasised for Israel that they were to be a holy people. And he’d later bring the Christ into the world through Israel. So it’s all all right.”

I don’t know to what extent Craig actually believes the Bible to be historical in the sense of “an accurate representation of what happened, Gods and all”. I don’t believe he’s a creationist (though he has Intelligent Design sympathies), and it’s hard to see how you could accept the absolute historicity of the Pentateuch and yet not be a creationist (where would you draw the line between the made-up stuff and reality?). So I assume he doesn’t take this literally. However, then I don’t see why he needs to justify this at all – there would appear to be a huge chasm between God as a “spaceless, timeless, disembodied consciousness” responsible for creating the universe and the Hebrew God with his petty jealousy, vanity and genocidal instincts. Does Craig believe they’re the same, and if not, why defend the latter?

At the end, there was a show of hands. The vast majority of the audience believed in a creator God, with about 10 atheists and 10 “don’t know”. Rather depressing, though I think the event had been organised by some kind of Christian union at Oxford which might explain it. I wonder how many of these people were studying science?

For more on William Lane Craig, here’s PZ Myers discussing Craig’s claims that animals don’t feel pain.

That probably sounds a little unhinged, so I suppose I’d better qualify it. The gedankenexperiment went something like this – supposing I was diagnosed with some particularly fatal ailment such that I had, say, 3 months to live, and I was prepared to take an ethical bullet for mankind by devoting my remaining time and modest financial resources by seeking out and destroying the individual who had done the most damage to the world over the course of his / her life, who would it be?

If you’d asked me this question anytime before the summer of this year, the answer would have been an unequivocal “Rupert Murdoch”. I figured that given his dominance of media across the globe and the way that politicians routinely capitulate to his demands in return for support, he was an obvious candidate. I would probably have argued that he was a far worse figure than Osama bin Laden, because whereas bin Laden had merely killed lots of people, Murdoch had debased and degraded mankind and possibly done irreparable damage to the fabric of society (I’m not claiming this is an argument I could have sustained, but I’d have given it my best shot).

However, this summer, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal happened and suddenly it seemed that Murdoch was no longer untouchable. At the time of writing the enquiries are in the early stages, but things aren’t looking good for him and, perhaps, his empire. No longer did he seem like public enemy #1, therefore I was obliged to rethink the whole “people I’d kill” thing.

The main outcomes of this period of reflection were:

1. I didn’t really have any intention of killing anybody. In the unlikely event of being given 3 months to live, I like to hope I’d be able to find something better to do with the time (here’s one particularly inspiring example of how to deal with impending death). Killing people, at least any of those on this list, would only make things worse.
2. I came across the quote “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”, said to be by Mark Twain but apparently not. I found this a succinct summary of my views in this matter.
3. I demoted Murdoch to #2, found a new #1, cobbled together a joint #3 and #4 and finally a thoroughly reprehensible #5 and realised that I might be able to justify writing a blog about it.

So, just to be clear – I do not wish any of the following people dead, for reasons which will hopefully become apparent (except in the weak sense that I certainly wouldn’t want any of them to live forever). However, they’re in the list because I believe the effect they’re having on the world is wholly malign and will be judged so by future historians, because they’re almost certainly unrepentant about what they do, and because there’s very little (or zero in one case) chance that they’ll ever be able to redeem themselves.

To understand fully the reasons for including each person, you’ll need to read the linked articles (some of which are quite long). You might want to set aside an hour and make yourself a nice cup of tea to calm down afterwards. Also, as you’ve no doubt realised, this is going to be a bit of a rant and therefore I’m allowing myself to make assertions without necessarily supplying any evidence to support them and to frame things in ways which favour my position. This is perfectly permissible because, basically, I’m right about all of this and you can trust me.

#1 Roger Ailes

Ailes has supplanted Murdoch as #1 enemy of the people for two simple reasons – he’s the boss of Fox News and apparently Murdoch is afraid of him.

Read this Rolling Stone article for details. One almost feels sympathy for Murdoch. Almost.

#2 Rupert Murdoch

Ailes might have supplanted Murdoch as the most malign person on the planet, but Murdoch is still hanging in there. Hopefully his influence is on the wane since the NotW scandal and politicians will be less keen to associate with him in future. But for being in cahoots with Thatcher as she and her merry band of Tories re-wrote society’s rules to reward wealth and punish poverty, he is still thoroughly deserving of his #2 spot.

#3 and #4 Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch

The Koch brothers. Who? Exactly. Wondering where a number of influential right-wing think-tanks get their money? Curious to know who is bankrolling the “spontaneous” tea-party uprisings? Read on…

Why, you might ask, are they so against Government regulations? Maybe because they keep falling foul of them.

To be fair, I’m sure there are plenty of other shady billionaires quietly funneling money to causes which promote their own financial interests and since the Citizens United ruling we’ll doubtless see the problem get much worse. But the Koch brothers seem to be a particularly egregious example of the genre. Charles seems to be the worse of the two, so he’s notionally #3, to David’s #4, but let’s consider it a tie. And – yes, I know they’re also part of the American tradition of philanthropy which I admire, but from the account of the climate exhibition at the Smithsonian, it seems that sometimes their largess may have strings attached.

#5 Bryan J Fischer

Most public right wing religious figures make an effort to obscure their true agenda, trying to hoodwink Americans into believing they’re not so extreme. But with Fischer, you’re getting the real stuff — unvarnished old-school hatred, with no gloss and no attractive rhetoric.

So says Charles Johnson of the excellent Little Green Footballs. I’ll have to let the Internets tell you all about Mr Fischer. Words more-or-less fail me.

• People for the American Way
• Right Wing Watch
• The great man himself

Yes, there are other crazy religious-right theocrats, historical revisionists, dishonest journalists,  anti-feminist-feminists, creationists and kooks of various types. Picking one of them is a thankless task, like trying to choose your favourite nazi (thanks to @rjceetoo for that comparison). But I’m going to plump for Fischer as my #5.

So there you have it. 5 obituaries that, some day, I imagine it will be great fun to read.

But do I want them dead? Well, eventually, yes, because if they turned out to be immortal it would undermine my confidence in science somewhat and also it would totally suck. But I want them to shuffle off this mortal coil of their own accord, rather than at the hands of an intemperate individual for two very important reasons:

1. It would be morally wrong to kill them.
2. I wouldn’t want these people going out as martyrs in a great blaze of glory – I’d far rather they went out in a dim flicker of failure.

I’d prefer them to live to a ripe old age, because I believe that despite their best efforts, the world is gradually becoming a more liberal, tolerant place, and the Internet has stripped away some of the veneer of impenetrability that protects men like the Kochs. So, rather than wish death on them, I want them to suffer much greater indignities, namely scorn and ridicule.

Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe  we will end up with an uber-right-wing (though naturally “small”) US Government, corporations which operate without regulation or restraint, and a society in which being anything other than a white heterosexual Christian will be a criminal offence. In that case, I’ll be the one who goes to my grave sad and defeated, a corporate boot stamping on my face forever.

But there’s always the hope that at the end of a long life of right-wing propaganda and dirty tricks, cynical opportunism, subverting the democratic process, or simply being a thoroughly vile individual (have you guessed which of these people I believe has zero chance of redemption?), they will look out at a world that has rejected their attempts to ruin it, and they will expire knowing that all their efforts have been in vain. I find that a comforting thought.

On re-reading this, I note one thing which has doubtless struck you as well – all of these people are American (well, Murdoch is Australian, but has US citizenship). Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I can’t find individuals in the UK with a similar level of unpleasantness (again, the exception is Murdoch whose baleful influence is global).

Firstly, we don’t have a media presence which functions as a propaganda machine for the Conservatives in the same way as Fox is the propaganda wing of the Republicans (or maybe the Republicans are the political wing of Fox as David Frum observed). It’s true that there has been disturbing speculation recently about relaxing the rules to permit this, but that was before Murdoch’s fall from grace so hopefully we’ll be spared that particular idiocy.

Secondly, I don’t think we have vested financial interests seeking to subvert the political agenda like the Kochs, though we’re not without mysterious brothers with financial interests. I believe that if anyone did try to fund think-tanks and lobbyists to the same degree, there’d be a sufficiently big fuss made (by all sides) that the game would be up, whereas the Kochs are able to get away with what they do because it’s evidently a non-issue for most of the American media.

Finally, we don’t do religious bigotry like they do in the States, and Christianity is not the dominating force over here that it is there. The only prominent religious bigot we have is the rather pathetic figure of Stephen Green and his pressure group Christian Voice who is occasionally and inexplicably quoted by the media from time to time as a token angry Christian. The idea that would-be Conservative leadership candidates would want to appear on a radio show hosted by him to pledge obeisance to his values in the hope of securing the votes of his army of fans is quite laughable.

Anyway. Who have I missed from this parade of evil?

After a brief flurry of activity in which I actually ripped all of the CDs I had at the time into WAVs, the project languished while I tried to figure out a way of getting all of the XML files into shape. The thing which restarted my interest in the project, and gave me a way out of the murky darkness was Subversion.

If you’re a techie type, you’ll probably know about Subversion already, but for the benefit of those who aren’t (in which case, well done for getting this far), Subversion is a version control system, usually used for program code. One sets up a master ‘repository’ which stores all of your work on a machine somewhere. You can then ‘check out’ a copy of the files in this repository to whatever machine (or machines) you want to work on. You make changes to files, add files, delete them, and periodically commit your changes back to the repository. If, in the meantime, other people have been changing files and committing their changes to the repository also, you can update your local ‘working copy’ to incorporate their changes (and they can update theirs to incorporate your work). You can also look at the revision history of stuff in the repository, so you can recover earlier versions of files if necessary.

I realised earlier in the year that I could sort out a lot of the files I have languishing on various computers, by setting up a bunch of personal Subversion repositories and putting all my stuff in them (this solves my usual problem of having some stuff on one machine, copying it to a laptop or something, then getting confused some months later about which is the more up-to-date copy – with Subversion, the repository is the master copy).

The cunning idea I had was this: I would check in the big tree of WAV files and XML into Subversion, except that I would tell it to ignore the WAVs (checking in 400Gb of WAV files wouldn’t have been particularly sensible). Then, I could check out the resulting tree to another machine, work on it, and commit a new version every time some progress was made. This fixed the ‘having to write one script to do it all in one stage’ problem – it could be broken into manageable chunks, and when it was eventually all done, I could simply update the directory containing the WAVs and all of the finalised XML would just fall into place around them.

So, armed with this wonderful new ability, I went through something like the following sequence of logical steps.

1. Using the CDDB ID of each CD (which I’d had the good sense to store, even though CDDB is a bit rubbish), I was able to get track and artist information from CDDB and save it as an XML file alongside each of the XML files derived from my pre-existing metadata (see parts 1 and 2).
2. I combined my metadata and CDDB’s metadata into one file for each CD. I assumed that if my names agreed with CDDB’s names, they were probably correct, so I just needed to look at the differences.
3. I wrote a script to look through the merged files and write out an XML file containing just the differences (e.g. if there was only a difference in one track name for a particular album, the ‘error.xml’ file would just contain that one track). Brilliantly, if the script found that ‘error.xml’ already existed for that album and had been edited by me, it would use my edits to resolve the differences. Thus my data correction problem became ‘find all error.xml files and make a decision about what name to use’.

For many CDs, the differences were quite trivial to resolve (a mis-spelling or different capitalization of a couple of track titles, for example. Therefore, I was able to do quite a lot of conflict resolution on a laptop on the train to and from work without having access to the CDs. For more complicated problems, the work had to be done next to my stack of CDs, but it was still pretty straightforward.

Here is where the story should have ended – I ended up with a set of XML files, one for each CD, with track titles, artist names and track boundary information. I was able to fix up the (relatively small) number of CDs with hidden first tracks, or with two albums on one disc / one album over several discs, and deal with the annoying track cataloguing of the Mars Volta’s ‘Frances The Mute‘ (if I’m feeling enthusiastic, one day I might restore They Might Be Giants’ ‘Fingertips‘ to the originally planned collection of many short tracks instead of one big one.)

Unfortunately, after discussing this ridiculous project with a friend of mine, he suggested that the MusicBrainz database might be worth investigating, so I investigated it. MusicBrainz is an open, user-contributed database of CDs, track titles and artist names. It is much better than CDDB because a) it isn’t owned by some large corporation, b) it has a much more robust way of identifying CDs than the terrible CDDB ID scheme I’ve already mentioned in part 2 and c) because it assigns globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) to each artist, album and track in the database.

Sadly, the prospect of having GUIDs for everything was too enticing, so I lurched back into ad-hoc scripting mode, writing scripts to match up all of my discs with GUIDs in the MusicBrainz database. Fortunately, they have an on-line service which will attempt to map CDDB IDs to MusicBrainz entries (with the proviso that this is not guaranteed to work because of the rubbishness of CDDB). So I was able to get most of them, but there were about 100 that I had to look up by hand. Then, having got the GUIDs for each disc, I needed to download the MusicBrainz data for that disc and merge it with mine (so my XML files acquired MusicBrainz GUIDs in addition to the titles, artist names and timings) – I could have used XSLT for this, but I decided it was simpler to do it in code using DOM4j (infinitely better than plain DOM). I realised that, good though MusicBrainz was, I owned some CDs which weren’t present in the database and so naturally I felt compelled to add them.

On the whole, the MusicBrainz excursion was worth it, because it simplified the next phase of the project, which was building a robust ripping solution that I could use in the future (and finally converting the WAV files I’d already ripped). In the style of the great four-book Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy, I will outline that in part 4 of this 3-part series and, for the geeks, I might even include some source code for the procedure. That will, at least, force me to comment it and actually clean up the error-handling (for those who want to know – it’s written in Java on Linux using Maven for dependency management – it might be possible to make it work on a Mac but I doubt you’ll get it to work under Windows because it requires the cdparanoia library and various tools for slicing up WAVs.)

1. The riots have brought out the best in people. The groups of volunteers out on the streets clearing up the mess and making cups of tea for knackered policemen and women represent Britain at its finest.
2. The riots have brought out the worst in people. The demands for the thugs to be shot on sight, insistence that the army must be brought in, suggestions that if we were all armed it would prevent the looting – none of these things are helpful. News that sales of baseball bats have shot up on Amazon is quite troubling – I suspect some would-be “defenders of the realm” are actually hoping for a fight, in which case it’s not clear how they’re morally superior to the rioters.
3. It is unfortunate for the looters that they don’t work in the city. If they did, they could do much the same as they’re doing now, except that it would be called “asset-stripping” and they would be richly rewarded for it. We’re seeing the “greed is good” morality of the Thatcher/Reagan years transplanted from the haves to the have-nots, though in both cases it’s the have-nots who will be the losers.
4. We’re fortunate that the rioters don’t appear to have a purpose beyond destroying stuff and haven’t put much thought into what they actually destroy. Panes of glass in shop windows are relatively easy to replace, shops can be restocked and paid for through insurance (which means higher premiums – thanks for that…). They’ve not, as far as I’m aware, tried to disable transport links (a burning bus or two doesn’t count), or sabotage the rail network. An angry mob which thought about what it was doing could inflict far more economic damage than we’re seeing now, which is not to say that the chaos we’re seeing now is going to be cheap.
5. There will have to be a rethink of the whole “austerity Britain” idea. For want of comparatively small expenditures on social programs (youth clubs etc.), we now have the large and ongoing expense of dealing with the resulting frustrations. Exacerbating the massive inequalities in our economic system by pulling the rug from underneath those at the bottom is simply going to result in more young people abandoning what pitiful stake they have in society and turning to violence. We won’t be able to keep locking them up for ever.
6. On the “punishment” front, I want to see the rioters punished within the law, but I expect their punishment to include a significant amount of rehabilitation, education and help. No doubt there will be those who regard this as woolly liberalism gone mad and will expect solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water. To people with this mentality, I have one simple question – do you want these people to come out of prison just as bad as they were when they went in?
7. Things which need to be fixed: The massive inequalities in society (probably by fixing taxation system to make it more redistributive). Idea that a person’s worth is measured by what kind of trainers they wear (i.e. the corrosive association of wealth with status – don’t know how to fix this as it seems ingrained in popular culture). Education system that tolerates failure and allows children to leave without being able to read and write meaningfully (this will cost a lot of money). Treatment of the unemployed as second-class citizens and demonisation of so-called “benefits scroungers” (if we’ve abandoned the goal of full employment because capitalism can’t deliver it, we shouldn’t be stigmatising victims of a systematic failure)
8. The title of this post comes from the song “Right To Work” by Chelsea. It encapsulates one simple fact: if there had been worthwhile jobs for all of the rioters, the riots wouldn’t have happened. Cameron may see the root cause as a lack of respect, but why should people respect a system which gives them no hope and no opportunity? Not a lot of point getting on your bike and looking for work if it’s plain to see that there’s very little work to be had.

1. To have a better grasp of its contents.
2. To recognise figures of speech and literary allusions which have a Biblical origin.
3. To form my own understanding of God.
4. To try to understand what Christians see in it.

I shall tackle these in order.

Getting a better grasp of the contents of the Bible

The Bible, as most people know (i.e. even I knew this before I started), is split into two parts. The Old Testament is basically a written-down version of the Israelites’ folk stories about their origin, and various prophesies. The New Testament is all the stories about Jesus and the invention of Christianity, mostly by Paul. My King James edition has 1235 pages, of which the first 943 are the Old Testament.

The Bible is a long narrative, written by persons known and unknown; there’s no named author for much of the Old Testament, and authorship of bits of the New Testament is disputed. It is important to realise that the Bible we have today is not a collection of these texts as they originally existed. There must, logically, have been a first time each book, chapter and verse of the Bible was committed to manuscript, but we don’t have these scripts. We have copies of copies and we know that they have suffered additions, deletions and edits, also by persons unknown, since their original creation. We know this because there are a number of fairly old surviving manuscripts of the Bible and they have a great many differences.

One example of this is in relation to the Ten Commandments which Moses is gifted in Exodus. The commandments are set out in chapter 20, which ends with Moses being instructed to build an altar. Then, suddenly, chapters 21, 22 and possibly 23 go into lots of low-level detail about punishments for various crimes and misdemeanors (e.g. if an ox gores a man then the ox is killed but not the owner, unless the owner knew that the ox had such tendencies, the owner is to be put to death too). Then we return to the scheduled programme. It could be that God is indulging in his enthusiasm for micro-managing everything (of which more later), but a more probable explanation might be that at some point a community decided that their laws needed a bit more divine authority, so they were simply inserted into their copy of the Bible at what seemed like a sensible place. Thus we have the famous “eye for eye, tooth for tooth“.

A lot of the Bible is pretty tough going and it is a little hard to stop one’s eyes glazing over at times. For example, Numbers 7:12-83 consists of almost twelve almost identical blocks of 6 lines, each of which details the offering made by one of the 12 tribes of Israel. These are all the same, apart from minor wording differences (e.g “One spoon of ten shekels of gold” vs “One spoon of gold of ten shekels”) and the name of the person doing the offering (“Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur, prince of the children of Manasseh”, “Abidan the son of Gideoni, prince of the children of Benjamin” etc.) Then, to add insult to injury, verses 84-88 sum up the total offering! Massively tedious.

The New Testament is a little better. It starts out with the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). Written a long time after the events they purport to describe took place, they tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth, a troublesome preacher with some radical ideas. In particular, he was critical of the dogmatic beliefs espoused by the priests of the time. Then he’s put to death and Paul, of “road to Damascus” fame, starts furiously writing letters about him thus starting a cult of personality which we know today as Christianity.

When asked by a friend during this project which bit of the Bible was my favourite, I said “the end”. This was semi-serious – Revelation was all jolly good fun.

Figures of speech and literary allusions

This aspect of reading the Bible was reasonably successful. Expressions of which I (at least) was ignorant of the origin include:

• “Land of milk and honey” – the description of the promised land in Exodus 3:8
• “The writing on the wall” – from a story in Daniel beginning in 5:5
• “Kick against the pricks” – basis for a Nick Cave album title rather than a well-known expression as such, but it’s from Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in Acts 9:5
• “Spare the rod, spoil the child” – appears to originate in Proverbs 22:15 and 23:13
• “Lambs to the slaughter” – from Jeremiah 51:40
• “Kiss me with your mouth, your love is better than wine” -from Kiss Me by Tin Tin, but it’s originally from the Song of Solomon 1:2

Also, of course, the lyrics of Hallelujah have various Biblical references (2 Samuel 11:2, for example), and now that I have an understanding of the story of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat I have a much better appreciation of how crass it is as a musical.

I noted with interest and amusement that the word “piss” appears several times in the Bible. It’s used to describe a group of people that “pisseth against the wall” (e.g. 1 Samuel 25:22), and in 2 Kings 18:27 in a description of people who “eat their own dung and drink their own piss”. Coprophilia in the Good Book – do they allow children to read this filth?

Personal understanding of God

To be precise – a personal understanding of how other people have understood God. I take it as read that it doesn’t exist (for the sake of readibility, I’ll use “he” or “his” but note here that it seems odd to assign a gender to a non-existent being) and so I’m more interested in his portrayal. Winston Churchill’s son Randolph once decided to read the Bible in a fortnight for a bet and observed “isn’t God a shit?“. I think this is an analysis which stands up well.

It seems clear that God was a hypothesis invented by the people of Israel to account for their origins and the trials and tribulations they encountered in their history. As their fortunes waxed and waned, God was either on their side or had turned against them and, since fortune is unpredictable, it follows that God must be capricious and flighty. But, nonetheless, they were compelled to understand the reasons why God had chosen either to favour or forsake them and tried to deduce which aspects of their behaviour would tip him one way or the other.

As bosses go, God is a bit of a control freak. For example:

• Several chapters of Exodus (25-27) are taken up with God describing to Moses the construction of a tabernacle (a large tent of some kind) in which he is to be worshipped.
• Exodus 28 has God as a fashion designer, creating the uniform for his priests. My favourite aspect of this was the frequent references to the “curious girdle of the ephod” which could be the title of some ghasty prog-rock album.
• He’s quite particular about the various offerings and sacrifices that are to be made to him: the sin offering, the trespass offering, the meat offering, the wave offering and so forth. And heaven forbid that anyone should try to improvise an offering – Nadab and Abihu the sons of Aaron the priest try, and are burned to death with holy fire for their troubles in Leviticus 10:2.
• He has an obsession with circumcised penises. It is never really explained why – maybe it was some kind of personal preference of one of the many authors / editors. Nevertheless, I particularly like Jeremiah 4:4 which reads “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart” – it sounds like a bad Country & Western song.
• He likes to throw his weight around and mess with people, just because he can. Take the plagues of Egypt for example – the Lord smites Egypt with a variety of ailments, and each time the Pharoah fails to let Moses and his Israelites go. But, in Exodus 9:12, we see that Lord is responsible for the Pharoah’s intransigence! God seems to be playing off one side against the other for the sheer hell of it. See also the trials and tribulations of the hapless Job who gets caught in the crossfire of a bet between God and Satan.
• You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. In Numbers 11:1, people in Moses’ camp complain and this displeases God, who then proceeds to burn them all with fire until the people have words with Moses who prays to God to put the fire out.

Understanding what Christians see in it

This is still something of a mystery to me. I can see how, a long time ago when people were less sophisticated in their reading of texts than we are now, readers might have found it convincing. Certainly, if you assume that it’s all literally true, ignore the contradictions and inconsistencies, and don’t ask any awkward questions, then I imagine that it would all seem rather impressive – the creation of the world in 6 days, the rituals, the divinely-approved genocide, the guy coming back from the dead and so forth. I am at a loss to understand how anybody could possibly take it all literally now, although some people clearly do. I am also rather sceptical about any attempt to derive a system of morality from it – although Jesus said (or is said to have said) some broadly sensible things, it’s not a complete guide and its simplistic prescriptions (thou shalt not kill etc.) have troublesome edge cases (assisted suicide, for example) which weren’t so much of an issue two millenia ago.

I guess the beauty of the Bible is that there’s so much in it that can be {over/mis/re}interpreted to suit whatever ends the interpreter desires. Plenty of people with a misogynistic, narrow and bigoted outlook on life have taken advantage of this to find an interpretation which allows them to claim divine justification for their beliefs.

As an example of the rich pickings available for misogynists, take the story of Vashti, the wife of king Ahasuerus. One day when he’s had a bit to drink, he commands her to be brought forth and shown to all the princes. Vashti refuses and this makes the king “very wroth” so he asks various wise men what he should do with her. A chap called Memucan sees the dire trouble they’re in – if word gets out that Vashti refused to do her husband the king’s bidding, then soon all over the kingdom, wives will be standing up to their husbands. Calamity! So the king writes to all the provinces stressing the importance of the man ruling in his own household. Meanwhile there’s a search for virgins, such that the one who most tickles Ahasuerus’ fancy should be queen instead of Vashti. Thus the first recorded outbreak of feminism is quickly stamped out.

For more casual misogynism we can look at the two occasions where the owner of a house, beset by ruffians who wish to “know” his (male) guests, attempts to mollify the mob by promising them his daughters. This gambit first appears in Genesis 19:8 though we don’t learn if the mob take the man (Lot in this case) up on his offer. The second time this cunning ruse is tried is in Judges 19:24, on which occasion the men are invited to “do with them [the man's daughter and his guest's concubine] what seemeth good unto you” which turns out to be “they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning”. Or there’s the time that Moses orders the slaughter of all non-virginal women, but suggests the soldiers keep any virgins for themselves (Numbers 31:18). I suppose if you really want confirmation that women are disposable second-class citizens, the Bible is a good book to have on your side.

Of course, one of the regular demands that gets brought up by Christians of a certain persuasion is the importance of marriage as it is in the Bible – one man and one woman. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Moving on from hatred of women, there’s the wholesale slaughter to consider. God kills all the firstborn of Egypt (Exodus 12:12). In Numbers 25:17, Moses is urged to smite the Midianites. In Deuteronomy 7:2, God promises to destroy utterly the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites to free up the land for the people of Israel – I believe we’d call that ethnic cleansing in our modern parlance. And, as already mentioned, he’s not above slaughtering his own followers when he’s in a bit of a grump.

One reason for being particularly worried about the Bible and its followers at the moment is that it looks increasingly likely that the next US Republican presidential candidate will be relying on the Bible (or an interpretation thereof) as a guide to policymaking. At the time of writing, Texas Governor Rick Perry is preparing to hold a prayer rally in Houston on 6th August. He appears to be connected with a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation who believe they have a “direct line to God” and take the Book of Joel as a manual for coping with “end-time events“. He will be supported by a variety of interesting individuals, all of whom have their own interesting interpretations of the Bible.

Summary

So, in summary – it’s too long, not very well written, quite dull in many places and generally underwhelming. I failed utterly to be particularly moved by any of it, but it obviously provides sufficient fodder for a variety of crazy (and disturbingly influential people) to justify a range of beliefs from the merely objectionable to the morally abhorrent. Ultimately, it seems rather unfortunate that whatever good ideas Jesus may have had (he’d  probably be branded a dangerous radical if he was around now), Christianity lost its way around the time Paul was writing his letters, and we’ve been stuck with its curious mix of whimsy, cruelty and idiocy ever since.

Broadly speaking, there are two political parties in the States – the Republicans and the Democrats. When I was younger, my mental picture of the world had these mapped nicely to English equivalents – the Republicans were Conservatives (pro-business, pro-rich-people) and the Democrats were Labour (pro-social-equality, pro-poor-people in the sense of wanting to help them). A nice simple picture, marred by two facts, namely that the colours were the wrong way round (Republicans = red, Democrats = blue), and if it ever had any truth at all (doubtful) this mapping now is entirely wrong. A more accurate picture would have the Democrats as Conservatives (perhaps on the left of the party) and the Republicans – well, they’re just off the scale.

The central thesis of American Taliban is that despite the fierce anti-Islamic rhetoric from the US right-wing (which has risen in fervour even since the publication of the book), the ideals and aspirations of militant Islamic groups are surprisingly similar to those espoused and endorsed by the US religious right and therefore reflected in the positions espoused by Republical politicians.

Each chapter of the book captures a different aspect of the right-wing zaniness.

1. “Power”. The American Taliban regard wielding power as a divine right. When they’re not wielding power, something is heinously wrong. They don’t really like the idea of democracy, unless it can be subverted to serve their ends (although they scream bloody murder when they think, however incorrectly, that it is being rigged agaist them).
2. “War”. They love their fighting. Whether it’s against funny foreign people in another country, or tacitly encouraging nuts to murder funny foreign-looking people in their own country, they just can’t get enough brutality. All in the name of Christ, of course, that well known warmonger. No, wait…
3. “Sex”. They love this. Or, rather, they love to hate this. Especially when the people involved are of the same gender. They’re all for liberty, freedom, and getting the hated Government out of peoples’ lives, but make a special exemption for what goes on in the bedroom, which they insist the Government should regulate to the n’th degree (both in America and abroad). And don’t be trying to tell any of the kids about sex and contraception neither! (But make sure abortion is not an option if they experiment anyway with unplanned consequences).
4. “Women”. Not especially popular, unless they’re in the kitchen baking cookies. Curiously, some of the American Taliban’s chief women-hating voices are women themselves – Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly (mother of Andrew Schlafly of comedy “Conservapedia” fame). Protecting women against rape? Not terribly high on the American Taliban’s agenda. Ensuring that, if a women is raped and becomes pregnant, she must have the baby? Well that’s different…
5. “Culture”. In the land of the free / home of the brave, the American Taliban love to allege that Obama is leading America to some kind of totalitarian hell (I think it was Jon Stewart who pointed out the absurdity of the right-wingers claiming that the Nazi conspiracy to impose universal healthcare was being led by a black man and a gay Jew). But the people at the forefront of any movement to ban something? No prizes for guessing. One brief accidental glimpse of a nipple on the television and all hell breaks loose.
6. “Truth”. The American Taliban are like the terminator (a product of liberal Hollywood values, don’tcha know) in one important respect – they cannot be reasoned with. This is because many of them flatly reject the idea of rational discourse, reasoned argument, appeals to evidence. It smacks of elitism and academia (something else they don’t like very much). Instead, they believe what they want to believe. Including the idea that the Earth is 6000 years old, that climate science (or science in general) is a hoax, and that there’s no economic problem that can’t be solved by cutting taxes for the rich. At least some of them acknowledge that they live in a fantasy world.

A common and lazy criticism which can be made of books like this would be to accues the author of quote-mining (the practice, beloved of creationists and other anti-science nuts, of taking someone’s words out of context to give a misleading impression of their position). To be fair,  But, as they say, by their actions shall you judge them. To take one example the American Taliban’s hatred of women is illustrated by Al Franken’s “the US government shouldn’t do business with companies which allow women to be raped by their co-workers” bill – 30 Republicans voted against this.

These forces have been around in America for a long time, but it’s only since Obama’s election that things have really started to kick off. The Tea Party rallies are ostensibly an expression of populist anger at the government, but are in reality overwhelmingly a right-wing Republican phenomenon, fired up by incendiary words from the American Taliban’s more noted intellectuals and bankrolled by shady characters for whom this is really all about tax. It will be noticeable how, next time a Republican is voted in as president, the Tea Party movement will simply melt away and the extremist rhetoric will diminish somewhat (though, sadly, it will be replaced by action).

Interestingly, amid all the gloom and despite the fire-and-brimstone imprecations of the demagogues, there are signs that the American Taliban may be losing the culture war on at least one front – the poll numbers suggest a general trend over the last couple of decades towards an increasing acceptance of gay marriage. The unreconstructed and primitive attitudes of the right are generally less appealling to the younger generation, though this hasn’t stopped various states’ Republican parties of adopting measures to try to stall this. Unfortunately, this has meant the right have needed to cast around for another group to persecute and it seems that Muslims have landed this uncoveted role. Since the book went to press, the whole kerfuffle about the “Ground Zero Mosque” has been stage-managed by the usual Republican talking heads, with the consequence that mosques and Muslims across the country have been the victims of attacks by dim right-wing “patriots”. Some of the American Taliban aren’t even bothering to be subtle about it, openly equating being Muslim with being a terrorist. Picking on a social group within society and making them scapegoats for whatever ills (or imagined ills) society is facing – where have we seen that before? Sadly, the irony of this posturing is lost on the rank and file.

The book is informal – it’s not pretending to be an academic tome, it’s just the author telling it like it is. As a reader of the Daily Kos (the left-leaning blog founded by the Moulitsas), I was already aware of some of the documented tales of bigotry, but it’s good to have them collected in one place. And, as I’ve said, he’s not picking words from fringe nutters – some of these people have real influence, from the senators who voted to deny raped women their day in court, to Don “standing up to the experts” McLeroy fighting to ensure schoolchildren across the nation are taught palpable nonsense in science classes.

Condemnation of this foolishness is not confined to the left, of course. There are conservative commentators who are equally aghast at the way the Republican movement is becoming (and allowing itself to become) increasingly disconnected from reality and abandoning itself to blind prejudice. A prime example is Charles Johnson who posted on his Little Green Footballs blog a list of 10 reasons why he wanted nothing more to do with the modern conservative movement and, since then, has been grimly documenting their flight from reality (for which, naturally, he receives quite a bit of hate mail).

In conclusion, if you heard vague things about Sarah Palin and had an idea that she would have been a mistake as vice-president, you should read this book. If you’re wondering why Obama’s efforts to fix the broken US healthcare system resulted in him being compared to Hitler you should read this book. If you are under the impression that American politics is anything like English politics (i.e. politicians who are basically smart, knowledgeable and capable of civilised, rational discourse), you should read this book.

For further information, the Daily Kos covers US politics from a left-wing perspective (a despairing left-wing perspective given how pathetic the Democrats are being at the moment). The aforementioned Little Green Footballs is also good, focusing recently on the anti-Muslim outpourings of Pamela Geller, a right-wing pundit. Episodes of the Daily Show and Colbert Report (the closest the US gets to decent political commentary, as far as I can tell) are often worth watching though you have to do nefarious things to persuade them to play in this country. I like Michael Tomasky in the Guardian, and whenever I’ve followed links to Paul Krugman in the New York Times, he’s been a voice of compassion, reason, and economic literacy. I will sign off with a quotation from a recent post by Ed Brayton on his Dispatches From the Culture Wars blog, which (though the post itself was not related to American Taliban) nicely sums up the situation.

If you took many of the provisions of even the most reactionary versions of Sharia law, substituted God for Allah and called it the American Family Values Protection Act, not only would most of the same people screaming about Sharia embrace it, they would claim that the failure to pass the bill was evidence of anti-Christian persecution.

Very little is reliably known of Jesus of Nazareth. A vast amount – enough to fuel a world religion for almost 2000 years – is claimed of Jesus of Nazareth. One of fewer than a handful of authentic contemporary references to the Jesus of history, the Jewish historian and turncoat [he changed side to join the Romans in the first great Jewish Revolt against Rome in the late-60s C.E.], Josephus, writes in the second half of the 1st Century C.E. of a “tribe of Christians”. He is referring to the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. They had by now attached to the not-long-dead, illiterate, teacher of startlingly original ideas on how people ought to live, the title ‘Christ’ – the Greek version of the Hebrew word Messiah. The Messiah, a figure evidently prophesied in the Jewish scriptures, was expected to rescue Israel from the dire straits into which she had fallen. Most Jews continued (and continue) to wait. The tiny minority who now believed he had just been (and not quite gone) were joined by Gentiles (non-Jews) and a Jesus Movement began to take root. And the movement, inspired by a charismatic, illiterate Galilean peasant, was soon to be driven along by a (Greek) narrative which has ever since been widely seen as a work of actual record and history – which it most certainly is not. Only in modern times and with the benefit of almost two centuries of painstaking scholarship [matching the scholarship that has accounted for the progress in understanding the Natural Sciences] is it possible to appreciate the proper context in which the scriptures should be understood.

First of all, all that is ‘authentically Jesus’, amounts to a small fraction of all that appears in the four Gospels, Acts, and the Letters [I've no idea what appears in Revelation]. It is believed that the essential teaching of Jesus, focused as it was on the here and now, devoid of reference to Heaven and quite miracle-free, survived in an oral tradition (only conjecturally in a written form) until the second half of the 1st Century C.E. At this point the Jesus Movement began to produce its own literature.

Secondly, as ‘Christian’ literature was written, the representation of Jesus changed. For example if Jesus was to be the Christ (Messiah), he had to have been born in Bethlehem [whereas he was almost certainly born as his name implies, in Nazareth] to ‘plug-in’ to the prophetic texts of the existing Hebrew scriptures. Appreciation of the ‘plug-in’ or ‘continuity’ factor is essential to the understanding of the New Testament. Pithily, writing specifically of the arrest, trial and execution of Jesus, the biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan [Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography] reminds us that “the details of our Gospels, are, in any case, prophecy historicized and not history memorized”.

Finally, Christian literature was, over time, submitted to ruthless editing. The most widely known Christian scriptures comprise the agreed ‘canon’ (that, is the scriptures that were to be included as against those – quite a lot actually – that were to be rejected) of books comprising the New Testament. Agreement on the canon came about under the civilized auspices of the Roman Empire. Astonishingly, in the light of the origins of the Jesus Movement and the several subsequent episodes of Roman persecution of Christians, the Empire became, after the ‘conversion’ of Emperor Constantine in 312 C.E. the ‘major sponsor ‘ of the heir to the Jesus Movement, Christianity. It may be strongly argued that this sponsorship was crucial in enabling the long-term survival of Christianity.

So where does all this leave Jesus ? Well, back in the desert talking a very new and eternally useful sort of sense. The Jesus who enjoins us to do to others only what we would not mind having done to ourselves and to forgive our enemies, is a long way from the eye for an eye man of wrath. The Jesus who enjoins us to live simply and charitably, is a living challenge to the consumer society which tries hard to turn its face away from poverty and inequality. The Jesus who preaches that the Kingdom of God is here and now and not pleasure deferred, invites us to remake and improve this world rather than imagine, or live in terror of, another one somewhere else.

Many centuries before Jesus of Nazareth was born, as far as we have been able to discover, the object of religion began to shift away from ritual and worship towards the central, ethical question of how to live a good life, harming no-one and behaving well to everyone we meet. The prophet Jeremiah, in Jesus’ own tradition, the Buddha and Lao Tzu, far to the East, all knew this to be the point of religion. Socrates (and friends), in Athens in spite of their polite acknowledgement of the Olympian crew of questionable morals, sought, with the aid of reason and philosophy, to define the goodness that our lives should display. Jesus would have got along well with his distinguished predecessors. The Big Question of Religion remains ‘How Should We Live ?’ (not where do we go next or whether the universe is explained by a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’). Almost 20 centuries on from his death, Jesus is (deservedly) still around to help us answer the big questions – and the Christians are welcome to join the discussion if they have anything helpful to say.

Despite being an atheist, it turns out that I like Jesus. I might even go so far as to claim that he’s worth following (or, to be precise, that if you want to construct a moral framework within which to live your life, you might benefit from taking his teachings into consideration). And, though we’re separated in time by a couple of millennia, it seems that Jesus and I have the same common enemy – Christians.

Unfortunately for Jesus, after living a relatively short life (which didn’t end well for him), during which he made some sensible suggestions about how on might live better amongst one’s fellow humans, he was seized upon and a vast Hollywood re-write of his life began, culminating in the obsessive cult of personality we know today as Christianity.

Fortunately for Jesus, there is a movement to rehabilitate him. It’s clear that, in addition to having been written some time after the event, the New Testament has been through numerous stages of copying in which errors (and wholesale fabrications) have crept in (see Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus” for the details). However, from the surviving manuscripts and other bits of evidence, a group called the Jesus Seminar think they can divide the 1000+ things that Jesus is claimed to have said into 4 categories – things which are virtually certain to be authentic, things which seem likely, things which seem tenuous, and things which are almost certainly bogus. Obviously, such a project can produce no guarantees of absolute accuracy, but their research suggests strongly that Jesus was basically a secular humanist.

Jesus’ teachings are all to do with the practical matter of how we should live in this world. There’s very little “God” stuff in there, apart from references to the Kingdom of God which are probably metaphorical. All of the supernatural bullshit was added later along with material which, with our modern eye, we would recognise as practically focus-grouped PR – a man who could turn water to wine would doubtless appeal to the Roman 20-something partying demographic. Over a period of about 4 centuries, Jesus’ real message was neutered, while he was enthroned as the embodiment of Old Testament prophecy come true, and his Word (or words cheerfully attributed to him) became Law.

If Jesus were to appear today, he would be quite appalled at mutilation of his teachings trading under the brand Christianity. He’d have some harsh words about the corrosive effects of free-market capitalism, he would deplore the idiocy of the creationists and other ignorant fools, and be pretty fucking cross with people invoking his name to justify their bigotry and intolerance.

In return, many of his biggest fans (particularly in America) would denounce him as a liberal hippie. Fox News would have security escort him out of the building, and he’d probably get shot by some right-wing nut. Ironic, really.