hotdogs galore

This is another linguistics-related post I'm afraid, but it's what's sloshing around in my head at the moment so I might as well put it somewhere.

It's to do with compounds. In the world of real science, a compound is something that's made of two or more elements joined together - for example, you can join the reactive metal sodium with the poisonous gas chlorine, and the compound is sodium chloride, or salt, neither a metal nor a gas but something with properties all of its own.

In the world of linguistics (no comment as to its scientific credentials), you have roughly the same idea. If you combine "hot" and "dog" you get "hotdog," which is usually not a dog and might not always be particularly hot. You can't just add the words together and get a transparent meaning from the sum of the parts: the meaning of the compound word belongs all to itself.

But I keep reading books and journal articles which talk about "hotdogs" as compounds in one sentence, and in the next sentence they're trying to analyse it as if it consisted of two independent words, "dog" and "hot". This means they tie themselves up in all sorts of knots ... there's even an analysis that ends up with Word as a sub-category of Compound, which makes about as much sense as saying that Britain is a subcategory of Scotland, or Animal is a subcategory of Horse. If that's the kind of thing that gets published ... I wonder how many other gruesome fallacies are out there that nobody's noticed yet.

Anyway, just thought I'd get that wee grumble out into the open. Normal service should resume soon.

thank you for taking my place...

This is an add-on to the point that I finally got round to making at the end of this lengthy post.

When someone is faced with the gospel message, the reason why I think it's inappropriate to get them saying/thinking things like, "Thank you for dying for me," is because it's something which might or might not be true (as I said back there).

The reason why I think that that's a problem is because it brings in an uncertainty to linger right at the centre of what you're telling people they have to believe.

People aren't saved by believing maybes: you have to get a hold of the truth - things that are totally true and reliable. Examples of things that are totally true and reliable and available for unconverted sinners to get a hold of, include these.

• when Jesus said: Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out. John 6:37
  
• when Isaiah said: Seek ye the Lord, while he is to be found; call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, for he will have mercy on him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Isaiah 55:6-7
  
• when the Lord said: There is no God else beside me, a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else. Isaiah 45:21-22
  
• when Jesus said: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28
  

All these truths and promises refer to God the Saviour, directing your focus away from yourself and what might or might not be true about you, and towards him instead. Rather than making risky speculations about whether you were included among the people that Christ died for, the gospel focuses instead on accepting his own word about himself: that word is always true and reliable, and that's what people need to hear and believe in.

seeking

Here are some questions which need answering.

• If someone is crying out for the Lord to save them, how are they to know when he does?
• Do you need to go to church, or is it enough to read the Bible, pray, and think about God without going to church as well?
• If you think that there used to be a time in your life when the Lord was working in you, but you turned away (gave up going to church, etc), what happens if he's working in you now, and you turn away again?
  

I've been thinking about these questions for a while on and off, but I've postponed answering them because my reaction has been that they're very difficult. I would hope that someone will read this later and be able to give wiser responses than me, but in the meantime I'll offer some thoughts, tentatively, for any readers to query or expand on as they see fit. And I'll apologise in advance for going on at such length: I know before I start that this is going to be a long post.

The first question is about assurance, I think. It's tricky to answer because people's experiences vary. Some people know in a fairly clearcut way, when and where they were saved. Other people's understanding of their experience is more blurry. As you know, salvation is God's work, and everything about it is at his discretion, and that includes him letting a person understand what he's done for them, or in them. But there are two general ways that the issue can be tackled.

One is that there are several characteristics which mark out a person who God has saved, and the Bible tells us what these are. So one way for a person to find out whether the Lord has saved them is to examine themselves to see whether they can find any of those characteristics in their own lives. It takes a careful analysis of themselves and the things they've experienced, comparing them to what it says in the Bible, and asking help from God to do it honestly and thoroughly. I might try and post something later that would go into more details about what kind of characteristics I'm talking about, but for now, all I want to say is that if your self-analysis is honest before God, and you find that he has given you some things that match with the descriptions he gives of the people he saves, then you can conclude that he has saved you too, still asking him to confirm to you himself that this conclusion is right.

The other thing would be to recognise that assurance of being saved is a gift from God, and go to him to ask him to give it to you. That goes hand in hand with using all the different ways of approaching him, and especially reading what he has to say in the Bible, and praying. (There are other ways, but these are two of the most readily available.) He tells us that the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God, and that's something that we can ask him to do for us too, or at any rate make it clear to us whether or not we are truly his children. 'Ask, and ye shall receive.'

The second question is: This person is reading the bible more and more, praying constantly, and thinking about God all the time. Do they need to go to church too?

It might be worth saying this to start off with: the mere fact of going to church isn't going to contribute to saving you. It is perfectly possible for God to work in a person's soul simply through his Word which they prayerfully read at home for themselves. You don't need to add in churchgoing, as if getting saved was just ticking things off on a checklist, or as if you would definitely be saved once you started going back to church, just because it's the one thing you notice you're missing at the moment.

On the other hand, going to church to hear the gospel preached is one of the most important ways that God has arranged for people to approach him - right alongside bible-reading and prayer. He has set up the ministry as a way of helping people to understand what the bible says, and sending his Word home to their hearts, in a way that doesn't really happen when you're reading the bible on your own. What a preacher is meant to do, is take the Word of God, explain what it means, and show you how it's relevant to your personal spiritual situation. By gathering with other people to hear God's Word being brought to you in that way, you're not only obeying what God wants you to do, but you're also placing yourself in a very good situation for getting help from him and his Word.

But having said all that, some people unfortunately live in places where there's no real gospel preachers for them to listen to. If that was the case with the person asking these questions, I'm even more hesitant to offer any suggestions. Ideally you would want to keep looking for a church where the bible is respected above everything else, and where the preacher speaks to your heart in a biblical way. But if you can't hear the gospel when you go along to the churches in your locality, maybe it might be better to stay at home after all, and carry on prayerfully reading the bible, asking for the Lord himself to guide you since there are none of his pastors within reach who can help.

The third question was: What happens if you turn away again, even after the Lord has renewed his work in you?

Salvation is God's work, from beginning to end, and if he ever saves someone, he makes sure that he keeps them safe for the rest of their life (until he takes them to heaven to be safe with himself for ever). Nobody needs to think that once God starts to work in them, it's up to them now to make sure that the work doesn't fail. It's a shameful thing to turn away from God, especially if he's begun to work in you, but he still proclaims a message of forgiveness to anyone who returns to him. Some people in the past turned so far away from him that he told them, 'You have destroyed yourselves,' but that wasn't where he stopped: 'You have destroyed yourselves, but in me is your help.' Hosea 13:9. He speaks to the wicked person and the unrighteous person and says, "Return to the Lord, and he will have mercy, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." Isaiah 55:6-8. It's good to recognise that we aren't able to keep ourselves, and we are prone to turn away, because when we realise that, it should make us run even closer to him, asking him to keep us. And if we do turn away from him, we still know that there's no one else who can help us, or who would help us, so all you can really do is turn back to him again, still asking for forgiveness.

That's as far as I've thought on these questions at the moment, and if anything is unclear or misleading, I'd welcome anyone who points it out. I'll also be very glad if anyone can add anything that would be helpful to the person who asked them.

the right to justice

The Barnabas Fund is starting up a new campaign to publicise the worldwide discrimination of Christians in minority situations. They're running a peitition calling "for Christian minorities to receive just and equal treatment with non-Christian majorities," and calling on the government to raise the issue of anti-Christian discrimination with the governments of the countries where it occurs. They seem to be taking as their motto, 'Let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all, especially unto them who are of the household of faith,' Galatians 6: 9-10. The campaign website, www.righttojustice.org, is to be launched on 20th February with more information.

"hell's best kept secret"

In case you haven't heard of it, Hell's Best Kept Secret is a book by Ray Comfort, a New Zealander who lives in California. It was written in 1989 and it tackles the problem of the large numbers of people who "make decisions for Jesus" then fall away: within the first few pages he reports estimates of an 80-90% drop-off in the number of people who "make decisions" in evangelistic campaigns. In other words, going by his (presumably American?) figures, less than 20% of people who claim to have "given their lives to Jesus" persist with a Christian lifestyle, without falling away, or "backsliding".

Comfort is rightly concerned about this, and offers a solution which his book calls radical. The solution is to preach the law to sinners as well as the gospel. He gives the famous parachute analogy: people in planes think of parachutes as irrelevant, until they realise the plane is going to crash. So, people who are offered peace and love from the gospel will find these things irrelevant, unless they realise that they are things that they need. Although you can manipulate people into "making decisions", you can't get them to really appreciate the gospel unless you tell them, from the ten commandments, that they're sinners.

All this is very true and important, and it's a solution which evangelists should embrace, even though it's pretty depressing to think of all the people out there who find the idea "radical", or think they're already "winning souls" without mentioning the concept of sin.

However, I do have a quibble with this book, because while it's quite right on this point, there are other areas where I think it's misguided. And the reason why I think it's important enough to say so here is because I recently heard it recommended in the same breath as the teachings of Reformed, Calvinistic writers such as RC Sproul and WJ Chantry. It was in the context of how calvinism can be implemented in practice in outreach and evangelism, and specifically in the context of using the law to show people their sin. Since that's the main point of the book, that was fair enough, but I don't think you can really justify recommending the book overall.

The most significant reason why I say this comes out, for example, in chapter 13. Here he talks about Christians telling non-Christians about their sin and the need to believe. Supposing the non-Christian then accepts the offer of salvation, having been "led to Christ" by the believer. Comfort's suggestion now is for the Christian to offer to lead the new believer in prayer, a prayer such as this:

Dear God, I acknowledge that You are holy, righteous, and just. I confess my sinfulness to You; I have repeatedly broken Your Law and deserve eternal punishment. Forgive me for my sin and give me the grace to turn from my selfishness and rebellion.
Thank You for taking my place on the cross as punishment for my sin. I receive You as Lord and Saviour. Please give me the grace to live the kind of life that will glorify You in all that I say and do. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Focusing on that second paragraph, I feel uncomfortable about putting words like these into the mouth of someone whose conscience has been pricked at the thought of their sin. This is because on the cross the Saviour was taking the place of people who will certainly be saved: he took the punishment for the sins of all-and-only his own people, true believers, who can never finally fall away with those 80% of seeming-believers. However, in the situation which he pictures in the run-up to that prayer, I'm not convinced that the Christian who's doing the counselling has entirely safe grounds for thinking that the person s/he's talking to was in fact one of the people whose place was taken on the cross by the Saviour. In the next sub-section, Comfort says, "suppress the urge to tell him that he's saved. If God has saved him, let God tell him. Show him the promises of assurance, of course, but allow his assurance to come from God alone." Again, this is good advice, but, from what I understand, telling someone that Jesus took their place on the cross is telling them that they're saved. It gives them the assurance that they're one of God's children, because it was only his children whose place the Saviour took. But a person can have their conscience stirred up in the light of the ten commandments, without truly repenting or believing in the Saviour. So while it might be true that this person with a troubled conscience has believed or has repented or has been forgiven, you don't know for sure, and if you give them prayers like that to pray, you're making them say something which is not necessarily true. What a person can always do is pray, "Forgive me for my sin and give me the grace to turn from my selfishness and rebellion," but you need good grounds for going on to say, "Thank You for taking my place on the cross ..."

Ray Comfort certainly isn't unique in providing prayer templates like this. There are many many outreach attempts, and I'm thinking especially of gospel tracts for example, which come recommended as reformed in their theology - and indeed they are reformed, until the last page, when they suggest that you pray something like, "thank you for dying for me on the cross". It's never presumptuous to pray for forgiveness, but until that prayer has been answered, I don't think that people have grounds to assume that they were definitely represented on the cross, or to pray as if that was certainly the case.

Your comments on this, as well as everything else, are very welcome.

Leighton on First Peter 4:4

Robert Leighton was born in London in 1611, studied at Edinburgh University, and eventually became archbishop of Glasgow in 1670 before retiring and going back to London (he died 1684). I confess I'd never heard of him until someone recommended his commentary on First Peter - and I also confess it's the first time I've ever tried to read a commentary. It's slow going, because of the huge amount of detailed exposition on each phrase of each verse ... that's just what you'd expect from a commentary of course, but it doesn't make for easy reading.

So, to clear my head from all those stressful political rants, here are two excerpts. I'm posting them in reverse chronological order so that you can read them consecutively in small chunks ... never mind. I'm clearly taking this far too seriously.

Anyway, the first is an interesting observation on the phrase in chapter 4, verse 4, where Peter says that unconverted people think it strange that believers don't run with them to the same excess of reckless self-abandon. It was written obviously some time in the seventeenth century, so I've taken the liberty of making some changes in the wording, hopefully to make it more readable ... I don't normally like silent editing, but I'm going to break my own rule this time.

"The Christian and the unconverted person are most wonderful to each other. The one wonders to see the other walk so strictly, and deny himself to those worldly liberties which the majority take, and take for so necessary that they think they could not live without them. And the Christian thinks it strange that people should be so bewitched, ... wearying and humouring themselves from morning to night, always busy doing nothing; he wonders that the delights of earth and sin can entertain and please them for so long, and persuade them to give Jesus Christ so many refusals - can persuade them to turn from what would be their life and happiness, and choose to be miserable: indeed, to go to such lengths to make themselves miserable. The Christian knows the depravedness and blindness of nature in this; he knows it by himself, that he was once the same, and therefore he wonders not so much at them as they do at him; yet the unreasonableness and frenzy of that course of conduct appears to him now in so strong a light that he cannot but wonder at these woeful mistakes." [from p402-403]

Leighton on First Peter

Here's Leighton's comment on verse 7 of the same chapter: be sober, and watch unto prayer. He says first that prayer is a real means of receiving what you ask, and then he goes on:

"... it is for this reason that our Saviour, and according to his example the Apostles, recommend prayer much. Watch and pray, says the Saviour, and Paul says, Pray continually, and our apostle here particularly specifies the grand means of attaining that conformity with Christ which he expresses: Be sober, and watch unto prayer. Those who are much in prayer, will grow rich in grace. It is he who is busiest in this, our actual trading with heaven, who will thrive and increase the most, and fetch in the most precious commodities ...

But the true skill of this trading is very rare. Every trade has something which demands a special skill; but this is deep and supernatural, and it is not reached by human industriousness or diligence. Diligence is to be used in it, but we must realise that the aptitude for it comes from above, that is, that spirit of prayer without which our learning and intelligence and religious breeding can do nothing. Therefore, our most frequent prayer, our greatest petition, should be for the spirit of prayer - so that we may speak the language of the children of God, by the Spirit of God, who is the only one who teaches the heart to pronounce things rightly ...

For making progress in this, and growing more skilful in it, prayer, with continual dependence on the Holy Spirit, is to be much used. In much praying you will be blessed with much aptitude for praying. So then, you ask, What should I do, so that I may learn to pray? For the time being, take this, and chiefly this: By praying, you will learn to pray. ... Both for advantaging all other graces and for promoting the grace of prayer itself, frequency and abounding in prayer is very clearly intended here, in that the apostle makes the main part of the work we have to do, and wants us to keep our hearts in a constant aptness for it: Be sober, and watch - for what purpose? - unto prayer." [from p414-415]

yet more new laws

The new smoking ban puzzles me. I don't see why the government should be so keen to stamp out smoking in public places, even in the interests of public health. When someone smokes over your food, I appreciate people might find it unpleasant, but does it really constitute something to lay down in law, and fine people thousands of pounds for violating - I'm not convinced. They say the issue was about stopping people dying from passive smoking, but if the government was so keen to promote public health, they might as well go and ban drinking in pubs as well as smoking. It also sits extremely uncomfortably alongside their recent liberalising triumphs, such as legalising mini-brothels and introducing 24-hour drinking licenses, as well as their super-casino project - none of which seem particularly conducive to public health or safety or general welfare.

However, it fits perfectly well with their creepy authoritarian streak. ID cards and a national identity register have nothing to recommend them, either in principle or on practical grounds, but the government has ignored all the opposition (public, legal, technical) and imposed them anyway. And on a compulsory basis, which, incidentally, breaks their own manifesto promise that the scheme would be voluntary. It was very interesting watching Tony Blair trying to argue for them - although he acknowledged that people had civil liberties concerns, he didn't bother to address those concerns even in the smallest way, he just mentioned the phrase "civil liberties concerns" and went straight on to trot out the rhetoric about public safety. He presumably wanted to make it sound like he believed the concerns were unfounded, but in reality, there simply isn't an answer that can make the scheme compatible with civil liberties in principle, and there is no urgent reason in the current national or international situation which would justify suspending our liberty in this area in this (permanent) way.

And now, the latest offence of "glorifying terrorism". What exactly constitutes glorification isn't particularly clear; in fact the only thing that's clear is that our government is rapidly and unashamedly eating away at our civil liberties: and we're not talking about radical lefty dreams here, but ordinary basic fundamental things that you learned about in school as cornerstones of democracy and a free society. A government or a group of people might not agree with the opinions expressed by other people, whether that's a majority of the population or just a minority, but that is no reason to criminalise them. And nor does the government have any right to impose its idea of who or what constitutes "terrorism" on the rest of us. Even non-violent political groups are liable to be classified as terrorists under the powers that the government is now taking to itself through this legislation.

It's bad enough taking away the rights of alleged terrorists (in things like the right to a fair and open trial, the right not to be detained without charge, the presumption of innocence), but this is even a step further, infringing the rights of everyone, suspected terrorist or not, to express support of opposition to governments of all sorts of countries (including Mugabe's Zimbabwe, eg), if they wish to do so. Giving up our freedoms in the name of security is self-defeating, and a price too high to pay.

civil liberties disaster

The House of Commons has just voted to make it compulsory for people to have an ID card and to have their personal details stored on a national identity register. Needless to say I think that's appalling, but I've got a presentation to finish for tomorrow, so right now I'm going to conserve energy by not setting out on a rant at the moment. I'll just remind you of this link instead.

hunger strikers might be innocent after all

The Pentagon's own figures cast doubt on their case for holding people in Guantanamo Bay, according to this article. Only 5% of the 500-odd prisoners ended up there because the Americans captured them, and 40% of them have never been linked with a terrorist organisation at all. The only thing that grates slightly about the article is its last paragraph, which makes it sound like the Islamic world feels like a disappointed parent watching the barbarity of the West ... while at the moment, a truer picture would be the West looking on in surprise and not a little fear as Muslims still protest about those cartoons. Even the moderate ones still want the law to be changed to make it illegal to offend them. But Guantanamo Bay is a disgrace - everything about it stinks, even the fact that the Pentagon can release these figures and not be shamed into sorting themselves out. All the hype about America on some great mission to spread democracy around the world rings so hollow when they're belying their own ideals with ongoing outrages like this.

the death of christian britain

I've already talked about Dennis and Erdos's book Families Without Fatherhood, the one that says it's better for children to be brought up in the traditional two-parent family. The second thesis of this book was that this breakdown in traditional family arrangements is what has caused the growth of crime and general incivility which has been seen in Britain since the 1960s.

A book which I've been revisiting since then is Callum Brown's Death of Christian Britain (2001). He argues that national religion hasn't so much been declining as that it's been abruptly rejected - since the 1960s Britain has suddenly abandoned the Christian morals and values which had characterised it for centuries. It only took us forty years to forsake Christianity, he says in the introduction, compared to the thousand or so years of practicing it [sic].

Quote: "The generation that grew up in the sixties was more dissimilar to the generation of its parents than in any previous century. The moral metamorphosis directly affected the churches' domain: the decline of marriage, the rise of divorce and remarriage, the rise of cohabitation in place of marriage ... decreasing stigmatisation of illegitimacy, homosexuality and sexual licence, the growing recourse to birth control and abortion, and the irresistible social pressures for government liberalisation of restrictions on drinking, Sunday closing and recreation. The range of the changes in demography, personal relationships, political debate and moral concerns was so enormous that it did not so much challenge the Christian churches as bypass them," p190.

Both these books are rich sources of comment.

• if the churches were bypassed by these changes, it isn't because they had nothing to say on things like marriage or drinking, but because they weren't being listened to any more
• the decline in respect for what was traditionally thought of as morality seems to have gone hand in hand with what you might call selfish behaviour, prioritising your own perceived benefit over that of other people's, to their disadvantage
  
• even though people have rejected Christianity, they're still religious; non-Christian religions seem to be growing, eg
  
• if the churches were so decisively rejected when their message they were preaching was the orthodox gospel (or by and large, and to a much greater extent than today), what implications does that have for the future of orthodox churches now?
  
• if the introduction of user-friendly gimmics in churches now still isn't halting the decline, what implications does that have for the future of the nice and cosy reincarnations of churches?
  

Maybe I'll come back to some of those things later, but there was one other thing which I 've been wondering about, and which I'd very much like to hear other people's opinions on. That's the question of whether we should look at the 1960s as the ultimate source of all these changes, or whether instead there were trends in society in the run-up to the 60s which only surfaced then. If religiosity started its inexorable decline in 1956, as Callum Brown's graphs show, and if crime rates started their inexorable rise in 1958, as Dennis and Erdos show, then what laid the foundations prior to the 60s or late 50s in order for this disintegration to take place? I wonder how much can we blame the war, for example, or both the wars - or maybe it started earlier than that, say with Victorian doubt filtering into the church itself rather than being rebuffed and kept firmly out of the pulpits. I'll keep thinking, but if you've any ideas, there's a comments section for accessing directly below, and you know how to use it ...

[Edited 20 March 06]

mysticism

Someone wrote a letter in a recent issue of the English Churchman which seemed to say that the idea of Christian 'experience' was an error along the lines of pagan eastern mysticism.

Needless to say, prioritising people's individual feelings or ideas over the revelation provided in God's word is a mistake, and fair enough, we all know cases of people deciding on what they believe only by the yardstick of what they'd like to believe - picking churches on the basis of what makes them feel good.

But still, all the things which are objectively true need to be accepted personally before it counts as saving faith. So although there are truths and propositions which are necessary to be accepted before you can be saved, accepting the propositions isn't sufficient: the truths of the gospel have to take root inside a person subjectively, in their personal experience, otherwise they're not real Christians. Any truth in your head has to travel those eighteen inches to your heart if it's going to be any use to you (that's a highly gender specific measurement of course: I make it more like thirteen myself).

People do criticise the puritans for being too introspective, over-analysing the goings on in their spiritual life, and encouraging too much focus on the internal inward aspects of religion. But there is most definitely a role for looking inwards, because you need to know whether the truth-out-there has really become truth-in-here, for you. And it wasn't just the puritans who cared about the subjective things - The Days of the Fathers in Rosshire defends the nineteenth century Scottish Highlanders against the same accusations, and an article by a Dutch minister written sometime last year still felt the need to make the same points.

There's a joint response by Maurice Roberts, Malcolm Watts, and William Macleod in the current issue of the English Churchman, which pointed out the misguidedness of the "experience = mysticism" position, and there's also a response available here, with a helpful quote from Rabbi Duncan.

responding to blasphemy

The Danish cartoons were published last September and subsequently publicised throughout the Middle East by Muslims from Denmark. Now huge numbers of Muslims are making it known to the world that perceived slights against their prophet cause them great offence.

Muslims have every right, in a free society, to feel offended. There are even Christians who have some degree of sympathy with the fact that they are offended when a person who has religious significance for them is being mocked: for once, after all, it isn't Jesus who is the target of ridicule by someone claiming the liberties afforded by freedom of speech.

But still. In a free society, what you don't have the right to do is resort to physically aggressive activities in order to enforce your beliefs or values on other people - and that's true whether you conceive of a free society along Christian lines or along secular humanistic lines. In addition, championing someone's right to take offence according to their own conscience rather than according to the rules of a human government, and/or sympathising with their offended sensibilities, is not the same as accepting that they have the right to: burn symbols which are special to other people, burn effigies of their fellow human beings, surround foreign embassies in mobs armed with guns, set foreign embassy buildings on fire, applaud the fatalities caused by terrorist bombs, or call for people to be slaughtered, annihilated, butchered, massacred, and/or beheaded if they insult them.

If you make the equation that hurting a (certain kind of) Muslim's feelings will inevitably result in violent intimidatory repercussions, I want to know, why? What compulsion is there that a person, or groups of people, must behave like that, and that everyone else must put up with it? Can people really respond to provocation only in this way, and are we right to tolerate it, or treat it as if it was understandable? Are we really saying that these Muslims are so inarticulate, and such helpless slaves to their own hurt feelings, that they have nothing else to resort to when they see a non-Muslim behaving like a non-Muslim, but to threaten them (convincingly) with death. Satirical cartoons targeting some person who is regarded as holy by religion X may be very provocative, but it's only realistic for followers of religion X to realise that not everyone regards that person as holy - and if it's really vitally important for the rest of the world to revere this person with them, well, guns and burnings (a) won't really help to convince them of that fact and (b) it's always unjust and morally wrong to use violence and intimidation as a way of interacting with other people.

taking offence

It offends me when people deny that God exists. It offends me when people deny the Trinity. It offends me when people deny that Jesus is the Son of God.

It offends me when people build up wrong impressions of God the Father, or God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit. It offends me when people draw pictures of a man and call it a picture of Jesus. It offends me when people sculpt statues of a man and call it a statue of Jesus. It offends me when people produce films where an actor pretends to be Jesus.

Furthermore, it offends me when people laugh at Jesus, make fun of the gospel, put symbols associated with Christianity in a context of obscenity, and use the names of God as swearwords.

Really, I suppose I wish I found these things even more offensive than I do. It might provide me with a bigger incentive to pray for the Saviour to be publicly respected, and for people who are now antagonistic towards him to be reconciled to him. It might make me more diligent about letting people know that God deserves better than this - that he is worthy of respect and praises, not scorn and mockery, because of who he is, and because of how he freely kindly saves sinners. It might also spur me into speaking out for him publicly using options like letter writing, church going, leaflet distributing, radio phone ins, or anything else that's available to me as a citizen of a democratic nation and a free society.

But the main issue of this post is this. In the current context, where some groups of people within Islam are offended because of perceived blasphemy, how much of a point do they have? It isn't unreasonable to want people to be polite towards you, and not ridicule a belief that you hold devoutly (no matter how ill founded that belief may be). But it isn't the case that in the West Islam is generally treated with contempt. In Britain, for example, if you want halal meat, well, there are exemptions from the animal welfare legislation that allows halal slaughtering. If you want your whole family to participate in religious festivals, your children are allowed to be absent from school. If you want to buy a house, there are mortgage deals available from mainstream banks which comply with sharia law. There are over a thousand mosques in the country, and the number of British converts to Islam is increasing, both among the white population and the black population. In addition, there are many non-Muslims who, just like many Muslims, don't approve of abortion, homosexuality, drunkenness, pornography, or gambling. So there is a wide variety of Islamic traditions and values which are either shared or else provided for, perfectly respectably, within contemporary British society.

The point here is that Western non-Muslims are running out of areas that can comfortably be conceded to Muslims (the Muslims whose traditions mean they want them), without having to give up things that are important rights and freedoms within our current partly secularised Judeo-Christian societies. As a non-Muslim, I can't conscientiously say "peace be upon him" after every mention of their prophet's name, for example. If that's regarded as blasphemous, it's regrettable that it's a point of conflict, but it's something that's non-negotiable. What's needed within Islam urgently is that moderate Muslims would help the extremists who claim to share their religion to recognise that if they expect Westerners not to treat their beliefs in a way that causes offence, the favour has to be returned: Muslims, even the most extreme ones, have to restrain themselves from giving offence to Westerners (Christians or atheists) too. At the very least, they need to stop resorting to bullying tactics in an attempt to force everyone else to concede them whatever respect they believe they deserve.

buy lurpak to celebrate

While the Danish company Arla Foods is talking about laying off workers due to the international boycott of their products in protest against the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, over here we've just passed a law banning incitement to religious hatred.

After yesterday's relief at the Commons votes, it's now time to realise that as of last night, we are less of a free society than we were the day before (and the day before that, for centuries). However, thankfully, the Lords amendments were accepted - amendments which were designed to tighten up the definition of the offence and add in some safeguards to freedom of expression.

This is definitely something to be heartened by. If the government had won, there's not the shadow of a doubt that people here would have been prosecuted for cartoons like the Danish ones - just because some Muslims could proclaim themselves offended by them. I already liked the Danes because they're roughly as eurosceptic as the UK is. I would buy Tulip bacon all the time given the chance. And now I have another politically charged item for my shopping basket: in support of Arla, butter from now on is going to be a choice of Anchor or Lurpak. (Which is great, cos we buy Anchor anyway. But still. Nice to have a reason for it now.)