The term “Islamist” is an invention by non-Muslims who want to differentiate between what they insist is the ”the vast majority of peace-loving law-abiding Muslims” from the “radicals”, or “extremists”, or “Islamofascists” for whom they think “Islamist” is a politer word. Islamists are, in the eyes of the well-meaning tolerant non-Muslims who coined the term, a minority with whom the vast majority of “moderate” Muslims do not agree and of whom they do not approve. Even though few of them actually express disapproval, the well-meaning, respectful, tolerant non-Muslims assume it to be strongly felt, and wish the wider public would believe and appreciate this.

For convenience, let’s call the well-meaning, respectful, tolerant non-Muslims who advance this view the Defense. The Defense hopes to persuade non-Muslim public opinion that the law and values of Islam are compatible with the laws and values of what is generally called the West.

The question then arises, what do “moderate” Muslims believe that is different from what the Islamists believe? For both moderates and Islamists the Koran is the holy word of Allah. The holy word of Allah cannot be changed. So what does the Defense say to that? It is, the Defense argues, a matter of interpretation. (For a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of this idea in connection with the Ground Zero mosque dispute, see an article by Ron Radosh at PajamasMedia. We usually find much to agree with in his writing, but in this article we find much to criticize. Rather than do so, because we think a point-by-point exegesis would be boring for us and our readers, we’ve chosen to make our own statement on the issue.)

What interpretation can be put on commandments to beat wives (sura 4.32), amputate limbs (eg sura 5.38), treat women unequally (eg sura 4.11), kill apostates (eg 4.89) – to take just a few instances of Allah’s writ? They are laid down in the Koran, from which Sharia derives. It is hard to read them and think of an interpretation that cancels, contradicts, or even merely softens their meaning. Even by the most liberal definitions imaginable by the most elastic of legal minds – one that could find, for instance, gradations of meaning in the word “is” – the words of the commandments cannot be made to mean their opposites. But some have tried to make them less apodictic, and the Defense depends on the possibility.

The Defense maintains that if the Koran is interpreted as meaning in many essential instances something different from what it says, it can be made compatible with American Constitutional Law. But wouldn’t that require deeply radical change, even complete reversal? And if such a radical change were to be made (by whom?), how, or to what extent, would it still be Sharia? Wouldn’t such a profound alteration mean, in effect, the obliteration of Islam?  And if so, how likely is it that it will be accepted by (at least a large enough part of) Islam?

One point often made by the Defense that needs to be answered: The Bible also orders cruel punishments, including, for instance, stoning adulterers. True, but there is no country on earth that declares Biblical law to be its constitution, or makes the commandments of Jehovah, or God the Father, or Jesus Christ, the law of the land, even though some laws agree with some of the ten commandments. Israel decidedly rejected the idea of basing its state laws on Jewish religious law (though for political expediency governments have made some concessions to the religious political parties, causing more nuisance than oppression – such as that marriage must be by religious rite.)

But every state in which Islam is the religion of the majority – even including Iraq when it was ruled by the ostensibly secular socialist Ba’athists – has Sharia as the basis of its law. Turkey was an exception that is now changing under an Islamist government to conform with the rest.

Islam wants the world to be Muslim. It declares that every Muslim must help achieve its goal. It prescribes violence as the chief if not exclusive means. Clearly by this alone Islam has set itself up as the enemy of all non-Muslims. In pursuit of its supreme goal and in obedience to the word of Allah, millions of Muslims, including the 19 who perpetrated the crimes of 9/11 in the name of Islam, have dedicated themselves to waging war on the rest of the world, and more will do so in the years to come.

They need to be stopped; by peaceful means if possible, by force whenever necessary. If “reinterpretation” of Islam’s holy writ is a way that can work peacefully, it should be pursued. But can it be done? Our answer is – almost certainly not.

In his speech to a largely Muslim audience at a Ramadan dinner at the White House on Friday August 13, 2010 [transcript here], Obama stressed points of US law and the values that inspired them to justify his support for the building of a mosque at the site of the 9/11 attack in New York. The speech was a ringing endorsement of religious tolerance. These are some of the statements he made:

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” The First Amendment of our Constitution established the freedom of religion as the law of the land.

Indeed, over the course of our history, religion has flourished within our borders precisely because Americans have had the right to worship as they choose – including the right to believe in no religion at all. And it is a testament to the wisdom of our Founders that America remains deeply religious – a nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully and with mutual respect for one another stands in contrast to the religious conflict that persists around the globe.

As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.

This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.

He implied that Islam  shares the American value of tolerance, custom of “diversity”, and principle of mutual respect:

Tonight, we are reminded that Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity.

We can only achieve “liberty and justice for all” if we live by that one rule at the heart of every religion, including Islam—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

That’s the so-called “Golden Rule”, holy writ for Jews and Christians. It’s also a sound principle for all civilized people to revere – and perhaps even to try and live by. But we doubt that you could find it stated or suggested in the Koran or any authoritative source of Islamic belief.

Obama, however, is not alone in alleging that the laws and values of America are compatible with the sharia law of Islam. One Muslim who supports his view, at least to some degree, is Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is planning to build the mosque at Ground Zero.

In his book What’s Right With Islam is What’s Right With America: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, Chapter 3, America: A Sharia-Compliant State, Rauf writes:

What I am demonstrating is that the American political structure is Shariah compliant.

The principles of the Declaration and Constitution are consistent with divine ordinance, the particular method of government and a particular scheme of sociopolitical cooperation that follow from it are thereby invested with divine sovereignty and command an authority that comes from God.

But the claim is exposed as fiction by Dr Jal Maharaj. He has devised a questionnaire for Muslims seeking U.S. Citizenship, which illustrates the essential difference between American law and sharia. He lists the contradictions, and at the end of each item asks the imaginary Muslim applicant, “Do you repudiate this verse in the Qur’an [which contradicts US law]?”

Here is an abridged version of his document:

1. The Constitution of the United States requires equal legal rights for men and women. [Sharia does not.]

Qur’an, Surah 2: 282 says, in part: “call in to witness from among 
your men two witnesses; but if there are not two men, then one man 
and two women from among those whom you choose to be witnesses…” 
This is the basis for Shariah law which holds that in all cases of 
law the testimony of two women is necessary to equal that of one man.

2. US Law does not tolerate wife beating and regards it as a crime [while sharia orders it].

Qur’an, Surah 4: 34 says: “Men are the maintainers of women because 
Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend 
out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded. But as to those women on 
whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone 
in the sleeping-places and beat them …”

(3) Cruel and unusual punishment is illegal by provisions of the 
US Constitution.

This includes such retribution as physical mutilation and injury to 
the body.

Quran, Surah 5: 38 “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off 
their hands. … ”

Surah 5: 33 “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief 
through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land:”

(4) The age of marriage varies by state, but in all cases requires 
that a wife should be of child bearing age, that is, she should be 
post-pubescent, generally 15 or 16 years of age minimum, 17 or 18 in 
other jurisdictions.

Qur’an, Surah 65: 4 “As for your women who have despaired of further 
menstruating, if you are in doubt, then their waiting period is three 
months as well as those who have not yet menstruated. As for those 
who are pregnant, their term shall be the time they deliver their 
burden. Allah will ease (matters) by His order for whosoever fears 
Him.”

As a Muslim scholar named Maududi has said in his official [and incomprehensible! - JB] interpretation of this verse:

“Therefore, making mention of the waiting-period for girls who have not yet menstruated, clearly proves that it is not only permissible to give away the girl at this age but it is permissible for the husband to consummate marriage with her. Now, obviously no Muslim has 
the right to forbid a thing which the Qur’an has held as 
permissible.”

(5) The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly outlaws slavery in all forms, male or female.

Qur’an, Surah 4: 92 “And it does not behoove a believer to kill a 
believer except by mistake, and whoever kills a believer by mistake, 
he should free a believing slave, and blood-money should be paid, but 
he who cannot find a slave should fast for two months successively.” 
As scholars have pointed out, this verse assumes that Muslims will own slaves, or a significant number will, as did Muhammad, who owned slaves and bought and sold them. This is just one verse out of dozens that approve the institution of slavery and present in as an eternal condition of humanity.

(6) Hate speech is objectionable in American culture, and federal 
law regards such language as legally actionable, deserving punishment.

Qur’an, Surah 5: 60 – 65, says in part, speaking specifically of Jews 
as verse 59 makes clear, “Those whom God has cursed and with whom He 
has been angry, he has transformed them into apes and pigs, and those 
who serve the devil”

This is the source of Muslim demonstrators’ signs and chants that Jews are apes and pigs — the Qur’an itself. There are still other 
passages in Muhammad’s book which also are anti-Semitic — as the 
term is generally used in America to refer to anti-Jewish bigotry.

(7) War or any acts of physical violence, or threat of violence, with the intention of forcing people to convert to a religion is utterly abhorrent to American law and is explicitly outlawed by the 
First Amendment.

Qur’an, Surah 8: 12 “Thy Lord inspired the angels (with the 
message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Muslims, I will instill terror into the hearts 
of the unbelievers. Smite them on their necks and cut all their fingers off.”

This is one of 164 jihad verses in Muhammad’s book. Of this number 
approximately 100 are commandments to able-bodied Muslim men to physically fight against non-believers.

There is no reasonable doubt that the meaning of the 100 
jihad verses in question all promote violence against people of other 
faiths. The main objective is conversion but also important is 
terrorizing others so that they fear the wrath of Muslims.

(8) The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion to all US 
citizens. No-one may prohibit someone from changing religion, or 
ceasing to belong to a religion. No-one may prohibit someone, in any 
appropriate setting, from seeking to convince someone else of the 
rightness of his or her faith and seeking to win converts. No 
believers of any faith are exempt from this provision of the First 
Amendment.

Qur’an, Surah 4:88-89 “Then what is the matter with you that you 
are divided into two parties about the hypocrites? Allah has cast 
them back (to disbelief )… Do you want to guide him whom Allah has 
made go astray?… They wish that you reject (Islam), and thus that 
you all become equal (like any other faith). So, take not… 
(friends) from them, till they emigrate in the way of Allah (to 
Muhammad). But if they turn away (from Islam), take hold of them 
and kill them wherever you find them.” One of several verses which 
deal with what Muslims characterize as apostasy. The penalty for what 
Americans insist is a God-given right, to free choice in religion, 
is death in an Islamic context.

(9) In America, free speech is sacrosanct and, while a people have 
the right to object to criticisms of their beliefs, and while others 
must obey libel or slander laws, everyone who so desires is free to 
make any criticisms of religion he or she wishes to make.

Qur’an, Surah 4: 140 “Allah will collect the hypocrites and those who defy faith – and put them in Hell.” This is one verse which is 
foundational to Shariah law penalizing all forms of what Muslims 
characterize as “blasphemy.” Depending on the “offense” and what 
country such law is enforced in, the punishment may be anything from 
jail time or banishment, to death.

What qualifies as blasphemy? A few examples–criticizing Islam making 
jokes about Muhammad or the Qur’an criticizing the Qur’an, … criticizing Muhammad, especially perceived insults 
of Muhammad criticizing such Muslim practices as saying prayers 5 times a day, … reporting objective facts that embarrass Muslims, such as the fact that Muhammad married Aisha, a 
girl of 6 and consummated the “marriage” when she was 9, creating an 
image of Muhammad or portraying him with an actor in a movie or stage play …

(10) The First Amendment guarantees freedom to worship any deity of 
your choice. Or freedom to be an Agnostic or Atheist. You may worship 
100 Gods or Goddesses, or just one, or none at all. All US citizens 
accept this principle but are free to express their opinions if they 
think someone else’s beliefs are wrong.

Qur’an 4: 116 “Verily Allah does not forgive setting up partners in 
worship with Him. But He forgives whom he pleases, sins other than 
that.” To be devoted to a Goddess, in other words, is, in Islam, the 
unforgivable sin. Also extremely serious is 2: 28, “How do you 
disbelieve in Allah, seeing that you were dead and he gave you life! 
Then he will cause you to die…”

In other words, Goddess worship [as in Hinduism] deserves death according to Islam, and Atheists also deserve death.

Dr Maharaj adds:

There are numerous other morally reprehensible passages in the 
Qur’an, all of which contravene American law and the freedoms 
guaranteed in the Constitution.

And declares that in his opinion:

Islam should be recognized for what 
it is, a subversive and criminal religion that functions in outright defiance of American law and which is based on principles which are totally incompatible with the US Constitution.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

It has been argued that Europe would better be able to protect itself from the onslaught of Islam if it were stronger in its traditional Christian faiths. We don’t agree. We cannot see how an argument can be won by opposing one irrationality with another.

America is still religious, mostly Christian. How is its Christianity helping to protect it from Islam?

The very nature of Christianity with its injunctions to love indiscriminately and forgive regardless of justice; the desire thus bred in Christians to see good where there isn’t any, to trust where no reason  has been given, not to judge where judgment is necessary, not to recognize evil for fear of sullying their own souls, can make them self-blinded, oblivious, and putty in the hands of their enemies.

In an article giving a very good example of how some Christians are all too easily deceived by Islamic guile, William Kilpatrick writes:

I wonder now if Christians, in their naivete and in their desire to be thought tolerant, aren’t inadvertently paving the way for an eventual Islamic theocracy.

It seems that quite a number of Christian churches are now involved in “outreach” programs with local mosques. The typical outreach is for a church to invite an Islamic leader to come in and explain Islam to the congregation. Naturally, the imams present Islam as a religion of peace and love. And naturally in their desire to appear loving and accepting, the Christians lap it up. The imams know how to press all the “tolerance,” “outreach,” and “respect” buttons, and the result is that the Christians end up thinking Islam is just another nice, brotherly religion like their own. As a result, they can probably be counted on not to oppose the building of a local mosque, or for that matter not to oppose any Muslim agenda or initiative. Islamic leaders have done a good job of framing their grievances as civil rights issues, and this, of course, has great appeal to the many Christians who see the pursuit of social justice as their main mission. Mentally, many Christians still live in the days of “We Shall Overcome” and lunch counter sit-ins. They think that in supporting and defending Islam they are like the Christians in the sixties who linked arms with civil rights marchers, and sang hymns together.

Lately, Muslim leaders have been taking advantage of the Christian disposition for outreach by offering outreach programs of their own. 20,000 Dialogues is a nationwide interfaith initiative that helps local level imams set up outreach programs, and provides films and speakers to facilitate the dialogue. The current offering is a film titled “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Think.” … The film massages polling data to make it appear that Islam is a predominately peaceful religion.

One such outreach was conducted on July 24th at the Lamb of God Church in Fort Myers, Florida. The guest speaker was Imam Shaker Elsayed of the Falls Church, Virginia mosque, “Dar Al Hijrah”—the same mosque where Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki mentored Major Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre. Elsayed himself is the former Secretary General of the Muslim American Society, an organization which has been described … as a “major component” of the “Wahhabi Lobby.”

Aside from the dubious connections of the speaker and the dubious nature of the film, the most interesting aspect of the presentation was the response of the 400-member audience. With a few exceptions they liked it. And they didn’t like the attempt by some members of ACT for America and the Florida Security Council who were present to ask tough questions during the Q&A session. … . Their sympathies were obviously with the representatives of Islam, and against the critics of Islam. …

Christians …  like Americans in general … have been nurtured on multicultural myths about the essential equality of different cultures and religions. So they are quite happy to nod in agreement when they are informed by the Islamic representative (or by their own pastor) that Islam is no more a threat than the synagogue down the street. For too many Christians, the essence of Christianity boils down to tolerance and non-judgmentalism. Moreover, Christianity in America has become so mixed up with therapy and pop psychology that, nowadays, the surest sign of election is feeling good about oneself. It is, of course, much easier to feel good about yourself if you can congratulate yourself on being tolerant, sensitive, and respectful of differences. It’s likely that many of the Christians who attend outreach presentations like the one at Lamb of God Church aren’t really interested in being educated about Islam. What they are really seeking is confirmation of their existing multicultural assumptions. So their sympathies will lie with those who tell them that it’s reasonable to keep dreaming dreams of interfaith harmony, and they will resist those who want to wake them from the dream.

Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. Historically it proved to be one of the three cruelest creeds ever to afflict poor suffering mankind (the other two being Islam and Socialism in all its ruinous forms.)

The best thing that ever happened to the human race was the Enlightenment.

Joel Mokyr, professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, has an article in City Journal which reminds us what it did for us all.

Here are parts of it:

The most hardy and irreversible effect of the Enlightenment [is]: it made us rich. It is by now a cliché to note how much better twenty-first-century people live than even the kings of three centuries back. In thousands of large and small things, material life today is immeasurably better than ever before. …  And without sounding too cocky about how progressive history is, or too triumphalist about Western culture as the crowning achievement of human development, I would like to suggest that what generated all this prosperity was the growth of certain ideas in the century after the British Glorious Revolution of 1688. …

The writers and thinkers whose work we call the Enlightenment were a motley crew of philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, physicians, and other intellectuals. They differed on many topics, but most of them agreed that improvement of the human condition was both possible and desirable. This sounds trite to us, but it is worth pointing out that in 1700, few people on this planet had much reason to believe that their lives would ever get better. For most, life was not much less short, brutish, and nasty than it had been 1,000 years earlier. The vicious religious wars that Europe had suffered for many decades had not improved things, and though there had been a few advances — the wider availability of books, for instance … — their impact on the overall quality of life remained marginal. An average Briton born in 1700 could expect to live about 35 years, spending his days doing hard physical work and his nights in a cold, crowded, vermin-ridden home.

Against this grim backdrop, Enlightenment philosophers developed a belief in the capability of what they called “useful knowledge” to advance the state of humanity. The most influential proponent of this belief was the earlier English philosopher Francis Bacon, who had emphasized that knowledge of the physical environment was the key to material progress: “We cannot command Nature except by obeying her,” he wrote in 1620 in his New Organon. The agenda of what we would call “research and development” began to expand from the researcher’s interest alone … to include the hope that one day his knowledge could be put to good use. In 1671, one of the most eminent scientists of the age, Robert Boyle, wrote that “there is scarce any considerable physical truth, which is not, as it were, teeming with profitable inventions, and may not by human skill and industry, be made the fruitful mother of divers things useful.” The idea spread to other nations. …

To bring about the progress that they envisioned—to solve pragmatic problems of industry, agriculture, medicine, and navigation—European scientists realized that they needed to accumulate a solid body of knowledge and that this required, above all, reliable communications. They churned out encyclopedias, compendiums, dictionaries, and technical volumes—the search engines of their day—in which useful knowledge was organized, cataloged, classified, and made as available as possible. One of these tomes was Diderot’s Encyclopédie, perhaps the Enlightenment document par excellence. The age of Enlightenment was also the age of the “Republic of Science,” a transnational, informal community in which European scientists relied on an epistolary network to read, critique, translate, and sometimes plagiarize one another’s ideas and work. …

The idea of material progress through the expansion of useful knowledge — what historians today call the Baconian program — slowly took root. The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, was explicitly based on Bacon’s ideas. Its purpose, it claimed, was “to improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engines, and Inventions by Experiments.” But the movement experienced a veritable spurt during the eighteenth century, when private organizations were established throughout Britain to build bridges between those who knew things and those who made things. …

More and more manufacturers sought the advice of scientists and mathematicians …

The Baconian program proved unusually successful in Britain, and hence it led the world in industrial innovation. There were many reasons for this, not the least of them England’s union with Scotland in 1707. … The Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow were the Scottish Enlightenment’s versions of Harvard and MIT: rivals up to a point, but cooperating in generating the useful knowledge underlying new technology. They employed some of the greatest minds of the time—above all, Adam Smith. The philosopher David Hume, a friend of Smith’s, was twice denied a tenured professorship on account of his heterodox [ie atheist] beliefs. In an earlier age, he might have been in trouble with the law; but in enlightened Scotland, he lived a peaceful life as a librarian and civil servant. Another Scot and friend of Smith’s, Adam Ferguson, introduced the concept of civil society. Scotland did not just produce philosophers, either; it also exported to England many of its most talented engineers and chemists, above all James Watt. …

Optimism continued to abound about the potential of useful knowledge to improve the world. In 1780, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, wrote in a letter that “the rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter…”

The age of Enlightenment, of course, was also the age of Newton, whose discoveries made it possible to understand the movement of heavenly bodies. …

Advances in medicine proved similarly sporadic. Enlightened physicians were passionate about progress. How could they not be? Twenty out of every 100 babies perished in their first year; many young and talented women and men died prematurely of dreaded disease; adult life was often a sequence of disfiguring and debilitating sicknesses. “I see no reason to doubt that, by taking advantage of various and continual accessions as they accrue to science, the same power will be acquired over living, as it is at present exercised over some inanimate bodies,” wrote Thomas Beddoes, a learned English medic, in 1793. And there was at least one major success story in his lifetime: Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine three years later. …

The Enlightenment’s contributions to long-term economic growth were not merely scientific, moreover. Many economists … have begun to see Enlightenment economic and political ideas as central to the process. … The idea that trade normally benefits both sides led to the growth of free trade after 1815 and was central to the establishment of free-trade areas in Europe and elsewhere after 1950. That understanding grew out of the Enlightenment and the thinking of such intellectual giants as Smith and Hume.

Even more important was the Enlightenment notion of freedom of expression. In our age, we think of technological change as natural and obvious; indeed, we consider its absence a source of concern. Not so in the past: inventors were seen as disrespectful, rebelling against the existing order, threatening the stability of the regime and the Church, and jeopardizing employment. In the eighteenth century, this notion slowly began to give way to tolerance, to the belief that those with odd notions should be allowed to subject them to a market test. Many novel ideas were experimented with, especially in medicine, in which new ways to fight disease were constantly being proposed and tried … Words like “heretic” to describe innovators began to disappear. …

The Enlightenment, sadly, did not end barbarism and violence. But it did end poverty in much of the world that embraced it. Once the dust settled after the upheavals and violence of the French Revolution, Europe entered a century of economic growth (known as the pax Britannica) punctuated by a few relatively short and local wars. By 1914, countries that had experienced some kind of Enlightenment had become rich and industrialized, while those that had not, or that had resisted it successfully (such as Spain and Russia), remained behind. The “club” of rich countries formed the core of the industrialized world for most of the twentieth century. …

As unlikely as it may seem, then, a fairly small community of intellectuals in a small corner of eighteenth-century Europe changed world history. Not only did they agree on the desirability of progress; they wrote a detailed program of how to implement it and then, astoundingly, carried it through. Today, we enjoy material comforts, access to information and entertainment, better health, seeing practically all our children reach adulthood (even if we elect to have fewer of them), and a reasonable expectation of many years in leisurely and economically secure retirement. … Without the Enlightenment, they would not have happened.

As David Hume did, so also Baruch Spinoza (not mentioned by Mokyr, but hugely important to his theme) unlocked the chains of religion – Christianity, Judaism, and belief in the supernatural generally – that bound mankind in superstitious dread, for those who let them.

The ideas of freedom and tolerance that inspired, and are enshrined in, the Constitution of the United States are essentially Enlightenment ideas.

Now, countering the real progress that the Enlightenment launched, socialist “progressivism” is threatening freedom, the gift of the Enlightenment out of which all others proceed.

And even more threatening is the ideology of Islam: a darkness never penetrated by the Enlightenment.

Will we let either or both succeed in bringing back the darkness?

One religious belief versus another religious belief. Nonsense versus nonsense. But the devotees of Muslim nonsense are crueler now than most others.

Persecution.org tells this story (which we retell in our own words as the publishers are, inexplicably, limiting the spread of their story with tight copyright protection):

A convert to Christianity and a Muslim were fellow-travelers (by bus?) in Somalia. They got talking. The Muslim asked the Christian, whose name was (still)  Muhammad Guul Hashim Idris, if he thought that the prophet Muhammad was God’s messenger. The Christian (pointing out the obvious) replied: “If I thought so, I would have believed in him rather than the Messiah.”

When the bus reached its destination in the district of Hudur, the Muslim reported the Christian to the terrorist organization Al-Shebaab which, its seems, constitutes or commands the legal authority there, since it had Idris arrested on the charge of “insulting the prophet Muhammad”, a crime punishable under sharia law by death.

Idris, a recently married man with a pregnant wife, was duly condemned to public execution. The sentence was carried out (we are not told how but probably by decapitation) in a football stadium. Among the hundreds of watchers were schoolchildren, brought to observe the edifying spectacle.

Such killings in the name of Allah the Merciful are not rare but all too common in Muslim countries.

We simply cannot understand how any intelligent and educated person can believe in God or gods.

We are pleased to learn that as more people world-wide become literate, many more are critically examining religious teaching (of any sort) and realizing its absurdity, and are willing to say so.

But as many still won’t “confess” to being atheists for fear of abuse and discrimination, it’s not really possible to set even a ball-park figure to the number of atheists in any particular country or, therefore, in the world generally.

Some attempt at numbering them has, however, been made.

From the Skeptic’s Dictionary, by Dr Robert T. Carroll:

How widespread is atheism? It is difficult to say with precision, since many people are afraid of admitting they are atheists. …

There are indications, however, that atheism is growing and is more widespread than the media and religious leaders would have us believe. A worldwide survey in 2000 by the Gallup polling agency found that 8% do not think there is any spirit, personal God, or life force. Another 17% were not sure. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 found growth in that segment of the adult population “identifying with no religion.” In 1990, 14.3 million or roughly 8% identified with this category. Ten years later the non-religious population had grown to 29.4 million, roughly 14.1% of the American community. This may be due in large part to the fact that in the 1990 survey the question asked was loaded: What religion do you identify with? In 2001, if any was added to the question. In 2008, the Pew Foundation published the largest, most comprehensive survey on religious affiliation ever done. About 16% say they are not affiliated with any religion. That translates to about 49 million Americans who don’t identify with any religion. Atheists make up only 1.6% of the adult population; that’s fewer than 5 million atheists in the U.S. and are outnumbered by Christians by about 50 to 1. In 2008, the American Religious Identification Survey found that since the last survey of its kind in 2001, the number of atheists has doubled from 900,000 to 1.6 million. The number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation is now at 15%.

The fact is that more than half the world’s population, and more than 90% of the world’s scientists, do not believe in a personal God … Worldwide, there are about 1.1 billion nonreligious people; only two religions have more numbers: Christianity has about 2.1 billion adherents and Islam has about 1.3 billion.

Dr Carroll writes of his own atheism:

If I had to sum up my own atheism, I think I would have to say that it amounts to this: I have no interest in the supernatural. I also have no interest in what others believe about the supernatural as long as their belief does not involve intolerance of those who disagree with them. Such people are a menace to society, a hindrance to social progress, and are unworthy of our respect. If we care about humanity, we have a duty to stand up to the intolerant of the world, no matter what god they claim commands them to behave inhumanely. We also have a duty to oppose those who claim immunity from the prohibition of abusing children because of their belief in some god. To claim that children should not be educated in science or in the religious beliefs of others — or that they should not receive proper medical care — because their parents believe God forbids it, is unacceptable.

We heartily agree.

In the fictions of humanity, gods are among its worst characters.

Never mind your despicable, frivolous, quarreling, spiteful deities of Greece and Rome, your fiery baby-eating Mollochs, your South American blood-lusting monsters, and your bestial, deformed, multitudinous divinities of the Far East. Let’s just look at the gods of the three allegedly moral religions created in the Middle East.

God, the Hebrews’ invention, is a tyrant par excellence. Although lauded as good, merciful, and life-sustaining, he emerges from the story as petty, cruel, capricious, boastful, greedy, unjust (for ample examples read the book), and disproportionately vengeful. He takes particular pleasure in vengeance, teasing his worshippers into doing things that will give him a pretext for unleashing punishment not only on the guilty but on innocent successor generations; in one notorious and extremely consequential case by evicting a patriarchal couple from the pleasant garden home he first gets them accustomed to and forcing them to raise their children by hard labor in harsh conditions. (Plan: plant apple tree in garden, tell the two people who live in it not to eat the fruit, and when they do exile them forever with a heavy feeling of shame and guilt.) Incomprehensibly, his authors’ Jewish descendants continue to believe him to be beneficent, all-powerful, and of course actually in existence even when 6,000,000 of them are mercilessly exterminated. This holocaust that was visited on them as a religious group has not persuaded most of them to doubt the veracity of the story or change the characterization of God. As Christians claim to believe in him too he could be said to have many more believers in him than just the Jewish ones. To an objective observer, however, there is little resemblance between this voluble character and the reticent ‘father’ god of Christianity.

Christ, the divine ‘son’, is the Christian hero. He’s even better than God at causing folk to feel guilty. He’s made out to be a sweet good innocent type – who then has himself tortured to “death” so nice people are forced to feel really bad. He claims that he has suffered his pretend death to atone for everybody’s else’s sins so that they can be “saved”, yet he invents a place of eternal punishment for anyone who doesn’t manage to accomplish the impossible, unnatural, and unfair things he requires of them, such as loving everyone else and (unlike himself) forgiving them no matter what harm they’ve done. And then, on top of it, he says now and then in the story (he’s not kept consistent in his views and messages): “Reader, what you actually do doesn’t count: I’ll either “save” you or I won’t. My whim. No appeal.” The nature of this god is hard to grasp. He’s a hybrid god-man. A theo-anthro mongrel. Altogether, in what he is and what he does, what he causes to be done and has others punished for, he’s a bundle of contradictions, or a personified oxymoron. In every way a badly drawn character, he was based very loosely on one or more real-life preachy Jews of the Augustus-to-Tiberius era of the Roman Empire, but chiefly a particular man whose name is given in Greek as Jesus, but of whom no reliable facts are known to historians. The primary author of the fiction was one Paul, or Saul, but many other imaginations have worked on the tale.

Allah, the Muslims’ divine guy, while allegedly merciful, is the narrow-minded, belligerent, intensely misogynistic, ignorant yet dogmatic patron of a seventh century illiterate pedophile, highwayman, robber and mass murderer named Muhammad, to whom he is inseparably attached. The two of them, prophet and god, live on in the gullibility of billions. As their followers constitute an active threat to civilization by carrying out what they believe to be Allah’s commandments to kill and subdue non-believers, he’s at present the most dangerous of these three nasty yet widely popular gods.

In the dark ages, when Papacy held control of men’s consciences and few dared to think, one method which she practiced to supply herself with money was the sale of indulgences. The indulgence was a permission to sin and yet be free from its consequences. … Succeeding Popes and councils … argued that if they had a right to remit sins for service to the church, they had also the right to remit them for money for the church … and concluded that if they had a right to remit past sins for money, they had the same right to remit, or excuse, or grant indulgence for sins of the future. … It was the sale of these future indulgences for money which … gave rise to the Reformation movement, called Protestant, because of their protests and objections to this and other evils recognized in Papacy.

*

We do not believe that CO2 is a pollutant; that the earth is warming to any degree that should trouble us; that the planet is warmed by human activity; that a despotic world authority is needed to regulate human activity on the pretext of saving the planet from warming; that the wealth of the First World should be redistributed to the Third World; or that anybody’s wealth should be redistributed to Al Gore.

In the name of Climate Change, the new mysticism, Al Gore and his conspirators are selling indulgences. You pay them so you can carry on with living, manufacturing, traveling and so on, all the normal activities which they say is threatening Planet Earth. Ostensibly you are buying a certain amount of some Third Worlder’s CO2 ration, as determined by Al Gore and his conspirators, because you are exceeding your own ration, as determined by them. Some of what you pay will go to a Third Worlder, they say. Most of what you pay will go to Al Gore and his conspirators.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore‘s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.

“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special? …

The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration’s cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.

Thanks to Fox News’ Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.

Sandor estimates that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six “greenhouse” gases.

So lucrative does this market appear, it attracted the attention of London-based Generation Investment Management, which purchased a stake in CCX and is now the fifth-largest shareholder.

As we noted last year, Gore is co-founder of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets of dubious value that let rich polluters continue to pollute with a clear conscience.

Other founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. In 2006, CCX received a big boost when another investor bought a 10% stake on the prospect of making a great deal of money for itself. That investor was Goldman Sachs, now under the gun for selling financial instruments it knew were doomed to fail.

The actual mechanism for trading on the exchange was purchased and patented by none other than Franklin Raines, who was CEO of Fannie Mae at the time.

Raines profited handsomely to the tune of some $90 million by buying and bundling bad mortgages that led to the collapse of the American economy. …

The climate trading scheme being stitched together here will do more damage than Goldman Sachs, AIG and Fannie Mae combined. But it will bring power and money to its architects.

Beyond a certain point it is hardly possible to discern degrees of evil or degrees of cruelty. And yet I think it may be said of Jehan Calvin, dictator of Geneva in the sixteenth century, that he was more appallingly cruel and more intensely, intrinsically, through-and-through evil than other great persecutors, dictators and mass murderers of history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Torquemada are the very names of evil, so what was it about Calvin that can distinguish him as specially terrible in his own nature than even any of these?

He oppressed the subjects of his dictatorship unremittingly and mercilessly; but so, you say, did the others. Not content with killing his enemies, he prescribed extreme tortures for them while they survived to suffer them; and yes, so did the others. But – and here we come to the nub of the case – Calvin was different in that he (often, if not always) personally specified the torments for the particular victim. He gave thought to the minutiae of their sufferings. All the others, even Catholic Inquisitors like Torquemada, issued general orders for terrorizing, torturing, killing. Calvin gave a personal service, tailoring his cruelty to his individual prey.

And that’s not all that distinguishes him among human monsters. Consider this: he was squeamish. He could not stand the sight of blood. He was afraid of pain. He felt horror at the thought of physical suffering – so he made thinking about it into a spiritual exercise, to strengthen by self-inflicted agony, as a monk does with a hairshirt, his resolve to do what was hardest for him in the service of his God. He ordered the infliction of agony, then meditated on the process, imagining it as fully as he could. He nourished his spirit on visions of torture.

This he did in private. The spiritual discipline he forced himself to undergo did not impel him to the prison and the public square to witness the torments and killings that he prescribed. He never attended a racking, a flogging, a breaking on the wheel, a burning to death. That far in the service of his God he would not push himself.

This grooming of his soul by inflicting suffering on others, did not replace general orders of oppression. He gave those too. He instituted a totalitarian reign of terror. He was as convinced a collectivist as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest. He would allow “no liberty, no freedom of the will, for [a] man could only misuse such privileges. … [He, Calvin] must frighten him … until he unresistingly accepts his position in the pious and obedient herd, until he has merged in that herd all that is individual within him, so that the individual, the extraordinary, vanishes without leaving a trace.”

So wrote Stefan Zweig in his devastating dissection of Calvin and Calvinism, The Right to Heresy. He goes on:

“To achieve this draconian suppression of personality, to achieve this vandal expropriation of the individual in favour of the community, Calvin had a method all his own, the famous Church ‘discipline’. A harsher curb upon human impulses and desires has hardly been devised by and imposed upon man down to our own days [pre-Second World War]. From the first hour of his dictatorship, this brilliant organizer herded his flock … within a barbed-wire entanglement of … prohibitions, the so-called ‘Ordinances’; simultaneously creating a special department to supervise the working of terrorist morality … called the Consistory [which was] expressly instructed to keep watch upon the private life of every one in Geneva. … Private life could hardly be said to exist any longer … From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry, and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the citizen concerned being able to offer resistance. Once a month, rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, had to submit to the questioning of these professional ‘police des moeurs’. “

The moral police poked into every corner, examined every part of every house, and even the bodies of those who lived in it. Their clothes and shoes, the hair on their heads, was inspected. Clothes must be dark and plain; hair must not be artificially curled.

“From the bedroom they passed on to the kitchen table, to ascertain whether the prescribed diet was not being exceeded by a soup or a course of meat, or whether sweets and jams were hidden away somewhere.”

They pried into bookshelves – only books approved by the Consistory were permitted.

“The servants were asked about the behaviour of their masters, and the children were cross-questioned as to the doings of their parents.”

Visitors to the city had their baggage examined. Every letter, in and out, was opened. Citizens could not write letters to anyone outside the city, and any Genevan permitted to travel abroad was watched in foreign lands by Calvin’s spies.

Spying became universal. Almost everyone, in fear of being thought heretical in the least degree, and to prove himself clean and upright, spied on everyone else.

“Whenever a State inaugurates a reign of terror, the poisonous plant of voluntary denunciation flourishes like a loathsome weed … otherwise decent folk are driven by fear to play the part of informer. … After some years, the Consistory was able to abolish official supervision, since all the citizens had become voluntary controllers.”

As far as he could, Calvin put an end to pleasure. Music – except for what Calvin deemed to be sacred – was forbidden. So was dancing, skating and sport. Theaters and all other public amusements including popular festivals, were prohibited. Wheeled carriages were not allowed. People had to walk to wherever they needed to go. Guests at family celebrations, even weddings and baptisms, were limited in number to twenty. (The names parents could give their children had to be from an approved list.) The red wine of the district could be drunk in small quantities, but no other alcohol. Innkeepers were not allowed to serve their guests until they had seen them saying their prayers, and had to spy on them throughout their stay and report on them to the authorities.

Punishments included imprisonment in irons, hanging, decapitation, burning to death.

“Everything was forbidden which might have relieved the grey monotony of existence; and forbidden, of course, was any trace of mental freedom in the matter of the printed or spoken word.”

“The first thought,” Stefan Zweig declares, “of any one of dictatorial temperament, is to suppress or gag opinions different from his own.”

One man who dared to argue with Calvin was a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus. A child of the Reformation, he innocently thought he could express his own boldly Protestant opinions. He thought Calvin was the very man to hear him expound his personal interpretations of Holy Writ. He could not have been more mistaken. For having the effrontery to send them to him, Calvin had the man thrown into prison. “For weeks … he was kept like a condemned murderer in a cold and damp cell, with irons on his hands and feet. His clothes hung in rags upon his freezing body; he was not provided with a change of linen. The most primitive demands of hygiene were disregarded. No one might tender him the slightest assistance.”

Finally, for daring to disagree with Calvin, Servetus was condemned to death by the dictator’s order. The death Calvin chose for him was “roasting with a slow fire”.

‘The prisoner was brought out of prison in his befouled rags. … His beard tangled, his visage dirty and wasted, his chains rattling, he tottered as he walked. … In front of the steps of the Town Hall, the officers of the law … thrust him to his knees. The doomed man’s teeth chattered with cold … In his extremity, he crawled on his knees nearer to the municipal authorities assembled on the steps, and implored that by their grace he might be decapitated before he was burned, ‘lest the agony should drive me to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime’. This boon was denied him. Relentlessly, ‘the procession moved on towards the place of execution. … The wood was piled round the stake to which the clanking chains had been nailed. The executioner bound the victim’s hands. … The chains attached to the stake were wound four or five times around it and around the poor wretch’s wasted body. Between this and the chains, the executioner’s assistants then inserted the book and the manuscript which Servetus had sent to Calvin under seal to ask Calvin’s fraternal opinion upon it. Finally, in scorn, there was pressed upon the martyr’s brow a crown of leaves impregnated with sulphur. … The executioner kindled the faggots and the murder began.

“When the flames rose around him, Servetus uttered so dreadful a cry that many of the onlookers turned their eyes away from the pitiful sight. Soon the smoke interposed a veil in front of the writhing body, but the yells of agony grew louder and louder, until at length came an imploring scream: ‘Jesus, Son of the everlasting God, have pity on me!’”

Needless to say, neither Jesus nor an everlasting God did anything to relieve the roasting man.

‘The struggle with death lasted half an hour. Then the flames abated, the smoke dispersed, and attached to the blackened stake there remained, above the glowing embers, a black, sickening, charred mass, a loathsome jelly, which had lost human semblance. …

“But where was Calvin in this fearful hour? … He was in his study, windows closed. … He who had really willed and commanded this ‘pious murder’, kept discreetly aloof. Next Sunday, however, clad in his black cassock, he entered the pulpit to boast of the deed before a silent congregation, declaring it to have been a great deed and a just one, although he had not dared to watch the pitiful spectacle.”

To this day, Jehan Calvin is regarded as a great Christian whose teaching continues to shape the lives of millions of citizens in the Western world through the Presbyterian and various “Reformed” churches. People are no longer burnt to death for disagreeing with the master. But dictatorship, in the name of similarly dogmatic collectivist faiths, is not absent from the modern world, not even from America now, in 2010. A much vaster community has fallen under an organizer of dictatorial temperament. His consistory has made it plain that they wish to control what you eat, how you live in your homes, and what you say. Children are being urged to impress the leader’s messages on their parents. The names of those who disagree with him are blackened, and the silencing of broadcast dissent is openly advocated.

What should be done about it? There are conservative voices maintaining that the way to resist incipient totalitarianism is to “return to Christian values”.

Our hope is that this reminder of how Christian values affected life in the past may serve not only as a cautionary tale against collectivism and dictatorship, but also as a rebuttal of the idea that Christianity can be a counterforce against them.

Jillian Becker   April 25, 2010

[Photo: John Lawrence]

Antony Flew, the philosopher, atheist, and defender of freedom, died on April 8, 2010, at his home in Reading, England. I knew him, to my pride and delight, for many years. We would meet a few times a year (we both served on the Council of the Freedom Association, as I still do), and wrote to each other frequently about books, events, issues, campaigns, tactics. On politics and religion we saw eye to eye. We were both atheist conservatives. He was a classical scholar, more widely and deeply erudite than anyone else I’ve ever known. And he had the humility of true greatness. When I asked him to write the introduction to a new edition of a book I was editing on, and against, Karl Marx (The Red Prussian, by Leopold Schwarzschild) he told me that he was not the best person for the task, and gave me a short list of experts who, he insisted, knew more than he did and whose names would better grace the book. Only when they’d all declared themselves unable or unwilling, Antony said he would “do his best” to write a good introduction – and a very good introduction it is.

Obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic say that Antony Flew was the world’s most famous atheist, and that he suddenly changed his mind and declared that God exists after all.

It is true that he did say this. But he never said it when he was in his right mind.

It would have been unkind of me to write what I am about to write while he was alive. Yet I think it is absolutely right that I say it now, because it’s necessary to do him justice. So I declare that the reasoning by which he arrived at his certainty that God does not exist was never cancelled or reversed by the sloppy arguments of his senility.

Of his many books, the one that matters most for his reputation as an atheist is God & Philosophy. It was first published in 1966. Later editions appeared at intervals, the last in 2005. To judge by the new introduction he wrote, he was as sure of his atheism then as he had been in 1966.

In 2007 a new book appeared under his name titled There is a God. The subtitle crows: How the world’s most notorious [sic] atheist changed his mind. The authorship is ascribed to Antony Flew “with Roy Abraham Varghese”. But no one who has read God & Philosophy with attention could possible believe that There is a God was a product of the same intelligence. Either the powers of Antony Flew had faded away, or some other mind engendered this work. In fact, both those things happened. It has emerged that he did not write it. He had spoken, and other hands had written. He could not even remember what was in it. And of that failure of memory and general weakening of his mental faculties, the actual writers had taken advantage.

There is a God is distinctly written for an American readership. It refers, for instance, to the Red Sox. I’d have bet a mint that my friend Tony Flew had no idea who the Red Sox are – Chinese school-boys, he may have supposed.

According to Dr Richard Carrier, who tried to ascertain from Professor Flew himself whether he had really “found God”, the authors of There is a God are Roy Abraham Varghese who is known for his work on “the interface between science and religion”, and Pastor Bob Hostetler – two people with a big blunt axe to grind.

Carrier’s detailed account of how Flew claimed he was, but then again was not, converted to belief in a creator-God when certain scientific facts were brought to his attention, makes the whole sorry story plain. Carrier records that the philosopher admitted to finding the subject “too hard” to deal with; that he failed to remember anything about There is a God; that he repeatedly contradicted himself. He tells us about the bewildered old man being awarded a prize by an Evangelical Christian University. (The Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, bestowed on him by the university of Biola at la Mirada, California.) The prodigal son returned! Much rejoicing in Christian circles. As if the willingness of a senile man to concede – on and off – the existence of a creator-God, were all the proof they needed to shout in the face of atheists and sceptics: “There, you see? If even he can see it now, you should not have the hubris to think you know better and continue to deny it!”

How insecure these believers must be in their belief!

Carrier writes: “It is certainly possible that Flew looked at ten drafts [of There is a God]. I see no reason to believe Flew was able to understand or even recall what he read.” Flew admitted to having “a nominal aphasia”. But it was more than “nominal”. “Flew could not even recall the arguments of the book , not just who made them or what his sources were.”

Carrier found that whenever Professor Flew himself stated his position, it was always to reaffirm his atheism. Statements to the contrary were never made by him directly, though one at least, firmly insistent that he really had changed his mind, was put out by the publisher on his behalf.

However, I know it was not a total scam. I know that at times he did think he had changed his mind.

I saw him soon after the book appeared and asked him was it true he now believed in God.

“Yes,” he replied, “but not the Monster”.

I understood of course what he meant by “the Monster”. He had rejected the Christian God while still in his teens because he could not reconcile the evil in the world and hell after it with a beneficent deity. Such a deity could only be a Monster. His father, a Methodist minister, was distressed by young Antony’s rejection of his faith, but Antony said, as he was to repeat throughout his life, that he had to go “where the evidence leads”. Now he told me, only the existence of “an intelligence” can explain the nature of the universe. This intelligence, this non-monstrous god, made the laws of nature and then had nothing more to do with his creation – the theological position known as deism.

In God & Philosophy, there is a section on “Order and Design”, in which the author asks the question: “Does order in nature itself presuppose an Orderer?” Elegantly and fully he reasons over a few pages that it does not. (This is not the place to quote his reasons, but I hope to whet some appetites for seeking them in the book.) “So we conclude that order in the universe by itself provides no warrant whatsoever for trying to identify an Orderer.”

The meticulous arguments are abandoned as though they had never been made, in the later book There is a God. The reason given there for belief in a creator God, is that the author has learnt about DNA, about its “enormous complexity”, and sees that there must have been an Orderer who made the universe! He also sets out the “fine-tuning” argument. Both the arguments, from “irreducible complexity” and “fine-tuning” have been thoroughly refuted.

Then there is the “Stratonician presumption”, as Flew himself named it after the Greek philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, the third head of Aristotle’s Lyceum, who formulated it. The presumption is that in explaining the world you can do without entities that are not necessary for the completeness of the explanation. In God & Philosophy, Antony Flew does not find it necessary to call in God or gods.

But suddenly, in There is a God, such a supernatural being becomes essential to explain the world’s existence. *

From Antony’s point of view these pressing believers had not done him a disservice. He told me that there was to be a TV documentary about him and his conversion. He was innocently surprised at the attention he was getting, and the unexpected windfall it brought with it. He was paid what seemed to him a very large sum of money. He had never been a rich man, and he was happy for his wife and daughters that they would have this fund at their disposal. (This most generous-hearted of men was painstakingly frugal: every letter he posted was in a re-used envelope with a label stuck over the old address.)

So there’s the picture. A pair (or more?) of American Christian Evangelicals (and a Jewish theologian and physicist, Gerald Schroeder) had worked on him rather than with him, when he had become mentally frail, to produce this cancellation of a lifetime’s thought. In his dotage, these Evangelicals battened on to him, dazzled him with science that was utterly new to him – the big bang, DNA – and rewarded him like a Pavlov’s dog when he gave the response their spin elicited. He was subjected to intellectual seduction, much as Bertrand Russell was by Communists in his senile years.

What seems to me intolerably sad and wrong is that the reputation Antony Flew ought to have, as an atheist philosopher who brilliantly defended atheism throughout his long and distinguished professional life, is now to be replaced by a phony story that he who had been a convinced atheist changed his mind. Is the man who defended atheism better than anyone since David Hume, to be remembered as a deist?

Is this to be allowed to happen – that he be remembered as a man who saw the error of his atheist ways and became persuaded that there was a God – simply because he suffered a softening of the brain in his last years? The truth is that the Antony Flew who conceded the existence of a “creator-intelligence” was not “the Flew” – as he liked to allude to himself – that he had been at the peak of his powers. His faculties were deteriorating, his memory came and went unreliably, he was confused, bewildered and – because he was in a state of decline – taken advantage of.

His handwriting became shakier. He put letters to other people in envelopes that he addressed to me. (They probably got the letters I was supposed to receive.) When I sent him the print-out of an article I had written deploring the Islamization of Britain, he sent it back to me a few weeks later as an article of his own that he would like me to comment on. When he was to meet me and a few colleagues at a certain old club on Pall Mall (the famous street of clubs in the heart of London) which he must have visited dozens or even hundreds of times, he couldn’t find it. A search party rescued him and brought him to the meeting. He had become unsure of himself. He did not always remember, or possibly even grasp, points put to him in a discussion.

But what an enthusiast he forever was for ideas! His face would light up, his voice grow urgent with excitement. A passionate intellectual who was always gentle, always courteous even in the heat of argument, Antony Flew was the epitome of a reasonable man. Or I should say that is what he had been, and that is the way he should be remembered, this great philosopher and atheist. (His country bestowed no honors on him. I think he should have been made Companion of Honour, which is in the sole gift of the sovereign. England deserves her great men ever less!) Even those who disagree with his atheism must surely acknowledge in the name of justice and decency that his achievements, not his late and lamentable capitulations which seemed to cancel them, should be what he is remembered for.

Jillian Becker  April 18, 2010

*

*Here is a sample of the “reasoning” of these Christian ghosts, writing in the name of Professor Flew:

“I put to my former fellow-atheists the simple central question: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a reason to at least consider the existence of a superior Mind?’

Easy reply: manifest purpose.

They state in his name that the immaterial, ie mind, cannot come out of the material.

Reply: How can the material come out of the immaterial – ie matter out of “Mind” or “God”?