Vi mennesker overlever det utruligste, om vi må.

Kjærligheta lyt ein ta vare på om ein finn den, la hun til, - uansett når i livet det skjer. Kjærligheta har ingen alder, ikkje slik e ser det.

Tiden leger ikke alle sår, men den la en skorpe over sårene. Det var en viss hjelp i det og, selv om skorpen over hennes sår ennå ikke var mer enn en tynn hinne.

Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you. Oh can't you see, you belong to me ...
Sting

I am continually astonished by those theists who, far from having their consciousness raised in the way that I propose, seem to rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins, in the book just mentioned, takes this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's lazy God is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: deus otiosus – literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step, Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist. My memory vividly hears Woody Allen's perceptive whine: 'If it turns out that there is no God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.'

Jeg har trengt utfordringer for å bli klar over mine strategier og mestringsvilje. Viljen min har blitt sterkere når den har blitt trent. Jeg er i konstant utvikling og mine mestringsstrategier blir til underveis i livet mitt.

Jeg merker at de gangene jeg sliter med motivasjonen, stiller jeg bitte små krav til meg selv. Jeg møter meg selv der jeg er. Jeg forsøker å trigge de mekanismene som gjør at jeg kan hjelpe meg selv med å aktivere kreftene i meg. Litt er bedre enn ingenting. Noen dager dreier det seg om å løpe femti skritt og gå hundre skritt et par ganger før jeg gir opp. Bare det å klare det gir mestringsfølelse når motivasjonen er på minussiden.

Dyr klarer seg godt uten lange forklaringer eller illusoriske bekymringer for fremtiden. De forholder seg til nåtiden og handler på instinkt. Det er mye smartere enn å lage negative spiraler. Den egenskapen er forbeholdt oss mennesker.

Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain
its tens of thousands.

SEAN O'CASEY

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill's bottom that religion may be adaptive.

MAREK KOHN

A professorship of theology should have no place
in our institution.
THOMAS JEFFERSON

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man – living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time … But He loves you!
GEORGE CARLIN

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.
MICHAEL SHERMER

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The priests of the different religious sects ... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

En av Danmarks mest populære politikere er ikke medlem av regjeringspartiene. Han er heller ikke en danske fra fødselen av. Han er født i Syria og innvandret til Danmark som barn. Han representerer partiet Det Radikale Venstre, som ideologoisk er nokså sammenfallende med Venstre i Norge. Politikeren heter Naser Khader og har fått heltestatus i Danmarks befolkning, nesten på linje med en popstjerne. Hvorfor? Fordi han ikke har levnet noen som helst tvil om hvilken side han står på i det som måbetegnes som Danmarks pågående kulturkamp. Khader er på det sekulære demokratiets side – med begge benene. Derfor nyter han tillit og popularitet. Sett med norske øyne kan dette virke underlig, all den tid det kan synes som om vi i norge nærmest tar det for gitt at ledende muslimer støtter det sekulære demokratiet. Slik er det ikke i Danmark. Grunnet den åpne holdningen og debatten, der man langt på vei klarer å behandle hverandre likeverdig uansett etnisk eller religiøs bakgrunn, er den ene islamisten etter den andre avkledd. Dette skyldes kanskje først og fremst at Danmark er velsignet med en presse som generelt sett er lite styrt av myter og partipolitisk forutinntatthet knyttet til innvandringsfeltet. Sammenlignet med Norge erfarer jeg at Danmark har langt flere journalister og redaktører med kompetanse på feltet, som ikke vegrer seg for å sette søkelyset på kritikkverdige forhold i innvandrerbefolkningen. Derfor var det ikke til å undres over at det nettopp var i Danmark at det som har blitt en verdenshistorisk begivenhet skjedde: Trykkingen av karikaturtegninger av islamstifteren Muhammed i avisen Jyllands-Posten i 2005.
Oppstarten på karikaturstriden var en antakelse om selvsensur: Var det blitt slik i Danmark at ytringsfriheten knyttet til religion er innskrenket – at det foregår en selvsensur grunnet frykt for represalier fra ekstremt hold? Og det var i kjølvannet av Muhammed-karikaturene at det som lenge hadde vært en mistanke ble bekreftet en gang for alle; at ledende og innflytelsesrike imamer i Danmark ikke stod ved det danske demokratiets verdigrunnlag. Pressen avdekket at imamene ikke bare opptrådte i dobbeltroller, men de jobbet dertil aktivt ved hjelp av løgn og bedrag for å svekke Danmarks omdømme og selv posisjonere seg maktmessig nasjonalt og internasjonalt. Det kom også for en dag hvilket bredt nettverk imamene har blant islamister i den muslimske verden, som eksempelvis samarbeid med en av islamistenes ideologer, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Det var midt i denne internasjonale krisen som oppstod, at den allerede kjente politikeren og folktingsmedlemmet Naser Khader stod frem med utvetydig beskjed til de udemokratiske kreftene: «Hvis imamene ikke kan like lukten i bakeriet, kan de finne et annet sted å bo. Jeg er så trett av å høre dem beklage seg over forholdene i det landet som har gitt dem beskyttelse, ytringsfrihet, religionsfrihet og masser av muligheter for barna deres. Khader tok initiativet til organisasjonen Demokratiske muslimer, som på kort tid fikk flere tusen medlemmer. Initiativet lovprises både av næringslivet og fra politisk hold.
Avsløringen av islamistiske ledere i Danmark overrasket også den sekulære muslimen Khader. Han ble likeledes overrasket over hvilke svært tette og velutviklede internasjonale nettverk de danske islamistene har: «Vi må våkne opp. Vi har å gjøre med en indre fiende som er farligere enn man kunne forestille seg. Det har i det seneste gått opp frp meg,» sa Khader til Berlingske Tidende 2.april 2006. Hans livsprosjekt er nå å bekjempe denne indre fienden, islamistene: (...) «jeg er ved å kaste opp av dem og deres fullskjegg (...) Mange av flyktningene som er flyktet fra Iran, er flyktet fra disse tingene – og så skal de likevel møte det her. Deres hensikt er å føre sharia over på muslimer som bor i Vesten.» Khader sier han vil gi islamistene «kamp til den demokratiske streken» og gjøre alt for at de «marginaliserte muslimene blir trukket bort fra islamistene og inkludert i det danske samfunnet».
Khader er truet på livet for standpunktene sine og sin rolle i offentligheten, og han lever med beskyttelse. Khader sier at hans «forbrytelse» er at han mener islam og demokrati kan forenes. På debattsidene på nettet raser muslimer mot ham. En meningsmåling viser at kun 13 prosent av danske muslimer ser Khader som deres talsperson. Og kun en av fem muslimer i Danmark støtter opprettelsen av organisasjonen Demokratiske muslimer.

I'll end the chapter with a particular case study, which tellingly illuminates society's exaggerated respect for religion, over and above ordinary human respect. The case flared up in February 2006 – a ludicrous episode, which veered wildly between the extremes of comedy and tragedy. The previous September, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Over the next three months, indignation was carefully and systematically nurtured throughout the Islamic world by a small group of Muslims living in Denmark, led by two imams who had been granted sanctuary there. In late 2005 these malevolent exiles travelled from Denmark to Egypt bearing a dossier, which was copied and circulated from there to the whole Islamic world, including, importantly, Indonesia. The dossier contained falsehoods about alleged maltreatment of Muslims in Denmark, and the tendentious lie that Jyllands-Posten was a government-run newspaper. It also contained the twelve cartoons which, crucially, the imams had supplemented with three additional images whose origin was mysterious but which certainly had no connection with Denmark. Unlike the original twelve, these three add-ons were genuinely offensive – or would have been if they had, as the zealous propagandists alleged, depicted Muhammad. A particularly damaging one of these three was not a cartoon at all but a faxed photograph of a bearded man wearing a fake pig's snout held on with elastic. It has subsequently turned out that this was an Associated Press photograph of a Frenchman entered for a pig-squealing contest at a country fair in France. The photograph had no connection whatsoever with the prophet Muhammad, no connection with Islam, and no connection with Denmark. But the Muslim activists, on their mischief-stirring hike to Cairo, implied all three connections … with predictable results.
The carefully cultivated 'hurt' and 'offence' was brought to an explosive head five months after the twelve cartoons were originally published. Demonstrators in Pakistan and Indonesia burned Danish flags (where did they get them from?) and hysterical demands were made for the Danish government to apologize. (Apologize for what? They didn't draw the cartoons, or publish them. Danes just live in a country with a free press, something that people in many Islamic countries might have a hard time understanding.) Newspapers in Norway, Germany, France and even the United States (but, conspicuously, not Britain) reprinted the cartoons in gestures of solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, which added fuel to the flames. Embassies and consulates were trashed, Danish goods were boycotted, Danish citizens and, indeed, Westerners generally, were physically threatened; Christian churches in Pakistan, with no Danish or European connections at all, were burned. Nine people were killed when Libyan rioters attacked and burned the Italian consulate in Benghazi. As Germaine Greer wrote, what these people really love and do best is pandemonium.
A bounty of $1 million was placed on the head of 'the Danish cartoonist' by a Pakistani imam – who was apparently unaware that there were twelve different Danish cartoonists, and almost certainly unaware that the three most offensive pictures had never appeared in Denmark at all (and, by the way, where was that million going to come from?). In Nigeria, Muslim protesters against the Danish cartoons burned down several Christian churches, and used machetes to attack and kill (black Nigerian) Christians in the streets. One Christian was put inside a rubber tyre, doused with petrol and set alight. Demonstrators were photographed in Britain bearing banners saying 'Slay those who insult Islam', 'Butcher those who mock Islam', 'Europe you will pay: Demolition is on its way' and apparently without irony, 'Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion'.
In the aftermath of all this, the journalist Andrew Mueller interviewed Britain's leading 'moderate' Muslim, Sir Iqbal Sacranie. Moderate he may be by today's Islamic standards, but in Andrew Mueller's account he still stands by the remark he made when Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for writing a novel: 'Death is perhaps too easy for him' - a remark that sets him in ignominious contrast to his courageous predecessor as Britain's most influential Muslim, the late Dr Zaki Badawi, who offered Salman Rushdie sanctuary in his own home. Sacranie told Mueller how concerned he was about the Danish cartoons. Mueller was concerned too, but for a different reason: 'I am concerned that the ridiculous, disproportionate reaction to some unfunny sketches in an obscure Scandinavian newspaper may confirm that … Islam and the west are fundamentally irreconcilable.' Sacranie, on the other hand, praised British newspapers for not reprinting the cartoons, to which Mueller voiced the suspicion of most of the nation that 'the restraint of British newspapers derived less from sensitivity to Muslim discontent than it did from a desire not to have their windows broken'.
Sacranie explained that 'The person of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is revered so profoundly in the Muslim world, with a love and affection that cannot be explained in words. It goes beyond your parents, your loved ones, your children. That is part of the faith. There is also an Islamic teaching that one does not depict the Prophet.' This rather assumes, as Mueller observed,

that the values of Islam trump anyone else's – which is
what any follower of Islam does assume, just as any
follower of any religion believes that theirs is the sole way,
truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher
more than their own families, that's up to them,
but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously …

Except that if you don't take it seriously and accord it proper respect you are physically threatened, on a scale that no other religion has aspired to since the Middle Ages. One can't help wondering why such violence is necessary, given that, as Mueller notes: 'If any of you clowns are right about anything, the cartoonists are going to hell anyway – won't that do? In the meantime, if you want to get excited about affronts to Muslims, read the Amnesty International reports on Syria and Saudi Arabia.'
Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical 'hurt' professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan against the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed carrying a banner reading 'God bless Hitler'.
In response to all this frenzied pandemonium, decent liberal newspapers deplored the violence and made token noises about free speech. But at the same time they expressed 'respect' and 'sympathy' for the deep 'offence' and 'hurt' that Muslims had 'suffered'. The 'hurt' and 'suffering' consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or real pain of any kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in a newspaper that nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but for a deliberate campaign of incitement to mayhem.
I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defence. What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect? As H. L. Mencken said: 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.'
It is in the lights of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but or shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.