andrewt.net

blog

Science Near Islam

I’m watching “Science And Islam” on BBC Four. I’ve already rejected the premise out of hand, but I’m watching it anyway. I’ll buy that Muslims have made and will continue to make important discoveries, but it’ll take a lot to convince me that Islam itself has anything to do with it. (This is not helped by the fact that after about five minutes the show referenced a book called “The Hindu Art Of Reckoning” as a major breakthrough in mathematics.) Favourite quote so far: “I think one must bear in mind that this [the 8th century AD] is an era in which people actually believed in God.” — Dr Amira Bennison, Cambridge University. How good is that?

Mostly it is about the Islamic world and the culture and people thereof rather than Islam itself (the Islamic people seem uniquely incapable of distinguishing these concepts), but there are a couple of encouraging comments from Mohammed in holy texts that can’t have hurt (although the program doesn’t address other parts of scripture that may have the opposite effect) and an interesting idea about the Q’uran helping out. The idea is that Arabic was rolled out as a universal language to help people understand the book in its original form, and Arabic was modified to make it clearer so that people didn’t misinterpret it. That doubtless helped science, albeit by accident, by enabling easy, unambiguous communication. (It’s interesting that Christianity didn’t feel the need to make their message unambiguous — indeed, until recently they deliberately obfuscated it by translating it into dead languages. I think they only stopped because it was too much like hard work.)

Right now the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, is talking to a so-called “wise woman” who has a wide variety of herbal and similar remedies. I assume he’s just being polite, but It appears not to have occured to him that they might not work. To my eyes, that proves nothing at all to do with science. That could just as easily be superstition. It becomes science when you test it. It’s a blurry line when you’re talking about the early proto-science of the eighth century, but the fact that she’s still selling this stuff in the twenty-first doesn’t seem to have put him off his “Science And Islam Walking Hand In Hand” thesis. And now he is reading from a book which says epilepsy is caused by evil spirits. “Hardly scientific,” he says, “but Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy. It is, after all, a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans”. No, it’s just a religion. Like all religions, it contains loads of different ideas, many of which are perfectly horrid, and adherants can choose to focus on any of them that they fancy.

I know Islam has had some bad press lately, but you won’t fix that by trying to give it the credit for any and all achievements made by its followers or their subjects. Marcus du Sautoy managed to cover much of the same ground on the same channel without as far as I recall mentioning Islam. (I imagine he probably mentioned it in passing.) That should be a clue as to how important it was. Another interesting quote from Dr Bennison just now: “it was not the case [in ninth century debates] that people were expected to adhere to a particular line or adopt a particular religion. They were allowed to express their own sentiments and their own views very freely. The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic and in good logical reasoning”. Compare and contrast that to the reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed, an arguably quite important side of Islam that the program utterly fails to mention. Where did “butcher those who insult Islam” come from? Why should I credit Islam with the former and not blame it for the latter?

This sort of thing bothers me because it kind of spoils an otherwise interesting documentary, and because if we confuse a religion with its followers then any meaningful debate is impossible. You can’t argue against an idea if that argument is seen as an attack on the people who hold that idea (or other similar ones, since the term “Islam” can cover a multitude of sins). I think that if you call a show “Science And Islam” then it should be about the relationship between science and Islam, not about the growth of science in the Islamic world (that show should clearly be called “Science of Arabia”), and as part of that I expect you to mention that the influence of Islam on science has at times been to hinder it. Granted I’ve only seen one episode, but even if that is redressed in future episodes, I shouldn’t have to watch a whole series to get balance.

The program now ends with the observation that “the first great achievment of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove that science isn’t Islamic… Science… transcends political borders and religious affiliations”. Which is true only in the rather weak sense that science remains true no matter which parts of it you elect to ignore: science is not Islamic, and crucially, Islam is not scientific.

Moral, But No Cigar

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that … In order to be of assistance to persons carrying out religious duties within the community, the Council [of the London Borough of Barnet] are, on an experimental basis, introducing a Community Parking Permit that will enable the permit holder to park in any permitted parking place within the Borough’s Controlled Parking Zones.

From the BBC:

Religious leaders on official business in part of north London will be able to park for free using special permits.

…

Applications from worshippers on faith business will also be considered.

Mike Freer, leader of the council, said: “The importance of religion to many Barnet residents cannot be underestimated and the council has acknowledged this with a policy that will assist spiritual leaders when engaging with people in times of illness or crisis.”

And from the Barnet Times:

A new permit introduced by Barnet Council will allow people carrying out religious duties to use residents’ parking bays, to avoid the struggle to find a parking space. … Councillor Mike Freer [said] “This new permit shows our commitment to improving the quality of life for local residents and increasing wider participation for all in religious, cultural and community life.”

Religions currently recognised by the council include Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Sikhism, Unitarianism and Zoroastrianism. Applications from any other religions will be considered “on their own merit” in consultation with the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum, according to the council.

The following is their attempt at humour:

In the 2001 census 390,000 people across England and Wales declared that their religion was “Jedi”, a belief inspired by the conflict between good and evil in the Star Wars series of films. Census officials bowed to public pressure to include Jedi on the list of chosen religions, but it remains to be seen if the parking badge will be awarded to people carrying out Jedi duties.

This definitely gets my new ‘religion taking the credit’ tag: if these people are doing vital work then their entitlement to permits to help them do so should depend on that, not on their faith. That would allow Humanist, atheist and secular people doing similar work to benefit, and help filter out people abusing the system for indoctrination purposes.

A few weeks before that, a report was published by the Church of England and something improbably named “the Von Hugel Institute” called Moral But No Compass. I would link to the report, but despite being both designed and likely to influence government policy, it isn’t freely available to the public. It costs £9.95. They’re charging for propaganda! (Only religious people ever do that. Well, them and McDonald’s.)

This report, according to the BBC, whose writings I am allowed to read,

The report … suggests the Church is discriminated against in competition with private companies who provide welfare, which Bishop Lowe suggested was partly the result of a continuing process of secularisation under the Labour government.

Well, surely secularisation is a good thing? I realise the Church of England are the last people who are likely to agree with that idea, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to defend their alternative. That means they have to defend it more — they clearly have a vested interest. (It’s hard to imagine what Labour government he’s been watching that he thinks are “secularising” anything at all.)

It also calls for a level playing field for faith-based organisations including churches, and for a “Minister for Religion” to be appointed.

What the hell would he do? “Hello, I’m the Minister for Religion. Are you doing religion? Yes? Splendid. How about you? Are you doing religion? No? Well, that’s fine too.” There’s no Minister for Videogames, is there? There’s not even a Minister for Sex, and that’s a potentially dangerous activity vital for the future of the country that far more voters practice that religion. I honestly cannot think of even one thing that a Minister for Religion would do. (As such, I’d love that job.) It’s also worth noting that we already have Alun Michael MP running the government’s new “Faiths Taskforce”, and Stephen Timms MP, Labour’s Vice Chair with special responsibility for Faith Groups. And the Lords Spiritual. Is that not enough?

Nor do I understand what the accusation that the government is “religiously illiterate” might mean. I might assume it means that the government doesn’t understand that religion is dangerous, divisive and discriminatory and should abandon its various faith-based initiatives, but it seems more likely that a report commissioned by the Church is using it to mean that the government doesn’t take an active interest in their particular brand of dogmatic pastimes. But since they won’t let me read the report without paying, I don’t know.

The Bishop of Hulme Stephen Lowe, spokesman on urban affairs, told BBC Radio Four’s Sunday Programme that the Church was far and away the biggest voluntary organisation in the country, and had been for centuries.

Good for you.

The bishop said the Church was providing help and support to groups as diverse as elderly, homeless and unemployed people, drug addicts and asylum seekers. It also provides hundreds of chaplains to hospitals, prisons and the armed services, and thousands of schools, he said.

Well aren’t you nice?

However, the report, published on Monday and entitled “Moral, but no Compass”, said the government showed a “significant lack of understanding of, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere”.

…

He said if the government wanted to benefit from the huge amount of work being done by the Church, it would have to change the way it dealt with it.

No. No, you’re not nice. What you’re implying, essentially, is that if the government doesn’t start handing you huge piles of public money then you’re going to stop providing help and support to elderly, homeless and unemployed people, drug addicts and asylum seekers. Is that a threat? It looks like a threat.

And it worked:

The event also marked the launch of a Labour consultation with faith groups, entitled Believing for a Better Britain, run by the new Faiths’ Taskforce, chaired by Alun Michael MP. It will be led by Malcolm Duncan, leader of the Faithworks Movement. The consultation aims to hear first-hand the concerns of faith communities and those motivated by their beliefs, in order to reflect those concerns in the next manifesto. Duncan’s lead role will ensure that the reporting remains independent.

That makes perfect sense. You don’t want your consultation into religion (about which disconcertingly little information is available and none from official sources as far as I can tell) to be at all biased, so you should get an independent arbiter in, such as the former Head of Church and Mission for the Evangelical Alliance, priest, and leader of an organisation which ‘exists to empower and inspire individual Christians and every local church to develop their role at the hub of their community’. He should be just nicely detached. He says:

People of faith are making a vital contribution to the United Kingdom. It is impossible to talk about community cohesion, joined up service delivery or strong and sustainable partnerships without understanding this.

and that’s true, but I bet almost all of those people also own cars, and I think it’s pretty clear the government doesn’t consider car-ownership something that should be rewarded.

Ultimately, I’m not against faith groups being involved in anything they might want to play at, but I don’t like the focus being on the faith. Faith is irrelevant at best. Focussing on faith excludes secular and Humanist groups, and it distracts from the main issue, which should surely be the work that’s being done. Charities and voluntary organisations should be judged on their work, not on their ‘ethos’. That way, a faith group that doesn’t discriminate would be at no disadvantage, and nor would a secular group who don’t discriminate.

I maintain that the government should be totally secular: it shouldn’t care at all about the religion of its people or organisations. If you want to run a religious charity, you go right ahead, but you’re still bound by all UK law regardless of what the Bible might say about gay people. “The advancement of religion” shouldn’t be a valid activity for a registered charity (PDF, page 5, although this whole document is ridiculous) any more than the advancement of drinking Coca-cola is, because the government shouldn’t care what religion, if any, you have. If ‘faith leaders’ want to talk to MPs, that’s fine, but they can damn well talk to their own MPs like everybody else. Religion shouldn’t exempt anyone from any law, and nor should it grant you any extra protections — don’t expect the law to act just because something someone says offends your faithful sensibilities. Churches wouldn’t get tax breaks. Obviously any bishops who wanted to sit in Parliament would just have to win an election like everyone else — or maybe make a large cash donation to the Labour Party. (Also I would not allow any private groups to run schools. All schools would be entirely secular and run by the state, and homeschooling would be legal only for those parents who demonstrated they wanted their children to learn a balanced curriculum and have access to support outside the home — which they would be required to demonstrate by not asking to homeschool them.) Ideally, religious discrimination rules would be axed: the government wouldn’t recognise religion at all, but it would recognise that you believe things — and that is a perfectly good basis on which to make employment decisions. Pragmatically, they’d probably be necessary as long as religion was widespread, although I think a general “you must only consider relevant things when making employment decisions” might be a suitable compromise. There would be no law against inciting religious hatred, but there would be a law against preaching any form of bigotry: atheists are evil; gay people are evil; Muslims are evil; whatever. The same law would thereby protect and condemn religious groups as and when they deserve either. And the government wouldn’t deal with organisations like Faithworks, because they exist to promote something that the government wouldn’t recognise.

That’s how I’d run a country. I feel sure it’d save a lot of bother.

Religious Crackpot Of the Month: June 2008

John Sentamu is Archbishop of York. He’s referred to as Dr Sentamu in the Times, but his doctorate is in theology so I choose to disregard it. I realise that many theology degrees are about the study of religion as a phenomenon rather than a body of theories to be taken seriously, but he demonstrated on Wednesday that he’s crap at that, when he gave a speech on “The Role of Religion in Politics Today” which was wrong on most important issues.

Organised religion is always ambiguous. It can be both an instrument for good or for great evil.

When I consider the history of organised religions the world over and look at the present state of our world and the countless acts of violence committed in the name of God, is it any wonder that the third commandment given to Moses on Mount Sinai was not to misuse the name of the Lord?

Well maybe, although I can’t help feel God should have been a bit more specific. It must have occurred to him that the people misusing his name might think they were using it properly.

Such acknowledgements of wickedness give succour to those dogmatic atheists or illiberal secularists for whom any Utopian vision requires the eradication of all religion.

Succour is the wrong word here. Succour really means relief, whereas really what this provides is justification. Not sure what an illiberal secularist is. Sure, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re not common bedmates. And then he said…

Yet we only have to look to the Third Reich, the former Soviet Union and the present regimes of North Korea and Burma to consider that a society without religion rapidly loses faith in humanity.

This is just classic Atheists Are Immoral bullshit, isn’t it? And given that Hitler was a Christian it’s hard to see his point about the Third Reich.

In our new century organised religion has become not so much the enemy to be eradicated but the tool to be abused.

Whether it be the so called Salafi-Jihadism of Al Qaeda claiming the lives of innocent people perversely in the name of Allah or those narrowly focussed political parties attempting to usurp religious values and heritage, the purveyors of hatred and violence cover their wickedness with a religious cloak, or to use the words of Rabbi Lionel Blue, “the terrorists covering their own inner violence under a fig leaf of faith”.

Such abusers of religion lay easy claim to centuries of heritage with their lip service whilst their actions, and in some cases perverse ideologies, twist out of shape the garment of faith woven over centuries by faithful scholars and adherents.

I can’t fathom what the hell kind of mind comes up with this. What the hell is “the garment of faith woven over centuries by faithful scholars and adherents”? Either you think that a religion is true, in which case it was woven by God, or you don’t, in which case both sides are wrong. The sheer arrogance exhibited when he says “those people are wrong, you should listen to me if you want to know what God thinks” is astonishing. Why are they wrong? How do we know God isn’t on the terrorists’ side? They have as legitimate a claim to know God’s will as anyone else, surely?

Of course there are some for whom this business of our worship of God and the loving and serving our neighbour means that we should have no place in the political arena.

No, there aren’t. We don’t think the religious should be excluded from politics; we think that religion should be excluded from politics. If you want to sit in Parliament that’s fine; if you want to sit there and enact laws based on what you imagine an all-powerful being would like (but apparently chooses not to enforce) then there’s clearly something wrong there. Secularism is a lot easier to defend when you realise that God doesn’t exist and ‘his’ teachings were invented by superstitious people long before the advents of science and democracy, but it’s pretty easy to defend anyway, as long as you’re talking to someone passably rational.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is when I receive a letter from a correspondent–

From whom else does one receive letters?

–supporting my views I am congratulated for my apparent bravery in speaking out, whilst those who disagree with my stance castigate me in the most telling terms for getting involved in politics ’“ didn’t I know that religion and politics should not mix?

The word Politics derives from the Greek for Polis ’“ the City, for the place where life was lived and public business was done. How can anyone think that God is unconcerned or unconnected with any parts of our lives, public or private, or that we can build arenas which become no go areas for God?

How is that remotely relevant? If God existed then he would of course be able to go anywhere he liked (indeed, he’d already be there) and do what he wanted. He could rule the world if he chose to. But it would appear that he has chosen not to. His only contribution to the world is to write one of many indistinguishable but contradictory books of prophecy and instruction, and nobody can agree on which one it was, much less how it should be read or what it all means. We have no idea what the hell God thinks about anything, if he exists at all. And I for one don’t see what gives him any more right to a say than me. Frankly I think I should have more say than he does: he’s a mass-murdering misogynistic megalomaniac who thinks that just because he says he made the universe (a big claim for a guy with no proof who was conveniently the only witness) that means he gets to decide what’s Right and what’s Wrong. He shouldn’t get a vote: he should be sectioned.

Religion concerns the spirit in humanity, whereby we are able to recognize what is truth and what is justice;

This is true. You can recognise justice because it’s unconscionably vindictive and arbitrary.

whereas law is only the application, often imperfectly, of truth and justice in our everyday affairs.

…

Speaking in a Christian context, Desmond Tutu put it this way: “I don’t know what Bible people are reading when they say religion and politics do not mix”.

Isn’t that quite a lot like arguing “I don’t know which episode of Doctor Who people are watching when they say that the Daleks aren’t real”? Of course the Bible is going to be largely unsecular: it’s the fucking Bible. That’s what it’s for. If it was secular, it’d be an encyclopædia.

Not only do religion and politics mix, they must mix because religion enables politics to rediscover our duties and obligations to one another, to focus on service and community and to maintain a sense of liberty as a bulwark against an over-reaching state.

No, it doesn’t. It’s quite simple to do that without religion and religion is an active hinderance in many cases. Look at Islamic countries like Sudan or Saudi Arabia. You want to tell me that religion helps politics “maintain a sense of liberty” then you’d damn well better address those — especially after your little list of evil irreligious regimes, which notably failed to include modern secular democracies such as France, who are not what you’d call known for their genocidal nature. (Feel free to make a joke about their army surrendering to the oppressed minority.) And as for “over-reaching state” — until this year it was illegal to blaspheme! There were actual laws about which expletives I was allowed to use — me, an atheist. Granted the law was only really there as long as nobody tried to use it, but nevertheless…

I would like to consider each of these briefly in turn.

…

Is it any wonder that organisations in Britain such as the Hospice Movement, Amnesty International, Shelter, the Samaritans and countless other organisations and movements have been founded and motivated by those with a religious faith who recognise the responsibility and duty towards the other?

Hang on, Amnesty International? This would be the same Amnesty International who are “independent of any … religion” and who the Pope asked Catholics to boycott because he was worried they weren’t upholding his arbitrary stance on abortion? Nice example. Do you think these lists through at all?

More recently the Drop the Debt campaign, and Jubilee campaigns, taking the Biblical idea of Jubilee to reinterpret it as a measure of freeing the most indebted in our world from crippling debt, have demonstrated that such care and concern is not limited to the religious alone but are founded on religious ideas which are adopted by a wider society.

No, they’re not. Care and concern are part of being human. They might even by part of being some animals. They’re not inherently religious ideas. As an atheist, I find the implications of the idea that they are somewhat offensive. He goes on…

The trumpet which was once the herald of this nation’s greatness was the imperative of moral responsibility, of doing the right thing, where what was right was informed by a faith based understanding.

Now we are told, if we push for the end of religion in the public arena, in our politics and the public square, we will free ourselves from the shackles of an enslaving and moribund moral responsibility. However, if this is the direction which will shape our politics moral responsibility will be displaced not by reason, science or ethics but by sheer consumerism.

Notice again that he’s conflating the concepts of religion and moral responsibility, as if faith has some claim to morality. He even makes a distinction here between morality and ethics. Not really sure what the difference is but I think ‘morality’ is What God Says and ‘ethics’ involves committees.

He explained that ‘if each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society.”

This is a principle we need to hear afresh–

Yes, if only there was some kind of purely secular document that laid out that all men are created equal.

–not least in our treatment of the elderly, those refused asylum, young people in the care system, and the severely disabled, who, in my book, are clearly our teachers.

This explains a lot. (Sorry.)

Human rights without the safeguarding of a God-reference tends to set up rights which trump others’ rights when the mood music changes.

I wonder if he realises that the alternative to that is a system whereby only one person is alive at a time.

This religious vision needs once more to become a political vision for all to create a more just society and usher in God’s rule of justice upon earth.

Let us all do it, and let us do it now.

I always start to get a bit worried when people talk about “[ushering] in God’s rule of justice upon earth”. Sounds a bit culty to me. Religion is so commonplace that the absurdity of people discussing morality in terms of the opinions of an invisible grandad tends to pass me by, but once they start talking as if he’s actually coming back to rule the actual world the absurdity is just too in-your-face for anyone to miss.

Speaking of which, here’s an extract from the Q and A on his website:

Have you been to heaven before?

No, but I am trying to serve a God who I know is loved and worshipped in heaven. In heaven there’s no tears, no more crying, no more pain, there will be no sea either. The sea has always stood for violence. There will be no buildings because God Almighty will be giving it light and sun so that will be my destination. I also hope you’ll join me when I get there!

What kind of a ridiculous question is that? And more to the point, there will be no sea in heaven because the sea means violence? What the hell? Revelation 21:1 is presumably his source for this information, although the following verse does seem to imply buildings, or else the “holy city” will be a major let-down. There will be no sea in heaven, and no buildings. And no cuttlefish, and no two of spades. And none of those little figure-of-eight power adapters. And no brie. What kind of bizarre, arbitrary paradise is this? I like buildings! I like the sea!

Tony Blair Fails to Justify Faith Foundation

Tony Blair wants to combat malaria. How?

If you got churches and mosques and those of the Jewish faith working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria, what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show faith in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between faiths, and it would show what faith can do for progress.

No, that would be show faith near action, the importance of cooperation between people and what mosquito nets can do for progress. The faith isn’t involved at any stage.

This guy was running the country this time a year ago — and this is the level he reasons on?

Bloody hell.

Religious Crackpot Of The Month, April 2008

This month, in what can only be described as a surprising turn of events, the Religious Crackpot Thereof award goes to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is now, in his dotage, so intellectually vacuous that he wants to “awaken the world’s conscience” by encouraging us all to believe in god ’” but doesn’t even care which one. What the hell sense does that make? He says in his ridiculous speech

Let me be clear. I am not saying that it is extreme to believe your religious faith is the only true faith. Most people of faith do that.

and yet still thinks that belief, even in one of the other and presumably therefore false religions, is “necessary and vital”. (He makes one nod to atheism in the speech, before going straight back onto the topic of Faith Will Save The World as if atheists are like coach parties at gigs and just really want to be name-checked. As if when he utters the phrase “and those of none” all the atheists in the crowd will holler and unconditionally love him for the next year.) I’m sorry, but that’s moronic. I respect religious people as people. I don’t respect their religion. You know, like I respect someone who has the flu but not because they have the flu. It’s a pretty sound philosophy, I reckon. You can’t say that unquestioning faith in something that isn’t true is a good thing. That’s just lunatic.

We’ve all seen the clip of Alistair Campbell saying decisively “we don’t do God”, and possibly we even believed him. But since leaving office less than a year ago, Blair’s gone fucking mental.

First (and please forgive me if I get these in the wrong order), he told everyone how

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

Then, he joined a cult. Now, there are some who would argue that the Catholic church is not, strictly speaking, a cult, but those people are wrong. I can think of no better definition* of “cult” than “a religion with a living leader” — and obviously I mean a leader who atheists agree is alive — and under that definition Catholicism qualifies (although only just on the “living” bit). In any case, the only significant difference between Anglicism and Catholicism is that the latter is cultier. Personally, I don’t really understand how it is possible for something which “is the focal point of belief in your life” to simultaneously be something you can change because your wife does it a bit differently. But then, I don’t understand how it’s possible to seriously think that there’s an invisible wizard watching you from space and expect me to trust you with my things, so perhaps I just don’t ‘get’ religion.

After that, he announced that he was to teach a course on “faith and globalisation” (which seems a lot like teaching a course on “petrol and fire safety”) at Yale’s schools of Management and Divinity. The BBC rather amusingy reported this as follows:

Details of the course are being discussed with Yale’s School of Management and Divinity.

That has to be a pretty strange school, although “using the promise of large, unverifiable rewards a long way into the future and the threat of ridiculously overblown punishment to control the lower classes” would seem to be a theme. And now, perhaps strangest of all, his latest attempt to ensure that he’s remembered for something other than illegal war is

…The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which is designed to forge closer ties’”

You don’t forge ties. You tie ties. That’s why they’re called ‘ties’.

’”forge closer ties between young people of all major religions, as well as promoting the importance of faith in general.

Oh. His. God.

How does he not get it? He says “that religions of all kinds should be rescued from extremism”, but also wants to “[promote] the importance of faith in general“! (Quotes from the Independent, not from Blair; emphasis mine; quotation etiquette overwhelming.) It’s exactly “promoting the importance of faith in general” that causes all the problems! If we treated faith as unimportant then we’d still get all the good stuff, but nobody would be willing to explode themselves for it. Nobody would be alienated for rejecting it. Nobody would attempt to legislate based on it…

And therein lies the major problem with Blair’s supposedly new-found religiosity: did it ever affect policy? And the answer to that question is “yes”.

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

It’s pretty easy to make the case that he lied to us. Well, to you. I was fourteen when he was elected and didn’t vote for him the second or third time anyway, so I pretty well get off the hook on this one. But he said (or at least, endorsed) “we don’t do God”, and then he said

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

That could mean anything, from “my faith shaped my morals, and thereby affected my politics only indirectly, and I was honest about my morals” through “I took a lot from my religion and want to promote it, hence the faith school drive” to “I deferred important policy decisions to scripture, superstition and unqualified clergymen”. We really have no way of knowing a politician’s motives, so we’re left to judge them by their actions. And his actions included pushing unpopular, unmanageable, divisive and discriminatory faith-based schooling designed to brainwash children in a way more inescapable than their parents can manage, and joining an illegal war that George W Bush said God had told him to do. The latter I think was a largely secular (but still clearly wrong) decision. The former clearly wasn’t: no atheist would ever promote something like that, and whichever way you slice it it’s state endorsement of religion, even if no particular religion is specified. We don’t have an officially secular state here, which of course we should, but when you’ve promised that you “don’t do God” I think you still have an obligation to be as secular as possible.

Okay, so while in power he took the official “We Don’t Do God” line, but since than we also have the following quotes:

For me having faith was an important part of being able to do [my job as Prime Minister].

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

It’s difficult to talk about religious faith in our political system. If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ’˜Yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. They sort of [think] you maybe go off and sit in the corner and commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say, ’˜Right, I’ve been told the answer and that’s it’.

The reason that Alastair, my press secretary, has said ’˜We don’t do God’ was not because he is opposed to religious faith, but because you always get into trouble talking about it.

You can’t have a religious faith and it be an insignificant aspect because it’s profound about you and about you as a human being … If I am honest about it, yes, of course, it was hugely important.

All of this paints, to me at least, a picture of a very devoutly religious man who pretended to be only the normal, wishy-washy agnostic-Anglican kind of religious man that people trust, so that they would elect him their leader. I’m sorry, but that to me is at best an enormous failure to disclose information. As a scientist, I know how this works. If you think there’s a potential conflict of interests, you first ignore it and then you declare it. You ignore it while you make the decisions it might affect, and then you declare it when you announce the results so that other people can judge how successfully you ignored it. In politics, other people have to judge you before you make the decisions it could affect, so his “ignore then declare” policy feels more like deceit.

He admits faith affected his politics. He admits that he kept very quiet about that. And he admits that that made him more electable. If President Bartlett was accused of electoral fraud, then I can’t imagine why Blair shouldn’t be. You should declare everything that could affect the decisions you will make in office before an election, otherwise you’re trying to gain power by deception. By that stage, you’re effectively a Bond villain.

Clearly he’s trying to help, but he’s doing it in a really fucking stupid way, and personally, this quote riles me:

The foundation will bring together Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists to promote faith as a relevant and positive force for good.

So, because I happen to subscribe to the view that believing in things that don’t exist is perhaps a tad childish, I don’t get to ’” indeed can’t ’” help eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, provide universal primary education or combat HIV and AIDS? Piss the fuck off, you proselytising, self-righteous, smug, moralistic, deluded cock.

Hmm. I wonder if he checks his referrer list.

*This is a bigger problem than you might think: Wikipedia says

Some anthropologists and sociologists studying cults have argued that no one has yet been able to define ‘cult’ in a way that enables the term to identify only groups that have been identified as problematic. However, without the “problematic” concern, scientific criteria of characteristics attributed to cults do exist. A little-known example is the Alexander and Rollins, 1984, scientific study concluding that the socially well-received group Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult by using the model of Lifton’s thought reform techniques and applying those to AA group’s indoctrination methodology. Even though the elements exist, several researchers pointed out the benefit of the organization. Vaillant, 2005, concluded that AA is beneficial.

I like my definition. It’s concise, and I think that religions with no leaders are just sort of things-that-happened, whereas ones with a living leader feel a lot more like exploitation of people’s natural tendencies towards faith, and that to me is the essence of what makes a cult.