Life Less Literary

I just got my quarterly report back from Amazon Associates. Normally I sell zero items per quarter, occasionally one. The clock’s been ticking since about 2001, in that time I’ve earned the grand total of £2.76 - once the meter hits £10 I can actually spend it!

So I decided to check out what somebody had bought: every time until now it’s been a book I’ve recommended on my blog. This time it wasn’t. It was some music, something called “A Certain Trigger”. I’d no idea what this was, and couldn’t remember recommending it, so I checked and it turns out I haven’t, it’s the latest album by Maximo Park (which I am actually vaguely tempted to buy). Presumably somebody has surfed to Amazon via one of my links, and then gone off and bought this. Well, thank you whoever you are. (Who are you?)

I coined a pithy little sound-bite, an irrational-sounding truism, over at the Sheffield Forum today:

Internationalism starts at home

Edit: OK, so Google seems to show that I wasn’t quite the first to use this phrase, but almost.

I just stopped by Amazon to see whether they had put up my review of The End of Faith. They have, and it’s nice to see that after several years in the wilderness I am now officially an “Amazon top 1000 reviewer” again. Well, it makes me feel important anyway.

Until now, I had thought that the government’s bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred was a Very Bad Thing. But tonight, a thought struck me. This is actually one of the best laws this government has tried to introduce. We can use it to make bibles and korans illegal in the UK, which I think is a great idea. Actually, I’m amazed nobody else has thought of this yet (perhaps they have, but if so it’s been kept very hushed up).

Now, I don’t know a huge amount about the bill, but from what I’ve read it will cover spoken or written words which incite hatred. So, books which promote religious hatred will be outlawed. As I mentioned the other day, the Old Testament says that if a city houses people who worship false gods we should:

smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein… with the edge of the sword.

…gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street, and burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit… and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

Meanwhile, the Koran tells its adherents to:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

Both of which sound to me very much like incitements to hatred and explicit calls to violence.

Home Office Minister Paul Goggins has said: “It is about protecting the believer, not the belief.” Which is perfect, as the last thing we want to do is protect the belief, and we absolutely must protect the believer (or, as I would prefer to call him or her, the “person”, “individual”, “human being”). Now, once this gets through parliament, as it undoubtedly will (Tony always gets his way), does anybody know of any high-powered legal types who would be willing to assist me in putting together some sort of case?

I’m a little perplexed this morning. Unless I am very much mistaken, I seem to have been censored by the Observer, Britain’s left-leaning Sunday newspaper and sister paper to the Guardian (and, incidentally, my own Sunday rag of choice).

They have a post on their news blog Can ideas kill, or is it just people? As this is very much in the vein of what I’ve been reading (and posting) about these last few weeks, I thought I’d add a comment, the first time I’ve ever done so on a Guardian blog. I can’t remember quite what I said (I did write it in the wee small hours of around 4am) but the gist was:

I’m currently reading Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith, and he is is very much of the view that ideas can kill, specifically faiths or ideas which are adhered to despite a lack of evidence (or even in the face of evidence to the contrary). He makes his points rather heavy-handedly at times, but it’s a fascinating book and one which is very relevant today.

Harris makes explicit reference to religious texts to show how any Moslem (or indeed Jew) can find plenty of pretexts for violence. Indeed, far from being “contorted to justify brutality” many religious proclamations require a fair degree of contortion to be shoehorned into support for peaceful co-existence. How hard can it be for a literal-minded Moslem to find reasons to commit atrocities such as Thursday’s in passages such as:
“Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of God, whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him…. The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan…. Say: ‘Trifling are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for those who would keep from evil….’”?

Now, I admit that this may be somewhat controversial in asmuch as it’s not exactly what most people want to hear right now (and also literal readings of the Koran such as this risk playing into the hands of the violent thugs now apparently tagetting Moslems), but have I strayed from the path of truth? I dunno, I’m aware that I can sometimes be rather insensitive to peoples’ feelings when I get heated about topics like this, but to my mind I have not said anything untrue, and I have said something which really needs to be said in an age where (to rehash my earlier two posts) people are killing one another on the basis of millennia-old literature.

So… was the Observer right to censor me? Or am I just being a pompous trouble-stirring arse again? (Incidentally, I have written to the Observer asking for an explanation, but haven’t had a reply yet. Perhaps there is a more innocent reason as to why my comment’s disappeared).

Update: The Observer got back to me. They said:

Sorry. The debate on that post suddenly kicked off overnight and started to include some very offensive and some illegal material. I’m sure yours was a reasonable post but we decided to clear the entire thread and close that particular post to comments.

Again, apologies if yours was one of the few reasonable comments that got caught up in the cull.