COSMPOLITAN
SPAIN: Spain has the 8th. highest number of foreign residents in
the EU. Its figure of 10% is well above the EU average. Forty percent of these
foreigners are from the EU and the other 60%, would you believe come
from elsewhere. Of the Europeans, there are 728,252 Romanians - apparently all begging in Pontevedra – and 310,051 Brits. Well,
that's the official number; there are said to be 3 times that number
living here, with most of them not bothering to register with the
town hall. Which is a shame, as the money the latter get from Madrid
depends on the numbers registered. Of the non-Europeans, the
Moroccans, at 717,991 are just a little short of the Romanians. The
North Africans, though, don't seem as adept as the latter at begging
and robbing. Wonder why. Islam? Which reminds me . . . .
ISLAM:
Some say that there is fundamental change taking place among Muslims
and an article by one such person follows this blog, entitled Why
Muslims are turning away from Islam. Let's hope she's right.
There are some who deny this strenuously.
A
NEW WORD?: I came across 'ensorcell' this morning. Derived from
French, it means to bewitch or enchant. I wonder how many people know
this. Which reminds me . . .
STAR
WARS HYPE: Am I the only person in the world who
doesn't know what The Force is? Nor whether it is a good or a bad
thing. Or merely irrelevant.
FINALLY
. . . DARCEY BUSSELL: I'm not at all ashamed to admit I Love Strictly
come Dancing – Thanks, weather gods, for sending the rain that
blotted out last night's final - and
that I adore Ms Bussell. We share a couple of things: Firstly, 2
daughters, and, secondly, a belief that success comes primarily from
hard work. “This perception that we can be stars without any work
and just appear is rubbish,” she says. “You only survive if you
know how to do the grind and work up the ranks.” BTW . . . She was
born Marnie Mercedes Darcey Pembleton Crittle. I wonder why she never
went with this.
Don't
overlook my other blog here.
Today's
Facebook compulsory foto:
Why
Muslims are turning away from Islam
As
scepticism and materialism replace blind faith, more people than ever
worldwide are opting for atheism
Fifty
years ago, after the cracking of the genetic code, Francis Crick was
so confident religion would fade that he offered a prize for the best
future use for Cambridge’s college chapels. Swimming pools, said
the winning entry. Today, when terrorists cry “God is great” in
both Paris and Bamako as they murder, the joke seems sour. But here’s
a thought: that jihadism may be a last spasm — albeit a painful one
— of a snake that is being scotched. The humanists are winning,
even against Islam.
Quietly,
non-belief is on the march. Those who use an extreme form of religion
to poison the minds of disaffected young men are furious about the
spread of materialist and secularist ideas, which they feel powerless
to prevent. In 50 years’ time, we may look back on this period and
wonder how we failed to notice that Islam was about to lose market
share, not to other religions, but to humanism.
The
fastest growing belief system in the world is non-belief. No religion
grew nearly as fast over the past century. Whereas virtually nobody
identified as a non-believer in 1900, today roughly 15 per cent do,
and that number does not include soft Anglicans in Britain, mild
Taoists in China, lukewarm Hindus in India or token Buddhists in
Japan. Even so, the non-religious category has overtaken paganism,
will soon pass Hinduism, may one day equal Islam and is gaining on
Christianity. (Of every ten people in the world, roughly three are
Christian, two Muslim, two Hindu, 1.5 non-religious and 1.5 something
else.)
This
is all the more remarkable when you think that, with a few notable
exceptions, atheists or humanists don’t preach, let alone pour
money into evangelism. Their growth has come almost entirely from
voluntary conversion, whereas Islam’s slower growth in market share
has largely come from demography: the high birth rates in Muslim
countries compared with Christian ones.
And
this is about to change. The birth rate in Muslim countries is
plummeting at unprecedented speed. A study by the demographer
Nicholas Eberstadt three years ago found that: “Six of the ten
largest absolute declines in fertility for a two-decade period
recorded in the postwar era have occurred in Muslim-majority
countries.” Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria,
Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait have all seen
birth-rate declines of more than 60 per cent in 30 years.
Meanwhile,
secularism is on the rise within Muslim majority countries. It is not
easy being a humanist in an Islamic society, even outside the Isis
hell-holes, so it is hard to know how many there are. But a poll in
2012 found that 5 per cent of Saudis describe themselves as fully
atheist and 19 per cent as non-believers — more than in Italy. In
Lebanon the proportion is 37 per cent. Remember in many countries
they are breaking the law by even thinking like this.
That
Arab governments criminalise non-belief shows evidence not of
confidence, but of alarm. Last week a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced
a Palestinian poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to death for apostasy. In 2014 the
Saudi government brought in a law defining atheism as a terrorist
offence. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt, though tough
on Islamists, has also ordered two ministries to produce a national
plan to “confront and eliminate” atheism. They have shut down a
café frequented by atheists and dismissed a college librarian who
talked about humanism in a TV programme.
Earlier
this month there was yet another murder by Islamists — the fifth
such incident — of a Bangladeshi publisher of secularist writing. I
recently met one of the astonishingly brave humanist bloggers of
Bangladesh, Arif Rahman, who has seen four colleagues hacked to death
with machetes in daylight. He told me about Bangladesh’s 2013
blasphemy law, and the increasing indifference or even hostility of
the Bangladeshi government towards the plight of non-religious
bloggers. For many Muslim-dominated governments, the enemy is not
“crusader” Christianity, it is home-grown non-belief.
The
jihadists of Isis are probably motivated less by a desire to convert
Europe’s disaffected youth to fundamentalist Islam than by a wish
to prevent the Muslim diaspora sliding into western secularism. In
the Arab world, according to Brian Whitaker, author of Arabs Without
God, what tempts people to leave the faith is not disgust at the
antics of Islamist terrorists, but the same things that have drained
church attendance here: materialism, rationalism and scepticism.
As
the academics Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman wrote in an essay eight
years ago: “Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign,
progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular
religiosity. They all go material.” America is no longer much of an
exception. Non-believers there outnumber Mormons, Muslims and Jews
combined, and are growing faster than southern Baptists.
Whitaker
found that Arab atheists mostly lost their faith gradually, as the
unfairness of divine justice, the irrationality of the teaching, or
the prejudice against women, gay people or those of other faiths
began to bother them. Whatever your origin and however well you have
been brainwashed, there is just something about living in a society
with restaurants and mobile phones, universities and social media,
that makes it hard to go on thinking that morality derives
exclusively from superstition.
Not
that western humanists are immune from superstitions, of course: from
Gaia to Gwyneth Paltrow diets to astrology, there’s plenty of room
for cults in the western world, though they are mostly harmless. As
is Christianity, these days, on the whole.
I
do not mean to sound complacent about the Enlightenment. The adoption
of Sharia or its nearest equivalent in no-go areas of European cities
will need to be resisted, and vigorously. The jihadists will kill
many more people before they are done, and will provoke reactions by
governments that will erode civil liberties along the way. I am
dismayed by the sheer lack of interest in defending free speech that
many young westerners display these days, as more and more political
groups play the blasphemy card in imitation of Islam, demanding
“safety” from “triggering” instances of offence.
None
the less, don’t lose sight of the big picture. If we hold our
resolve, stop the killers, root out the hate preachers, encourage the
reformers and stem the tide of militant Islamism, then secularism and
milder forms of religion will win in the long run.
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