Britain’s Jihadists Within

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri



Some of the “freedom fighters” who are at war against the evil tyrant Assad in Syria, the “rebels” whom both Obama and Cameron wanted to help, have now been re-classified as “the biggest threat to Britain's security” and a “greater threat than al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan”. The British Home Office identifies Syria as “the most significant development in global terrorism.”

More than half of anti-terror investigations by the UK security service MI5 involve “Britons” who went to fight in Syria. Charles Farr - the Home Office’s terror chief - and others warned that the Syrian war is stoking the biggest terror threat to the West since September 11, and this problem is predicted to persist for as long as the hostilities will continue.

Syria is much closer to Europe than Afghanistan and Pakistan, making it a particularly easy and dangerous destination for UK Muslims who come back well trained, armed and ready for business: terrorism. And because the security services monitor about half of them, the risk is very high.

Robert Spencer asks some pertinent questions:

Why aren’t they monitoring the rest? And why were these men let back into the country in the first place? Simply because they’re citizens? (Are they even all citizens?)

In the past three years, from the beginning of the conflict, no fewer than 500 Britons have travelled to Syria to fight, many more than the corresponding number for Iraq. According to French President Francois Hollande, they are actually up to 700.

Between 250 and 400 of them are believed to be back with us, although the number may be higher. Apparently, they found life there “too hard”, so they say. But they may have been encouraged to return “home” in order to carry out attacks in the UK.

Hundreds more are still in Syria, and one of them has posted an internet video urging his coreligionists in Britain to join them and help their Syrian brothers and sisters, saying: "The doors of jihad are still open." He is a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a group which wants Syria to become an Islamic state ruled by Sharia law and which is considered too extreme even by Al-Qaeda, that officially disowned it. The first provincial capital to be occupied by ISIS was the city of Raqqa, on whose Christian community it has imposed payment of the jizya and other rules associated with the dhimmi status.

These are people who know their Islam, no doubt. They’ve forced even the BBC reporters to become familiar with the triple choice: convert, submit, die.

Aymenn al-Tamimi, a University of Oxford expert on Iraqi and Syrian jihadists, said:

In case ISIS’s ambitions to a global caliphate were still not apparent to anyone, ISIS’s official Twitter account for Raqqa province had this to say on the imposition of the dhimmi pact: ‘Today in Raqqa and tomorrow in Rome.’

ISIS uses British radicalised recruits, like Anil Khalil Raoufi, the University of Liverpool student of engineering who was recently killed in Syria.

The Syrian war is helping to accelerate the “final solution” for Christians in the Middle East.

The rebels’ ruthlessness is not in question. A Facebook video shows a British jihadist in Syria torturing and executing another jihadi who had insulted Allah, with the caption: “I can’t wait for feeling you get when U just killed some1.”

“Who are the British jihadists in Syria?” asks the BBC. The answer: “The Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London says most British jihadists are university-educated Muslims of British Pakistani origin in their 20s.” Ah! And I thought that, as the Left says, violent jihad and Muslim terrorism are caused by poverty and deprivation. It turns out that, once again, these people are mainly middle class.

UK security services last autumn intercepted a plot by "British" jihadists returning from Syria planning a Nairobi-style gun attack on civilians in a crowded location, maybe in London.

Furthermore, Al-Qaeda urged “lone wolf” terrorists trained in Syria to target the Queen with bomb attacks at British sporting events, including the Derby. Cheltenham races, Wimbledon and Football Association Cup matches are other recommended potential targets that could cause “maximum carnage”.

The recommendations come from Inspire, an English-language online magazine produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), that lists Britain as Al Qaeda's biggest target after America.

The big question is: what to do?

Robert Spencer is not the only one calling for not letting Syria jihadists back into the UK. The Week has a sensible suggestion:

Pass a law forbidding any British subject from travelling to Syria - unless registered with a charity authorised by the Foreign Office...

But anyone suspected of making an unauthorised trip to Syria would not be re-admitted to the United Kingdom. Put up posters to that effect at every airport and seaport... "If you travel to Syria illegally, you will not be allowed to return here."

Preventing any more of these jihadists coming 'home' would be the simplest solution. Dealing with an attack by such men once it kicks off will be difficult. Terrorists on shooting sprees of this kind inflict damage quickly, relying on a shock effect to cow their intended victims. No doubt the SAS or SBS will arrive, but even they will be lucky to arrive in time.

The butcher's bills have been quite severe. Mumbai: 153 killed and more than 600 wounded. Nairobi: 67 dead and 175 wounded. In both cases hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage were also caused to property. Imagine if something similar were to happen in London.

The UK’s Home Office, despite tough talking, has let these potential terrorists back into the country. We’ve heard threats to arrest and prosecute them from the Crown Prosecution Service.

There have been arrests: while only 24 people last year, already 20 this year, including Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee – yes, one of those innocent souls – whose trial date has been set in October.

But his arrest has caused protests from the Muslim community, claiming that they are being unfairly targeted. What’s new?

That has made government officials even more “aware of the thin line they must tread in dealing with the problem” than they already were.

UK Muslim charities delivering aid in Syria complain that they risk being arrested for terrorism on their volunteers’ return home – as if one eighth of zakat (Islamic charity) were not obliged to finance jihad according to Sharia law.

In fact, ten Muslim charities linked to Syria are under surveillance after Adeel Ali, the head of a UK charity that raised thousands of pounds from the British public for Syria, has been photographed embracing masked fighters brandishing an AK47.

With Islam, you never know where the money supposedly for charity ends up. There’s ample evidence of "charity workers" in Syria supporting jihadi "martyrs”.

The Left, as usual, sides with the Muslim community, and has accused the government, like George Monbiot in The Guardian making this historical comparison: ‘If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006.”

But a legitimate question has been raised: how can a government, like the British one, which only a few months ago was prepared to join the war against Assad and be allied to the same "fighters" on whose side these jihadists are battling, now consider them criminals? Isn’t it a bit inconsistent? This, after all, is the same government that openly supports the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backs the Syrian rebels pursuing this goal, lost a parliamentary vote on military intervention in Syria last year - and is fully aware that its allies in the Gulf are funding al-Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria. This inconsistency clearly shows how that pro-rebel stance is a terrible error.

And how likely is it that anything will be done to British-citizen Syrian jihadists now, when in an analogous situation in the case of the NATO-backed uprising in Libya in 2011 no British jihadi fighting in Libya was arrested? After all, to punish them would be “Islamophobic”.

Taqiyya and Blasphemy Laws in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri



In British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.

A soccer fan was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Quran and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew's - the stadium of the incident -, and going to any city where his team Middlesbrough was playing.

Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people, and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.

A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates a "zero tolerance policy" towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football's pledge to "eradicate racism in all its forms".

Nobody could answer the question of what race Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.

Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.

Now it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms, in short a means of oppression.

The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by the concept.

The sense or connotation is the concept's descriptive qualities.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has as reference an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it and in so doing make it precise.

Since the word "racism" has started being used to refer to many attitudes, behaviours and ideas that had little or nothing to do with racism in the strict sense, its meaning has become progressively larger and larger, correspondingly decreasing its sense.

When today I hear about someone or something being called "racist", I hardly ever believe that it’s true. The likeliest explanation, I think to myself, is either an umpteenth case of excessive political correctness, or a personal attack. The descriptive capability of the term has got lost or at least dramatically eroded.

There is at the moment a worrying trend: what has for a long time been a common Leftist ploy, the shouting of “racist” to shut down any criticism of Islam, is now tried to be enshrined in British law.

The soccer case is one example of this attempt. Another is what’s happened to Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the party Liberty GB, which will contest the May 22 European Parliament Elections for Britain (donations to help with the election campaign are welcome).

Burton appeared at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, England, on April 8, charged with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets in which he called prominent British Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist”.

Mujhal, founder and director of the organisation Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), was exposed by The Telegraph newspaper last year for having massaged some facts and figures about “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby. For this and other discrepancies between police official figures of anti-Muslim crimes and the inflated ones of Tell MAMA, the organisation, which had received £375,000 from the UK government, had its public funding discontinued.

The obvious paradox here is that Tell MAMA, clearly in desperate search for “Islamophobic” crimes that could justify its requests for public funds, didn’t find a sufficient number of them of a serious enough nature. So, first it exaggerated them both quantitatively and qualitatively, calling “attacks” simple posts on Facebook and other social media. Then, when this manipulation had become well known, it used the same tactic against the people, like Tim, who called the bluff, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Burton’s trial has been very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Tim Burton was accused of racially-aggravated harassment for tweets concerning Islam. Not only Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims can and do belong to all races, but also the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct and separate ones.

The Crown Prosecution Service, though, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case was trying to conflate the two because it did not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decided to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As its website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing equality, anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

The Macpherson Report, which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, reached the conclusion that the British police force is “institutionally racist” and, with the alleged intent of redressing the balance, established that absolutely anything perceived by a “victim” as a racist incident is de facto a racist incident: simple perception becomes legal reality, whether it’s true or not.

This makes the endeavour to legally treat anti-Islam criticism as racist even more dangerous, as it may render it subject to the ruling of the Macpherson Report.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as various evangelical Christian groups which threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishment.

This is why Liberty GB held a public protest outside the courthouse and considered this trial crucially important.

Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen appeared at the trial and gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.


Photo by Gareth Davies (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Tatchell: "Gay" Is Used to Distract People from Homosexuals' Sexuality



I've written about the hijacking of language by the Left and some of its manifestations.

There are many other aspects of it, like the wounds inflicted on grammar by the use of "they", "them", "theirs" in reference to a singular subject. For example: "Everyone knows what they are doing" or "The user must log in with their password". This is done only because it's politically incorrect to use "he", "him", "his", to cover both men and women, as it allegedly gives men a status of superiority (the same as in saying "man" to mean "the human species").

Politically correct writers - like the Australian-born philosopher Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University - instead use "she" to refer to both men and women, at least remaining grammatically correct. If we want children to be properly educated, PC should not override grammar. Writing logically helps thinking logically.

The practice of employing "they" referring to a singular has spread so much that it is now in use even when it's got nothing to do with PC, like in cases where the sex of the subject is known, so either "he" or "she" would be fine. I suppose people say "they" just to be on the safe side as they don't know the rationale behind its use, or they do it even in a totally automatic, thoughtless manner.

There is a particularly interesting case of PC language: the word "gay". The homosexual movement has hijacked what was once a common English adjective meaning something completely different - in fact in many ways opposite - from the sense that has become predominant today thanks to that movement's highly successful efforts, and now we cannot use this word in the original sense any more. That is tantamount to a small group's theft of the language that belongs to everybody.

In the video above George Galloway interviews Peter Tatchell, the UK's number one homosexual activist, about what terms to describe homosexuals would be accepted by the thought police of his movement. In it Tatchell, among other things, explains the origin of the word "gay" in the modern sense of a man sexually attracted by other men.

According to Tatchell, homosexual men's intention in adopting this term for themselves was to distract people's attention from the sexual nature of their condition. I can understand why they wanted to do so: they knew that being associated with anal sex, which is repugnant to most normal people and is medically unhealthy, as medical authorities keep saying - although this is not much reported in the media -, would not be good for their PR and image.

It is a case of dissimulation, if not outright deception. And it is a rare gem that someone involved in introducing one of the most glaring examples of this kind of politically-motivated changes in our language talks about it frankly and openly.

It is not just one of us saying that the Left intentionally changed the meaning of words for political reasons, but Peter Tatchell admitting it in a video interview with George Galloway. We can document a claim with evidence directly from the horse's mouth.

We should not accept this dissembling any more than we accept taqiyya from Muslims. I never use the word "gay" except in inverted commas (unless I want to describe someone who is merry). To do so would be to give in, to help homosexualists in their disguising attempt.

"Homosexual" is an honest word. It is not offensive - in fact, homosexuals who believe this are implicitly admitting to thinking that there's something wrong with their condition. At the same time, it tells things as they are: it describes people who are sexually attracted to the same sex (from the Greek "homos", meaning "same").

Tim Burton's Trial Pronouncements: Good on Taqiyya and Harassment, Bad on Race

Overall, the acquittal of Tim Burton and the judge's rulings on the case were a victory on two fronts and maybe not so much on a third.

The judge ruled that a few tweets, even intemperate and even relating to a Muslim person, cannot be construed as harassment. He clearly said that the Harassment Act was intended for entirely different situations from this one, like stalking somebody or shouting through his letterbox.

He also, if not explicitly accepted, took into account the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya. This can be a turning point for the counterjihad movement. Muslims are generally believed by people in the West when they talk about Islam; in fact they are considered as the experts on this system of beliefs, as one could naturally assume, so they are often asked questions about Mohammedanism by the media in the expectation that they'll throw light on it and help Westerners to better understand it.

But if the Western public can now gradually come to realise that there is a good, inherent reason, rooted in Islam itself, why Muslims are not reliable and trustworthy sources of knowledge on Islam, the discourse on this pseudo-religion in the West may slowly take a different path.

Taqiyya may now be officially established in the British legal system. Although taqiyya itself may not have been part of the judge's ruling, what sets a precedent is that the doctrine has somehow been given official recognition.

There is a hierarchy of the courts in the UK. The basic rule is that a court must follow the judicial precedents from a higher court, but it is not bound to follow decisions from courts lower in the hierarchy. Roughly, the hierarchy is:

1. European Court of Justice
2. Supreme Court
3. Court of Appeal
4. Divisional Courts
5. All other courts (County, Crown, Magistrates, tribunals)

The website e-lawresources explains:

Where the precedent was set by a court of the same level, the court is generally bound by the previous decision, but this is subject to exceptions. Different considerations apply, depending on the level of court, as to whether the court may depart from a previous decision of a court of the same level.

These are the two victories. Where we didn't win is in the District Judge's acceptance that Muslims, although clearly not representing a race in the strict biological sense, can be considered a race when, as a group, treated in a different manner as other groups.

This evidently did not affect his decision, but it shows that the worrying trend of using the terms "race" and "racism" in any way that fits the goals of the politically correct brigade is still alive and well, and supported by even reasonable and intelligent judges like Mr Ian Strongman.

Three Tweets Are Not Racially Aggravated Harassment, Birmingham Court Rules; Taqiyya Doctrine Accepted

On 8 April at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, District Judge Ian Strongman heard a trial of racially aggravated harassment against Tim Burton, 61, a computing consultant from Birmingham and the Radio Officer of the British party Liberty GB.

The reason for the charge was three tweets he sent over a period of a month from early June to early July 2013 to Tell Mama UK, a helpline organisation for victims of anti-Muslim attacks that also serves to monitor and collect data on them, whose director is prominent Muslim Fiyaz Mughal.

Investigations by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan discovered that, in the wake of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, Tell Mama had inflated numbers and seriousness of “Islamophobic” crimes, many of which were just posts on social media.

Discrepancies were also found between police figures and the association’s statistics, and this led to Tell Mama’ state funding – which by then amounted to £375,000 – being discontinued.

These revelations inspired Mr Burton to write the tweet “I wish to report Fiyaz Mughal for being a mendacious, grievance-mongering little Muslim scumbag & I want my £214,000 back now.” (a reference to taxpayers’ money) and two other tweets of a similar tone, calling Mr Mughal a “taqiyya-artist”. For these three tweets Mr Burton was accused of racially aggravated harassment.

The concept of taqiyya, part of a well-established Islamic doctrine, is the divine permission and even encouragement for Muslims to deceive non-Muslims to further the cause of Islam, particularly when Muslims are a minority.

The trial lasted all day. The Crown Prosecution Service called Mr Mughal as a witness via a video link. He repeatedly expressed that the tweets made him feel intimidated and targeted for his Muslim faith. On cross-examination, it was revealed that he did not know the meaning of the word “mendacious”, one of the insulting remarks that provoked the trial.

Next, the defendant Tim Burton took the witness stand. He said that his tweets, although in retrospect intemperate, were not intended nor expected to generate distress or anguish in someone like Tell Mama’s director, whose job is to search for and read online posts of analogous kind.

He added that the tweets were a political expression of outrage at the abuse of public money and the encroachment of Islam into British society.

Dutch scholar of Islam Professor Hans Jansen gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. He explained that the doctrine of taqiyya is accepted by all Muslim theologians and Quran commentaries, and rejected the prosecution’s and Mr Mughal’s theory that this word refers to a behaviour only found among minority Shia Muslims persecuted by majority Sunni Muslims, or that it is just used by far-right groups to victimise Muslims.

Asked by the defence lawyer if a Muslim could reasonably be offended by being described as practicing taqiyya, the witness replied that he had no reason to, since it is part of the faith he follows.

The District Judge, who had read some of Professor Jansen’s writings before the trial, seemed to find his arguments persuasive.

He found that Mr Burton had a right to free expression and that Mr Mughal had not been caused harassment by the three tweets sent to Tell Mama which were critical of him and his organisation. Mr Burton was acquitted on all charges.

Is Islam a Race? Birmingham Trial Will Tell

On Tuesday 8 April at 10am Tim Burton’s trial at Birmingham Magistrates' Court will settle the question of whether the defendant, by calling Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist” on Twitter, committed racially aggravated harassment, as he is accused of having done by the West Midlands Police.

Mujhal was exposed by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan for exaggerating the numbers and seriousness of “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby, and had his organisation Tell MAMA’s public funding discontinued. Many of these “attacks” were in fact simple posts on Facebook and other social media, similar to the tweets for which Burton is on trial.

Tim is the Radio Officer of Liberty GB, a British newly-formed conservative and patriotic party.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including white. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as the evangelical group Christian Voice who threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishments.

This is why Liberty GB will hold a public protest outside Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 8 April at 9am and considers this trial crucially important.

Our intention is twofold. Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen is scheduled to appear at the trial and give evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We’ve christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.

Here are more details on Taqiyya Trials in Europe

The defendant Tim Burton will be on the courtroom steps at 9:15am and then inside the main building from 9:30am ready to be interviewed.

Are only True Beliefs Effective?

I’m interested in the relationship between truth and effectiveness of a belief (or a theory).

Are true beliefs the only ones to be useful, solve problems, achieve goals?

Is there a correspondence between what is true and what is effective?

Positivism says yes (look at the relationship of correspondence between science and technology, its application).

I also say yes: historically it seems true, humankind is ever more effective and has ever more power as scientific knowledge of reality progresses.

Whenever this is not the case, it is because one acts “as if”. That is, it happens if a false belief makes one behave in the same way as a true one.

A good example is: to suffer for the death of a loved one does not serve any purpose. But if somebody simply says that to him/herself, it may have no effect.

If, on the other hand, one thinks: “I’ll see that person again in Heaven”, s/he behaves as one who says: “Suffering serves no purpose”, even though s/he does that by following a, let’s assume, false belief, which in this case leads to the same behaviour that would be inspired by a true belief.

I've assumed, for the sake of argument, that this belief is false, but in reality it would be more accurate to say that it's not certain.