People usually take this time of the year as an opportunity to assess what they have done for themselves, create some space for regret (which I hope, for our respective sanities, is few and far between) and draw up a list of New Year's resolutions. At some point, there is always that hint of skepticism about the actual implementation of said resolutions. But let's admit it, what are beginnings for if not for that whiff of optimism and fresh starts, even if we are reluctant to concede that most of who we are in the coming year are already resumptions of the previous year, whether promising or despicable?

As I have been wont to do lately, I am clipping and pasting excerpts from an article from The Guardian (dated November 19) which has served, of late, as a reminder sheet. I read constantly, be it fiction or non-fiction, and I try to dog-ear or underline certain passages which exhibit either ingenious use of language or incisive insight into human nature. But for some reason, this unassuming article about a proposed religious hatred bill in Britain resonates differently to me.

Since the object of this post is not to comment on either the merits of said bill or the opinions of the writer Philip Pullman (as well as commentators Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie), I will leave it to the reader to look up said article on the paper's website. I may be taking the following excerpts totally out of context (for it relates to the question of curbing religious extremism which the writer anchors on the question of identity), but I strongly believe in the applicability of these points for all of us who struggle with the simple question (yet yielding complex answers) of "Who am I?" However, "Who am I?" is interwoven with the more crucial question of "What am I supposed to do?":

1. What we are is not in our control, but what we do is.

2. On the other hand, and simultaneously, what we do depends on what we are (on what we have to do it with), and what we are can be modified by what we do.

3. What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.

4. With respect to the past: it's important to some of us to know that our ancestors came from this or that part of the world, to know a little of the history of our family, to feel a connection with a landscape, or a language, or a climate, or an artistic form of expression, or a religion that our ancestors knew as theirs.

5. With respect to the present: it's important for each of us to feel that we belong somewhere or with some group that is like ourselves in some way. We need to be free to live in a place and among people where we feel at home, and not in exile, or under threat.

6. Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions, not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.

7. Belief or faith is partly the result of temperament. I may be temperamentally inclined to scepticism, you to belief in supernatural forces. As far as the temperamental component of our beliefs is concerned, I am not to be praised or blamed for my scepticism, nor you for your faith.

8. It's when we act on a belief that praise or blame comes in. That is where the temperamental component of religion ends and the moral component begins.