Apathy Sketchpad

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.

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.