Simon Schama, currently exploring the history of the Jews on BBC Two, is the guest contributor to Prospect Magazine’s quirky column, “If I ruled the world” this month.

While saying emphatically that he does not want the job he does give us a short wish-list of some of the trivial and not so trivial challenges he would take up if forced to put on the mantle of world leader.

In the latter category is the not very surprising but highly commendable desire to make it compulsory for people to study history up to 16 years of age – and for a minimum of two hours a week. His reflections on the subject are worth relaying, as also are his take on religious tolerance.

“It’s important for children to learn history because if you don’t know where we’ve come from, you don’t have much of an anchorage for the present. For example, once upon a time, Britain was a compulsively, ferociously Christian country. We fought the Civil War over religion and our religious wars didn’t stop until the 18th century. Because of that, we should be in a position to understand when religion, for better or worse, becomes political, as it is in a large part of the world.

“If I ruled the world, I would make it impossible to make “sin” a crime. I would make it a matter of international human rights that nobody should ever be prosecuted, much less punished, for blasphemy. Jefferson argued for that in 1770 but it doesn’t seem to have come about. I’m not an atheist, but I do think that everybody should be allowed with absolute impunity to profess whatever religion they have, or none.”

“History”, he concludes, “is a tragic muse. One of its great founding moments is the Peloponnesian War and the whole majestic, terrifying drama of that builds up to the expedition against Syracuse that sees Athens sailing into massive hubris. That is good, honest, western history. It should never be self-congratulation; it should keep people awake at night.”

Ruairi Quinn, Ireland’s Minister for Education, who is killing any real history teaching in Irish schools, and other totalitarians or would-be totalitarians masquerading as liberals, please take note.

Also in this month’s Prospect, A. C. Grayling touches on the uses and abuses of history – for there is no doubt but that the greatest villians have put history in shackles to serve their nefarious ends.

He writes of the abuse of history to serve the ends of “the arrant nonsense we call nationalism, patriotism and other dangerous absurdities”. Noting that most borders between states were drawn in the blood of wars and are highly artificial things, “a fiction of history” – in other words, not really history but only imagined history – “an uneven line on a map turned into a fetish.”

“All over the planet”, he notes, “there are claims by one country to ownership of part or even the whole of another. One of the more comical is Spain’s claim to Gibraltar – comical because Spain possesses about a dozen Gibraltars on and around the North African coast and even inside France… Yet Spain wants Gibraltar ‘back’. It has about as much right to it as Turkey has to Spain itself, through the historical link of the Caliphate.”

He talks a lot of sense. Why can’t we all grow up and preoccupy ourselves about the things that really matter?

BRENDAN O’NEILL writes in the current post fro Spiked.com,
This week there was international outrage over the questioning of a Guardian journalist’s partner by anti-terrorism police at Heathrow. But there was no outrage, zilch, over the revelation on Thursday that a Sun journalist who was arrested in a dawn raid and subsequently spent 13 months on bail on suspicion of handling a stolen mobile phone had in fact never set eyes on the phone. Nine hours’ questioning of a friend of the Guardian provokes a storm; the placing of scores of tabloid journalists on year-long bail, often on very flimsy charges, causes no storm. Double standards have never been as explicit as this, and it’s press freedom that suffers – for that requires moral consistency, a willingness to defend redtop as well as respectable hacks from the long nose of the state.

Has international media ever been as blind as this? Add the persecution of Christians in Egypt to this, not to mention the shameless non-coverage of the Gosnel trial, the gay agenda support without even a shadow of serious analysis, and you can only conclude that journalism has surrendered itself to blind campaigning at the expense of telling the simple truth.

In shreds?

WASHINGTON, D.C.- August 22, the New Mexico Supreme Court in Elane Photography v. Willock, ruled against a Christian photographer who, citing her deeply held religious beliefs, declined to work a same-sex commitment ceremony. New Mexico law does not recognize gay marriage or gay civil unions. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 85 percent of Americans support the right of a photographer to refuse participation in a same-sex “wedding.”

Ken Klukowski, Family Research Council’s Director for the Center for Religious Liberty released the following statement:

“The New Mexico Supreme Court’s decision is profoundly disturbing. That court explicitly declares that a person’s sincerely-held religious beliefs–in this case, traditional and orthodox Christian beliefs–do not permit them to run their privately-owned business in accordance with their religious beliefs. This decision would stun the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, is a gross violation of the First Amendment, and should now be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court to reaffirm the basic principle that the fundamental rights of free speech and the free exercise of religion do not stop at the exit door of your local church, and instead extend to every area of a religious person’s life.

“This decision may bring to Americans’ attention the serious threat to religious liberty posed by overbearing government agencies when it comes to redefining marriage. Rather than live-and-let-live, this is forcing religious Americans to violate the basic teachings of their faith, or lose their jobs,” concluded Klukowski.

Sean Thomas, a novelist, journalist and travel writer who also publishes thrillers under the name Tom Knox, has now entered the fray of the intelligence-and-atheism debate. He concludes, on the basis of a “vast” range of research, that whatever about intelligence, they seem to have serious mental health problems. No wonder they’re happy, he says. Well, are they? Richard Dawkins never looked very happy to me.

I am a former subscriber to Prospect magazine. I’m not any more and although it is admirable in many ways, the last straw was when its readers chose Dawkins, the world’s leading public atheist as the world’s leading public intellectual as well. To be a subscriber to club in which that was the dominant view was more than I could take. What were they thinking? Maybe it was a joke.

Thomas asked on his Daily Telegraph blog last week, not who is more intelligent, the atheist or the believer, but “who is living more intelligently?”

And guess what, he told us, with his tongue only slightly to one side: “it’s the believers. A vast body of research, amassed over recent decades, shows that religious belief is physically and psychologically beneficial – to a remarkable degree.”

After citing all the research – which you can read for yourself here – he then asks: So which is the smart party, here? Is it the atheists, who live short, selfish, stunted little lives – often childless – before they approach hopeless death in despair, and their worthless corpses are chucked in a trench (or, if they are wrong, they go to Hell)? Or is it the believers, who live longer, happier, healthier, more generous lives, and who have more kids, and who go to their quietus with ritual dignity, expecting to be greeted by a smiling and benevolent God?
Obviously, it’s the believers who are smarter. Anyone who thinks otherwise is mentally ill.
And I mean that literally: the evidence today implies that atheism is a form of mental illness. And this is because science is showing that the human mind is hard-wired for faith: we have, as a species, evolved to believe, which is one crucial reason why believers are happier – religious people have all their faculties intact, they are fully functioning humans.
Therefore, being an atheist – lacking the vital faculty of faith – should be seen as an affliction, and a tragic deficiency: something akin to blindness. Which makes Richard Dawkins the intellectual equivalent of an amputee, furiously waving his stumps in the air, boasting that he has no hands.