The defence of liberty

The Defence of Liberty

Libertarians: What are They On?

Freedom is Bad for Your Health

Swords, Prophets and the Weakness of Gods

Gandhi: Great Soul or Arsehole?

Islam: tolerating intolerance?

The Civilized States of America and Jesusland

Long Live The English Republic

England and the Islamic Threat

St George, the Big Pussy Cat and King Richard

England and the Islamic Threat

Fitna, Geert Wilders and the Death of European Freedom

Enoch Powell: Failure

Why is it that we seem to assume that freedom will take care of itself?

People who are attracted to liberal thinking, including libertarian thinking, are always in danger of making the assumption that the benefits of liberty are so obvious that everybody will grasp them and that the solution to all threats and challenges is always simply more freedom. The ultimate folly of this way of thinking comes with anarchism, the idea that if you could just stop the government doing anything at all everybody would be perfectly free and would live happily ever after. Unfortunately people are not rational entities motivated by a rational understanding of their own self-interest, if they were capitalism would work perfectly. People are not aware of what their own self-interest really is and they are often seduced by ideas which pass from mind to mind like infections: memes. A combination of dangerous memes and dangerous people who know that they are smart or strong enough to beat the odds and do better in a world in which they oppress others will ensure that liberty always has enough enemies that those who love liberty must always be prepared to defend it.

Memes are infectious by definition, they replicate by appealing to minds and they use whichever mechanisms work, not limited to rational thought processes and not limited to replication strategies that do not damage the individual or community they infect.

Of course among the most dangerous memes that we have to face today are religions, especially those religious ideas which seek to take control of the political sphere. It is well past time that those who wish to defend and enjoy liberty grasped the nettle here, the idea that freedom of religion is the most vital liberty of all must be challenged. There is no value in the freedom to submit to a dictatorial religion. We must be aware that nothing has a greater capacity to destroy liberty than politicized religion, a capacity that far exceeds that of any political dogma because of the standard refusal to deny debate and to portray any difference of opinion as evidence of evil intent, moral weakness, sin or demonic possession.

The potential dangers of religion have to be fully grasped. Religion can stifle freedom and human creativity far more effectively than anything else in the human condition. Religion is potentially the mortal enemy of freedom and human creativity. The refusal to accept this idea is scandalous. Nothing else has a greater power to destroy freedom than the dead hand of a totalitarian religion. The combination of extremist and absolutist religion and the tools of mass destruction, indoctrination, propaganda and surveillance that now exist have the potential to create a nightmare scenario that is infinitely worse than the mere political totalitarianism that was experienced in the twentieth century.

The liberal movement is unavoidably mixed up with the demand for religious freedom because it was the desire for religious freedom which was amongst the most powerful drives in the great liberal revolutions which brought the English Civil War, the French Revolution and American Independence. After several centuries it is time we managed to move on and shed this historical baggage which is holding back the continuation of the liberal movement and is threatening the survival of liberal society.

Tolerating religion allows the build-up and breeding of an army of the illiberal who are quite content to use our openness, toleration and democracy to push their own agendas of bigotry, intolerance and theocracy.

What is the point of allowing unfettered freedom of religion when the religious are dead-set on removing our liberties? We need to make a very clear distinction about what religion is and to what extent it is benign. The unspoken assumption that religion was somehow innocuous and a good thing simply because it is a religion has to be challenged. It is a farcical concept. Religion is not an acceptable reason to allow criminal behaviour such as human sacrifices, so why should it be seen as a legitimate and acceptable reason to allow acts of treason, fomentation and sedition? The highly political agendas of Islam in Europe and fundamentalist Christianity in the USA are both clearly highly problematic for a continuation of a liberal society and their political aspirations are fundamentally opposed to those of liberal secularism. The religious regard the word of their god, as revealed by their reading and interpretation of old books to be the only way to govern mankind, that is not a position which can be accommodated within a liberal democracy.

The answer to this threat has got to be secularism. Religion is dangerous and must be kept in check because it has unquenchable thirst for power. Many among the religious will not give up until religion, and only their religion at that, dominates every aspect of human life. Religion does not fight fair, it uses every dirty trick in the book to get its hooks into people and to subvert their mind. Religion uses every sense, every feeling, every sentiment as a weapon against you and your resistance. Bribes, threats and the wrapping of religion around everything good and noble in humanity are all designed to strengthen the hold of religion. Christmas presents, Easter eggs, carols, hymns, stained glass, fasting and feasting, whirling in circles, chanting, getting involved in every stage of life from birth to death, through sex, parental love, coming of age, healing, consoling, grieving and even the disposal of corpses religion never misses a single dirty trick to make life about nothing but religion and they think it is virtuous to do so. They hijack the language and insinuate their superstitions into daily speech as every speculation about the future is transformed into a prayer or incantation. They even get a name-check in for their deity when people are expressing doubt and ignorance, although God knows why we let them get away with it.

Several times I have been at funerals and found myself asking who the vicar thought had just died because all the talk was about the suffering and death of the mythical Jesus. Why do we let religion steal pride of place on occasions such as deaths, marriages, baby naming and in many parts of the world even eating a meal? Why do we allow the religious to shoulder their way to the front of every crowd and offer their tediously predictable slant on the day's events?

Secularism does not depend on any shared beliefs in religions or the lack of religions. Secularism is about politics not religion, it is a political stance that religion should be kept out of government and politics, or at least that efforts should be taken to ensure that religion is not allowed to dominate politics and government. You don't have to be an atheist to appreciate the value of secularism. It is one of the founding principles of the United States of America: that the citizens shall be free to conduct their own worship in private and that religion has no place in government. It is also one of the founding principles of modern Turkey, which is not at all coincidentally one of the most forward-looking and advanced countries with a Muslim majority. Secularism is an obvious strategy for the religious to grasp when they know that their sect is never going to become a majority but they fear the possibility that another religion could dominate political life in their country and severely restrict their freedom of religion. It is of course only freedom of religion that the religious can get worked up about because they won't risk getting involved in anything which might split their precious congregation still further.

When religion and politics get mixed up the results are people such as George W Bush and Sarah Palin. People who want their life made simple, as simple as possible, black and white, good and evil, end up being the people who catapult idiots into high office and dangerous shadowy advisors into power. It is perfectly possible for people with deep religious convictions to be effective politicians in a secular guise. The classic example of this is Tony Blair, he is a man with strong religious convictions, quite strong enough to have made it in American politics, but because he was operating in a modern secular democracy he didn't play on his religion, contenting himself to allow just a dog whistle or two to be heard by those with ears to hear and without risking alienating anybody with a different religion or an antipathy to religion to find his religiosity offensive or off-putting. There is nothing stopping people with religious convictions rising to the top in a secular political system. There is also nothing stopping people without a passionate interest in religion from doing well in politics in a secular society.

Allowing freedom of worship is a cheap price to pay for keeping theocracy at bay. But there should not be a blank cheque given to religion on this issue. There can be no simple agreement that anything that they want to define as religion and worship falls under that heading. We do not accept human sacrifice as a legitimate form of worship, neither should we accept ritual slaughter of animals. If Muslims and Jews won't eat meat unless the animal has been tortured to their satisfaction with magical incantations recited then they have three choices: emigration, starvation or vegetarianism. No ifs or buts. We should not put aside our concern for animal welfare and give primitive superstition priority over humanitarian instincts. If they don't want to eat any other sort of meat that's fine, they can go and find a primitive society to live in, go without meat or face prosecution for being an accessory to animal torture.

Britain already draws the line at animal sacrifice and does not allow Muslims to become unlicensed slaughterers to indulge their blood lust on animals. Some other countries have not been so wise and have allowed Muslims to indulge in amateur slaughtering in the name of religious tolerance, much to their shame.

We do not accept that being a Rastafarian is an excuse for a person to be allowed to possess cannabis. Of course nobody should need an excuse to be allowed to possess a plant but that is another matter. I fear that the reason for this lack of a religious exception has a lot to do with the paucity of historical tradition, it is difficult for a lawmaker to take somebody seriously who says he believes an Ethiopian prince was the Messiah, especially when they had met Haile Selassie and been told by the man himself that he was no such thing. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that Rastafarians seem a lot more interested in smoking ganja than they do in anything which the external observer would recognize as religious, like holding a service or avoiding criminal activities.

It is time our laws stopped being a push-over for calls for exemptions on religious grounds. If people need to wear helmets for safety they need to, and turbans are not helmets. 18 months should be long enough for manufacturers to design over-the-turban crash helmets and hard-hats, end the exceptions on a specific date in the near future. And if they look silly and draw attention to people wearing them whose problem is that? As for school uniforms no exceptions should be made beyond the allowing of a choice of skirts or trousers for all, there is no religion which requires the wearing of any particular garment, Islam merely requires modesty of dress, which any uniform should allow for in any case regardless of religious affiliation. Any school which insists that teenage girls show their thighs to the world is really in need of a thorough inspection. Similarly there is no requirement in Christianity to wear a crucifix and no injury is done to anybody who has to keep any religious symbols out of sight while at work or at school. Shoving your religion into people's faces is not a fundamental human right. Strangely enough there isn't a single biblical verse that instructs Christians to adorn their cars with fish symbols. Nobody has ever been recorded as suffering physical pain because a casual observer was unable to instantly know what absurdities and myths they believed in just by looking at what they were wearing to work. Not even Sikhs.

It has been a criminal offence in Britain since the passing of the Public Order Act (1936) to assemble in a public place wearing a political uniform. This was a response to the threat of the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley who were parading around in black shirts and acting like a private army. It was not a great imposition upon the freedoms of an Englishman, and it doesn't stop people wearing black shirts for fashion reasons. What the law does do is give the police a reason to arrest people before they have committed any other crime. Armies dress distinctively, there is no legitimate reason why any group of civilians needs to wear similar clothing while in a public place to show common political beliefs. Of course ideally no such law should exist, but without it there might not have been a way to stop the rise of violence that accompanied the activities of the BUF. We have to be aware that fascists, communists and extreme religious groups will have no compunction in using any freedom we allow them to plot against the downfall of our way of life and our open democratic and secular form of government. They are quite content to allow useful idiots to fight for their freedoms as they plot to remove ours. The idea that if we let the extremists do their worst they can't possibly overthrow our freedoms is simply complacent and based on faith in the magical power of freedom. Freedom is not magic and it will not fight for itself.

A liberal democracy can easily cope with a small minority of communists, fascists or religious lunatics but once their numbers cross a certain threshold it becomes necessary to change tactics. The tactics that work well against an illiberal minority of 5% or less simply fails to work once the minority grows larger, especially if it seems there is a momentum running in their direction. Once an illiberal minority starts to use our tolerance against us it is time to amend it, not to roll over and surrender everything that we hold dear to the mortal enemies of freedom. When they are marching about shouting death to the infidel and piling firewood around us the time for platitudes and faith in the power of freedom is at an end. The rise of Hitler clearly showed the way that dictatorships will use the mechanism of a liberal state to seize control of it and end liberalism, tolerance and freedom. They will feel no shame in doing this, no remorse, no pity, no pangs of conscience for the hypocrisy of such a strategy, they want power and they will use whatever methods are available to seize it and they will actively despise those who support their efforts by defending the rights they have as citizens of a liberal democracy.

The Muslims who seek to create a Muslim superstate in place of free democratic and secular Europe must be watched. They have the potential to be the mortal enemies of freedom. The time to man the barricades or go out and arm ourselves is not upon us and any premature posturing by the immature hotheads will be counter-productive as it will embolden the opposition, split the resistance and lead to a greatly heightened tension.

At the moment it is a small minority within Europe's Muslim community who are actively supporting the use of violence to achieve their aims. These are for the most part loners and misfits who get a kick out of the idea of belonging to a great big global Jihad Conspiracy Brotherhood. A lad who fails his A levels and doesn't fancy being a waiter in a tandoori restaurant and is looking forward to a wait of five years before his cross-eyed cousin with the harelip back in Pakistan is old enough to marry can instead make himself important by pretending he's Burnley's representative of Caliph Osama bin Laden. These are joined by the recent converts, many of whom have converted to Islam within the last six weeks and suddenly decide they must become a muhajid (the singular of muhajadin, the singular is far more appropriate for these lone losers). They are sad cases. Equally sad are those who set themselves up as the defenders of the white race, Christendom or 'er majesty, God bless 'er who are trying to tell whoever will listen that it's time to Take Action and Do Something. Somehow they don't feel the need to specify what kind of action needs to be taken but it clearly involves the use of capital letters and innuendo and Guardian readers or those without a nom de guerre need not apply.

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