This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world’s best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can’t you fail. This is Armstrong’s principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the “apophatic” tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as “God” have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression. The right kind of silence, of course, not that of the pothead or inebriate. The religious state is exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are.” If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with the tradition.

Armstrong is not presenting a case for God in the sense most people in our idolatrous world would think of it. The ordinary man or woman in the pew or on the prayer mat probably thinks of God as a kind of large version of themselves with mysterious powers and a rather nasty temper. That is the vice of theory again, and as long as they think like that, ordinary folk are not truly religious, whatever they profess. By contrast, Armstrong promises that her kinds of practice will make us better, wiser, more forgiving, loving, courageous, selfless, hopeful and just. Who can be against that?

The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding – only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words. Her experience of “Jabberwocky” may have improved Alice.

Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, in human nature there is “some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent”. So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance.

Yes, they were, you silly man. The French army suffered half as many war dead as the US army during the war (from a population a quarter the size) and France was a combatant power for almost as long as the US - 1939-40 and 1944-45, v. 1941-45.

26: yes, it was, in 1944, when Leclerc’s 1 Fr Armoured Div was part of the invading force – and before the invasion, when the Jedburgh teams and the French Resistance was doing their stuff. Not in 1940, though.

Sure. The thing is, French and Americans alike, or so it seems to me, nowadays like to think about WWII as a conflict between pure good-allied forces-and pure evil-the German occupying forces. Of course, things were not as simple and people who actually lived the period remember something much more nuanced.

But all this was in response to the question whether Americans ever bombed allied cities. The answer is of course yes, and I think their decision was justified and strategically sound

My grand-father dug out burning bodies from under destroyed houses and my grand-mother, who was an active member of the Resistance, nonetheless has not so fond memories of the liberation of her hometown by the Americans (apparently, they looted more properties in a week than the Germans in four years).

Was Normandy ever a battle front between the Germans and the French during WWII? Hadn’t the French surrendered long before the advancing German lines reached that point?

Not only Normandy, but also fake targets to convince the Nazis that they might invade from a number of places. As for people not greeting Americans with flowers there, yes, this is true: you should talk about it with my grand-father, who lived in Rouen in 1944, and that should tell you everything needed. Though hard to hear, for French and Americans alike I guess, the truth is that allied forces inflicted incommensurably more damages that Nazis on Normandy.

To answer the question of Donald Johnson, not only allied forces bombed French villages but inflicted massive damages on several French towns (Brest, Le Havre, Nantes, Rouen, Boulogne, Caen…) with civilian victims in each of these towns at least comparable to, say, the Coventry blitz.

I’d focus on one obvious and pretty conclusive problem with ‘necessity’ as the sole criterion of justification: it’s unrestrictedly resource-relative. Strictly interpreted (for how else?) it implies that if all you happen to have at your disposal is a nuke, then you can use that to destroy a spear in the middle of Manhattan. (Or if you are not of a philosophical disposition, tone down the example until you get to one that’s ‘realistic’.)

More specifically, Bloix’s reference to tying down men and resources that are badly needed elsewhere illustrates how assessment of ‘necessity’ rapidly becomes a global matter – if you spread your civilian-preserving resources (misleadingly equated, btw, with engangerment of soldiers) thinly enough by adopting a sufficiently ambitious range of ‘legitimate’ objectives, then more or less anything can be made out to be necessary.

It’s also worth pointing ou that what counts as a legitimate military objective is presented as an independently answerable question, but almost certanly isn’t. Destroying a field of crops which may feed enemy soldiers (as well as the civilain population) may be regarded as a lgit objective if the relevant soldiers can’t be (or won’t be) killed directly, but possibly not otherwise. Not suer about this particular example, but certainly ‘necessity’, unlike ‘proportionality’, requires that legitmate objectives can be dientified prior to any consideration of the means of achieving them.

I think that this is the very best, and almost certainly unduely charitable, interpretation you could put on these events. My impression is that unless such deaths were seen as a slight plus (so long as they were kept fairly low), it becomes extremely hard to explain much of the action.

Well, clearly you’d be allowed to deploy shoggoths of your own. Which could end badly.

One shudders to think what would be deemed permissible in the case of an enemy possessing shoggoths.

You read right. Caen in particular got pretty comprehensively shot-up before it was liberated, and apparently without making it much easier to liberate. Add that to the widespread French conviction that the country was liberated by the Resistance (with a bit of outside help), and you can see how there could be a fair bit of ill-feeling.

I read somewhere that in the WWII the allies bombed the hell out of Normandy before the invasion. Apparently it was a really stupid and atrocious bombing campaign, destroying cities and villages, killing scores and scores of locals, while German military units were sitting outside populated areas unharmed. Apparently when Americans invaded they weren’t exactly greeted with flowers. Apparently there’s still some resentment out there in Normandy.

To take a factual example- when NATO bombed Serbia in order to force Milosevich to withdraw from Kosovo, the planes flew at high altitude in order to avoid Serbian anti-aircraft weapons. This increased the number of off-target bombs and resulting civilian deaths. Thus a calculation was made that in order to protect NATO airmen (and thereby to avoid the political fallout of casualties), extra Serb civilian deaths would be tolerated. No such calculation would have been possible if the civilians had belonged to NATO member states.

This kind of thing goes on all the time. Whether it’s moral or immoral, it’s how war is fought. Margalit/Walzter don’t seem to understand that their proposal would be a radical change in the practice of war, and that in many cases it would, if accepted, make war impossible. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – but I am saying that they don’t admit that they are effectively arguing for pacifism.

Is that true? Historically, has anyone ever shelled bombed or shelled their own people? I don’t know offhand. I would guess the answer is yes. How did the Free French feel about taking France back from the Nazis? Did any French villages get bombed?

This did come up in a Star Trek episode (in the last series, which I shamefully admit to watching.) There was the usual mucking around with the timeline by evil aliens from the future and the Nazis had captured much of the eastern seaboard of the US. The Americans were going to launch a counterattack and the characters took it for granted that this might involve the US air force bombing American cities. I took it for granted that we would in fact have done this, trying to minimize US civilian casualties, but if you’ve got Nazi bases inside Brooklyn, you’re going to bomb them.