Tonight is Halloween. Ugh!

Sometimes the much-criticised Met Police get it exactly right. In each of our two local papers this week they have taken a two-page advert warning that Halloween “can be a particularly distressing time of year for some of the more vulnerable members of our communities – especially the elderly.”

They also caution people not to throw things like eggs and flour – a theme taken up incidentally by a couple of responsible shops at the top of our road who – like fireworks – won’t sell them to under-18s. The police say eggs and flour “can cause a great deal of damage and misery… (and) can be classed as criminal damage.”

Of course our pre-teen daughters watch the TV and listen to the chat in the playground and want to join in the ‘fun’.

But why would we let them make light of the powers of darkness as if these aren’t real? Why would we allow them to participate in blackmail and threats – “trick or treat” – as if this isn’t learning to bully and torment? Why should they frighten the elderly and lonely? Why should they learn to rejoice in evil as if it’s good?

Halloween is a sick celebration at both a spiritual and social level. Again, I reckon the police have got it right. They suggest that if people want to party on Halloween night “why not just stay at home and having a Halloween-themed party with your friends and neighbours?”

Actually I think this suggestion should have the force of law. If we can ban smoking from public places, how much more should we ban Halloween from our schools and streets too?

A couple of weeks ago or so I watched the final programme in Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series ‘The Genius of Charles Darwin’.I generally try to avoid personal denigration, preferring to assess someone’s ideas and opinions rather than their character. (It is of course a false if civilising dichotomy to separate a person from his/her views as ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, they come from a personality. In many ways ideas reflect the person.)

However on this occasion I’m willing to state categorically that however articulate and intelligent, Dawkins is a fool and he’s an important reminder of Churchill’s dictum that scientists (and those like Dawkins who worship a scientific world-view) should be on tap but not on top. On the key issues of life my pre-teen daughters have more real insight and wisdom than the high-flying high-profile former professor from Oxford University.

Personally I’m agnostic about whether we evolved over millennia or were created literally in seven days, and I’ll happily concede that Dawkins makes an enthusiastic case for the former. However it doesn’t seem all that important especially as by his own scientific criteria Dawkins will never be able to prove a key component of today’s evolutionary theory: the Big Bang was by definition a one-off and therefore cannot be subject to the repeated and rigorous testing that scientific analysis requires. It must always remain a theory and therefore ultimately a matter of, well, belief – rather like the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England. In the programme Dawkins came across as a sincere, passionate but slightly dotty high priest of this new religion and presumably his bank balance is following the ever-upward trajectory of his unintended and equally dotty alma mater from another new religion, Rev Sun Myung Moon of the Moonies.

My problem is not with evolutionary theory per se but with Dawkins’ insistence that science has (or will have one day) the complete explanation for all things. Dawkins is locked into a mechanistic materialist and therefore limited view of the world in which nothing can exist unless it can be seen, measured, tested and exactly evaluated. “Where’s the evidence for God?” he cries. “Show me the provable facts and I’ll believe!”

Poor Dawkins. No doubt he’s an excellent scientific thinker and apologist. But what about love, beauty and truth: there can be no measurable scientific, logical or rational explanation for them so do they not exist? How about the human potential inherent in my young daughters that will blossom in unknown ways as the years unfold: it cannot be measured so does it not exist? What about the effect on a concert audience of the first movement of Beethoven’s sublime ‘Moonlight’ sonata played perhaps by Daniel Barenboim (here); Dawkins-style science cannot begin to explain the magic of the moment so did it not happen? How about Gazza’s stunning volley into the Scottish net in Euro 96; scientific logic cannot explain, understand or predict Gascoigne’s flash of genius, so what exactly are we watching on the video (here) Professor Dawkins?

And how about poetry, dance and the imaginative arts? Beyond technical support, what has science usefully to offer towards the illogical creativity inherent in all these?

The programme showed Dawkins foolishly worshipping the small god of his own closed scientific belief system. It would be funny if it wasn’t evidently so persuasive to so many in our secular age.

Instead it’s tragic.

Ten days ago I got a call. It was journalist Hugh Muir, formerly of the Newham Recorder but now lively diarist at the Guardian. He has a new column in the paper’s G2 section ‘Hideously diverse Britain’ , presumably borrowed from Greg Dyke’s ‘hideously white BBC’ jibe (here) and wanted to interview me about the projected West Ham mega-mosque that I’ve been opposing for the past three years (here).

We met at the Christian Peoples Alliance office at Canning Town and talked about the mosque and our campaign. He questioned me at length about the acceptability of a Christian challenging the construction of a Muslim place of worship. Eventually he asked how I felt about the pro-mosque websites and videos that virulently attack me for my opposition and attempt to taint me with a BNP brush, for instance here and here.

I told him how I’d discovered that the person responsible for the websites, Tahire Faruq, lives just half a mile from my home, and how I called on him unannounced earlier this year to see if he’d have a cuppa and chat. Suddenly Muir lit up; he’d smelt a story. Astonished that I’d visit a hostile opponent who’d obviously crawled all over my past life (why? – after all, Christ teaches his followers to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’), Muir became animated. I realised he’d suddenly found the narrative for his ‘Hideously diverse’ column the following week.

It was published in the Guardian last Friday – ‘Friendship across the religious divide’. You can read it in full here.

I especially like Muir’s optimistic ending: ‘If that’s the future, it’s not so bad’.

The liberal democratic liberties that hesitantly grew and then finally flourished across the UK and Europe over the past couple of centuries are under assault as never before. The continent is run by an unelected, interfering and financially incompetent (or corrupt) Commission that, as Ireland has found out, is utterly cynical about the will of the electorate expressed through the ballot box; the clout of the UK’s ancient Mother of Parliaments – sunk in the quagmire of the expenses scandal – has arguably never been lower; and the yawning gap of mutual incomprehension between the governing classes and ordinary people is feeding the growth of hard-line extremism on all sides, as the May election of two BNP MEPs and the recent UAF-encouraged Muslim violence at Harrow mosque (here) demonstrate. 

One by one – and despite the European Convention on Human Rights and associated national legislation – the lights of our liberties and freedoms are being extinguished in the name of our risk-avoiding, hurt-preventing, initiative-curtailing, target-worshipping, bureaucratic-meddling, money-mad, politically-correct, aggressively-atheist nanny state, which itself is only one stop away from a police state.

And the downhill slide towards this police state took a defining step forward two weeks ago when a Christian couple, Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, were arrested following a heated argument about religion in front of guests in the restaurant of their nine-bedroom private hotel in Aintree, Liverpool. No violence took place, no mayhem ensued; but one Muslim participant reckoned her religious sensibilities had been insulted and went to the police. Plod knocked on the hotel door – and now the Vogelenzangs have been remanded on bail and await trial under the Public Order Act 1986, a measure designed to stop violence and disorder on the streets.

The details will come out during the court case in December, but it’s already clear that the robust but peaceful expression of religious beliefs and opinions in a semi-private place in England in 2009 is now subject to police intervention and arrest. Henry Porter in the Guardian called the decision to prosecute ‘daft’ (here). Others reckon the police action is ‘heavy-handed’. Actually it is much worse than that; it is deeply deeply ominous. The mind-set and management ethos of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has now become so Orwellian and Stasi-like that in my view we have crossed the anti-democratic Rubicon. The chilling effect of this prosecution – whether it succeeds or not – on free speech is momentous and we are now but a few steps from Gestapo knocks on the door in the dead of night for anyone who expresses peaceful but apparently contentious, odious, offensive or politically incorrect views especially, as in this case, about Islam.

Of course the normal courtesies of hospitality should have restrained the Vogelenzangs from arguing with one of their guests, and I am not surprised that the local hospital is no longer sending outpatients to stay at the hotel. I wouldn’t either. But that does not justify police arrest or the CPS decision to prosecute.

To paraphrase George Orwell, ‘Liberty, if it means anything, means the right to offend’. By being dragged into court the Volgelenzangs have already been penalised for exercising that right and by extension, as fellow citizens, so have we. And they may yet receive a substantial fine and a criminal record.

What is to be done? First, the Vogelenzangs’ fight is our fight so I’m sending £100 to their legal defence fund run by the Christian Institute (here).

Second, we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. I therefore intend to repeat their opinions – only more so – on this blogsite with a view to sharing a police cell and court appearance with them.

The exact nature of their offending views is open to dispute as the unnamed Muslim lady claims Ben Vogelenzang called the founder of Islam, Muhammad, a ‘warlord’ – but he denies this. However it seems agreed that Sharon described the hijab (Islamic headscarf) as a form of ‘bondage’ (here).

Now I certainly admire Muhammad as one of the great figures of history, up there with Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and King David (of Goliath fame, who established Jerusalem as Israel’s capital around 1,000 BC). And the modesty of much Islamic dress is to be applauded.

But it is also valid to see Muhammad – like other historical greats – as a very flawed figure. And the niqab (Islamic face-veil) is as controversial in the UK as in France (here).

So I hope my Muslim friends and acquaintances (that especially includes you Abdul, Asif, Mohammed, Humera, Tahire, Manish, Irfan and Yaqoob) will forgive me now as I write about both Muhammad’s flaws and Islamic dress in a way they may find offensive. But I need to do so (a) primarily in order to assert my right to freedom of speech, and (b) secondarily to get myself nicked so that I can stand alongside the Vogelenzangs.

“Muhammad was a warlord, a paedophile and a vindictive murderer, and the niqab is a hostile anti-social sign of female subjection which should be banned from public places.”

There, I’ve done it. Now if someone would kindly take a copy of this post to the police, please also tell them they can obtain my address via Newham town hall. I’ll await with anticipation the nocturnal knock on my door.

Ben and Sharon, wait for me. I’m on my way!