Blair 'nutter' fear angers bishop

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7112256.stm
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Blair 'nutter' fear angers bishop

Mr Blair said politicians who talk about religion "get into trouble"

A bishop has criticised Tony Blair after he said he avoided talking about his religious views while premier because he feared the "nutter" label.

The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said he was "sorry" the former prime minister felt unable to talk about his faith.

It would have led to more constructive social policy at home and principled policies abroad, the bishop said.

Mr Blair's admission comes in the final episode of BBC One's The Blair Years.

During the interview, Mr Blair said faith was a crucial component for him in having the character to take on the prime minister's job and had been "hugely important" to his premiership.

A Christian vision underlies all that is important about Britain: its laws, institutions and values Bishop of Rochester

But while it was commonplace in the US and elsewhere for politicians to talk about their religious convictions, he added: "you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter".

British voters imagined that leaders who were informed by religion would "commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say 'Right, I've been told the answer and that's it'".

Bishop Nazir-Ali said: "I am sorry that Tony Blair feels he could not talk about his faith in case people thought he was a nutter.

"A Christian vision underlies all that is important about Britain: its laws, institutions and values.

"If Blair had been able to relate this vision to his policies, we would have had more constructive social policy at home and principled policies abroad."

Mr Blair's ex-spokesman Alastair Campbell famously warned reporters: "We don't do God."

He acknowledged to the programme that his former boss "does do God in quite a big way", but that both men feared the public would be wary.

Mr Campbell added that the former PM always asked his aides to find him a church to attend each Sunday, wherever he happened to be.

The Blair Years will be screened on BBC One at 2215 GMT on 25 November. The episode in which Mr Blair discusses his faith will be broadcast on Sunday 2 December.

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Does religion have a place at work? Have you been discriminated against because of your beliefs? Do you think it would affect your opportunities for a promotion?

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We of little faith by Sue Blackmore

reposted from Guardian

Sue Blackmore

Religious belief is inconsistent with reason and corrosive to the human mind - and I don't want to live in a world where it is respected.

June 8, 2007 9:30 AM

"Religious faith is not inconsistent with reason."

I nearly choked on my breakfast when I heard this on the Today programme. These words were spoken by Mr Blair, in his inimitably sincere style. He was addressing an Islamic conference in London, on June 4, and pledging more money to support Islamic studies in British Universities.

When I'd calmed down I went to check, and it really is true. In the full text of his speech, on the No 10 website, he says:

"In the face of so much high profile accorded to religious extremism, to schism, and to confrontation, it is important to show that religious faith is not inconsistent with reason, or progress, or the celebration of diversity."

But religious faith is inconsistent with reason (and much more that we value as well).

I'm not referring to the ordinary kind of faith by which we have faith in another person's honesty, or that taking an aspirin will reduce our headache. I am talking about religious faith, as Tony Blair was too. In this context faith means believing without reason. Indeed, this is precisely how it is defined, for example as "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence" or in Merriam Webster as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof". Does this make faith inconsistent with reason? I would say yes. Reason demands that you look for evidence and believe accordingly - which is exactly what we do when we trust a friend because they've been reliable in the past, or doubt a rumour until we've checked on the facts.

Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that's around. If someone is convinced that it is acceptable to base their beliefs on what is written in an ancient book, or what some teacher tells them they must believe, then they will have no true freedom of thought; they will be trapped by their faith into inconsistency and untruths because they are unable to throw out false ideas when evidence against them comes along.

The whole point of a university education is to learn to think for yourself, to criticise theories, to compare ideas and to find out the truth by research, exploration and experiment. Whether you are studying French, chemistry, or psychology, you are given tools for thinking independently and ways of evaluating other people's claims. In this there is no room for faith, and should be no room for faith.

I want to be clear about some things I am not saying. First I am not saying that everything has to be rational. There is much about human life that has little or nothing to do with rationality; there's love and affection, art and poetry, happiness, beauty and intuition. But none of these things has to be taken on faith. University courses include much that is not rational, not just in arts courses but even in science, where one has hunches or enjoys beautiful ideas, but again there is no room for holding onto religious faith - wherever the ideas come from they must ultimately be thrown out if they are shown to be wrong.

Second, I am not saying that no students should have religious beliefs. This is (and must be, in a free society) a matter for them, in the privacy of their own minds. There will always be some students who believe things on faith and others who don't, but the job of a university course is to make people think and to give them the tools for doing so. Faith is not one of those tools. Indeed, by and large, a university education reduces religious belief, as indeed it should.

I have had countless students on my psychology courses who began as believers in God, or the afterlife, or spirits and souls, and then had to question those beliefs through the process of learning how the mind actually works. I have seen them (and I hope helped them) go through this painful process of throwing off their restrictive childhood religious beliefs and learning to live with the uncertainties and open-mindedness needed for real learning.

Finally, I am not saying there should be no courses on Christianity or Islam or any other religion. There are and should be, for there is much of importance to study: the history of the religions, the beliefs, their cultural background and much more. But universities should be teaching people how to think, question, and understand these things, not to have faith in "truths" proclaimed without reason or evidence.

Tony Blair pronounces the word "faith" with just that touch of special reverence in his voice, as though it were something to respect, something we should admire in others and grant them licence to believe whatever they want on its account. Indeed he proclaimed that the conference was "an opportunity to listen; to hear Islam's true voice; to welcome and appreciate them; and in doing so, to join up with all those who believe in a world where religious faith is respected". How despicable. How creepy. How frightening when we see the dire consequences of faith-based actions all around us.

Of course people of faith want us to respect their beliefs. For they have no other way of defending them than to appeal to respect, to promise rewards for believers, or threaten punishments for unbelievers. So anyone who cares about the truth should resist these meme tricks. Religious faith is something that we should struggle to throw off when we have better ways of learning the truth about the universe we live in; something we should overcome rather than something we should respect.

I, for one, do not want to live in a world where religious faith is respected. I do not want more "faith-based initiatives". I do not want more faith schools, and our great universities should continue to teach people to think for themselves, to respect the truth, and to take nothing on faith.

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Hiding behind God

Tony Blair did more than anyone to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and popular culture.

Caspar Melville

May 12, 2007 3:00 PM |

The next few months will see a deluge of Blair assessments and pundits will argue for years about his legacy. But for humanists and secularists he's been, at best, a mixed blessing.

No one has done more to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and public culture and this has had nothing but a destructive influence on our hard-won secular settlement. Ever since he surfaced - the young lawyer with the good hair and intense eyes - there's been something of the evensong about him. Something earnest and preachy. His sign-off in Sedgefield was like a microcosm of his premiership - thrilling and convincing, marred by the spectre of Iraq, but at the end, carrying the unmistakable whiff of incense, with the suggestion that he had been a blessed leader of a blessed country.

Blair's preacherly tone has emboldened all manner of scriptural bureaucrats and self-appointed faith leaders eager for a public voice - from Iqbal Sacranie to John Sentamu to Cormac Murphy O'Connor - to believe that religion is squarely back on the agenda. Politics, the balancing of competing claims and limited resources, the art of the possible, of compromise and consensus, has been fatally distorted by the reintroduction of holy book-inspired moral certainties.

Blair's bowing to religious thinking and active support for the burgeoning of the faith industry in the political arena is having all kinds of negative consequences. In the March issue of New Humanist, we published Francis Beckett on the way Blair's city academy policy provided a back door into education for religious special interests. The cover story of the current issue reveals how bishops are now arguing for the continuation of their anachronistic and undemocratic presence in the legislature by suggesting that it is the idea of the separation between church and state that is the anachronism, and that, in the words of one Lord Spiritual: "The 21st century has seen an awakening of consciousness in public life of the importance of religion, faith and belief." That acceptance of religion as a benign political force is largely due to the style and disastrous faith agenda of our outgoing premier.

Such newfound confidence in religion as an alternative to politics has become de rigueur internationally too. Blair has found common cause with several leaders of putatively democratic countries who seem happy to accept scriptural explanations, and propose spiritual solutions, for critical social or environmental problems. George Bush's response to the Virgina Tech massacre was to suggest that solace and the resolution of the battle between good folks and baddies lies in prayer rather than, say, a frank discussion of American gun laws.

In Australia, John Howard, another active Christian, has spent years pooh-poohing climate change warnings only to find his country facing the most serious drought in its history. His solution? "Pray for rain."

Back in Britain, we look forward to the end of the Blair era signalling an end to the fallacious idea that the solutions to the intractable problems of the current time - inequality, social disengagement, environmental disaster - are to be found through prayer or divine intervention, rather than in the grubby, compromised human world of real democratic politics and evidence-based argument.

We don't yet know what Gordon Brown might do with the faith agenda, or how long he might have to do it. But we hope he, or whoever in the long term comes after Blair, has noticed that the British people don't like preaching.

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