Aniseed Balls

After the attack on Muslims in London, I must say something. Clearly Islam is not incidental to the Islamic extremism of the perpetrators. It is not like blaming coffee because they all imbibed it. The jihadists make it explicit that they act in the name of Allah. They almost always invoke Allah’s name at the scene of the mass murder. They give their life in the professed conviction that they will be rewarded for doing Allah’s will. Nobody can be left in any doubt that the atrocities are carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam against everything the culprits regard as un-Islamic, which includes Christianity, Western culture, people in the wrong Islamic denomination, and those in the right denomination who aren’t Islamic enough. The all-consuming question must be whether their religion is to blame for these crimes against humanity. I’m no expert on the socio-political backdrop for Islamic grievances, but I’m prepared to accept that Muslims have suffered much injustice in l...

A few years ago we got a new kitchen. (Use Google if you don’t understand how that is possible.) We knocked the old one through to a room we hardly used, and spent more than many people’s yearly salary having everything gutted and replaced. Despite the additional space, we ended up with less storage than we started with. And so ensued a year of not knowing where anything was, because Barbara would frequently reorganize everything she hadn’t been forced to throw away, in an attempt to fit it in. Last year we decided to replace our bedroom carpet. Apparently, it wasn’t worth doing it without having the cupboards replaced, the walls re-plastered and redecorated, the bed replaced, the chests of drawers replaced, the curtains replaced, and doing much the same in another room as well. As before, it took a whole year and we ended up with less storage than we started with. And as before, there then ensued a prolonged period of not knowing where anything was, because Barbara frequently re...

Imagine for a moment, if I could really prove that Islam was completely and utterly baseless. That the Koran is a deceitful fabrication. That Islamic beliefs are nothing more than misapplied ancient superstitions. That cultural adherence is the primary basis for many evil traditional social practices. That individual adherence damages one’s capacity for rational thought, and is a risk factor for developing hatred and extremism. That Allah is an absolute fiction corresponding to nothing that has ever existed. And suppose I could prove these things with an overwhelming level of certainty akin to Pythagoras’ Theorem. And suppose I could demonstrate it all so convincingly that you acquire an inner instinctive feeling for its veracity akin to our instinctive feeling for the force of gravity. In the face of all that, do you think Muslims would renounce their faith? Just in case you can’t see where I’m going with this, the answer is no. It would affect practically no one. Their religion has...