Apathy Sketchpad

If you got Italians and Germans and Greeks working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria, what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show Europe in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between countries, and it would show what Europe can do for progress.

If you got teachers and lawyers and those who empty the bins working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria, what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show workers in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between professions, and it would show what work can do for progress.

If you got Tories and Lib Dems and those who vote Labour working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria, what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show politics in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between parties, and it would show what politics can do for progress.

Need I go on?

You’d think he’d know the word “synagogues” too, wouldn’t you?

Or “Jews”.

It’s not that difficult to understand what Blair is getting at. True, you have to be able to red between lines, and this might be difficult for some.

Most “charities” are either secular national/international or of one religion or denomination. So if different, even opposing religions DID manage to work together on big issues, putting self interest aside, it would send a message or co-operation and not confrontation. It’s all about the perception of good. At the moment one religion is seen as “political” rather than religious, rightly or wrongly. In charity, politics takes a back seat. This is a challenge to all, but mainly to one religion, imho.

When people don’t rise to alter relationships and understanding by themselves, someone must show the way. At least Blair is trying. Counsels of despair can be left to others.

I agree — if religions cooperated rather than competing then a great deal of the problems associated with them would vanish overnight. But if that was his point then he should have said:

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 cooperation in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between faiths, and it would show what cooperation can do for progress.

As it is, it sounds like he’s saying that faith itself is what will change the world, and that’s not productive. I’ve said before that I think the main problem with Blair’s position is that impressing on people the “importance” of faith is exactly what causes the problems associated with religion, and if he wants to solve them then he has to stop doing that. I think your point is a good one, but I can’t read it into anything Blair has said.

Aside from anything else, this is a guy who describes his faith as “the only true faith” but thinks that other — presumably therefore false — faith is nonetheless “important and necessary”. The whole mindset just baffles me. How can unquestioning belief in things that aren’t true be “important”? And if it is, where does that leave us atheists? Are we allowed to fight malaria?

I think it’s playing semantics to dwell on whether co-operation or faith would be to thank for good if and when religions work together. It would surely be both.

You’ll have noticed from my site that for me Blair was the answer, not the problem. I think he was a great prime minister. But I don’t agree with him on everything. My problems with Mr Blair’s approach in his Faith Foundation are similar to yours. Probably like yourself, I don’t accept that you need religion to lead a full life, as he seemed to suggest.

Nor do I think that the ‘best’ people, or most giving, courageous or loving are necessarily religious.

Not that he said that, though, any more than he said that his religion was the “only true faith”. He might be signed up to that kind of phraseology, but catholicism today is pretty pick’n'mix, otherwise they’d be breeding like the proverbial. And they are not. Others are.

Whether secularists, agnostics or atheists agree or not on the importance of bringing religions together Blair does have a point. He fears we are on the edge of a culture/religious/political clash. And perhaps the way of tackling it is through de-politicising religions and finding common values. He has always been keen on espousing western values – yours and mine – whether we are religious or not. So perhaps his next challenge is to bring secularists on board.

If all religions combined to provide mosquito nets, it might not mean that faith has shown the way, but it’d be a start. It would show that faith does not need to stand in the way.

And let’s be honest, those of us who do not accept the existence of a deity are never going to try to bring religions together. Hoping for religion to die on the vine is more the approach here. But, perhaps Blair has his hand on the pulse more than some of us care to admit. The world is full of religious people, and bringing them together has got to be better than pulling them apart.

I still say – good luck to him.

This is true.

I’m just not sure I accept that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is good enough. Aside from anything else, the man’s far more popular in America than he is here, and he’s got a huge audience, and there’s a problem in America where atheists are actively discriminated against — and his message is “faith is important”. That’s not responsible. That’s going to make things worse.

And all he has to do is, instead of saying “faith can change the world” is say “the faithful can change the world”. How hard would that be? And he does this every time he’s interviewed. Hard to imagine he doesn’t believe it.

I’ve still not had chance to have a proper look at your site, but I’ve sent it to my Google Reader account and so I will get to it.

I just don’t see what faith has to do with it. The international community should be working together to eliminate malaria because it’s the right thing to do. And the right thing to do is to cooperate with anyone who shares that aim, including athiests, humanists, agnostics and so on.

Another thing worth addressing here, is this assumption that chucking loads of mosquito nets at the problem is an effective way of dealing with malaria… ( http://layscience.net/?q=node/125 )

Also, notice the hidden logic in Blair’s statement: “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.” The statement implies that there is currently an obstacle to this inter-faith love-in happening, which in turn means that Blair is stating by logical extension that faith is in fact a barrier to progress on fighting malaria…

Yes, I have to agree with much of what your respondents are saying here. And I repeat I don’t agree with everything that Tony Blair says!

I almost wonder if it is a counsel of despair on Blair’s part – this business about bringing faiths together – almost a last chance for us to see the colour of the “other”. The fact that islam is a highly politicised religion should not escape any of us, just because many of us think that Iraq was about oil or a neo-cons New World Vision.

In fact it DOES escape many of us. Such organisations as Hizb-ut Tahrir with its aim of a worldwide caliphate gained through the democratic system, (which it would then abolish), was formed the year before Blair was born.

In my humble opinion, it is now up to those who are Muslims – the huge majority of democratic and law-abiding muslims, I mean, to challenge their own good books and take control of the issues of barbaric punishments, intolerance and anti-democratic forces contained within it.

Until we in the west are prepared to call a spade a spade and face up to the fact that neither Bush nor Blair invented jihad/caliphate islamist extremism, we are going to get side-tracked by our own tolerance and over-inflated, naive attachment to the same “civil rights” for all. Our legal system was built around the legal rights of democracy, tolerance and fairness. I do not accept that those who abuse the human rights of others through terrorism should get away with it because THEIR human rights take precedence. Sadly we have developed a system which does not know how to deal with those who pick and mix the parts that suit them. And now we are hamstrung by it. Perhaps that is why Blair is trying to force change through religion – because politics has divided us so, and is not actually working in the hearts and minds battle.

Andrew – you said, “I’m just not sure I accept that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is good enough.”

I think we often do the right thing for the wrong reason. I DO think we need to use a bit of realpolitiks here.

Also, “the faithful can change the world” – faithful to what? He’s tried asking people to be faithful to our country, or wetern civilised values, or tolerance or democracy. What else is there?

I repeat – is this a counsel of despair from this normally optimistic man?

I feel an article coming on …

It seems to me that if people said “the Koran teaches that women should be inferior to men, but then it’s just a book so I’m not going to listen” then the problem would go away. They don’t do that because they have faith that the book was written by an infallible god — and therefore its teachings aren’t to be messed with. And they know there’s no proof but they won’t question it because they’re convinced that belief in unsupportable nonsense is somehow a virtue. That is what faith is. That’s what Blair is saying is important. What he is saying will change the world.

If you want people “to challenge their own good books and take control of the issues of barbaric punishments, intolerance and anti-democratic forces contained within it” then you have to start by convincing them that blindly accepting whatever it might say “as a matter of faith” is a mistake. You won’t make that happen by telling them faith is a good thing.

I agree that Religions Cooperating would be better than Religions Competing, but it’s a false dilemma. There are loads of approaches that could be taken and I think Blair’s is short-sighted in that while he is fostering all this delightful cooperation he is re-enforcing the very prejudices which cause all the problems to begin with. It will help in the short run but it will make it harder to make any real long-term progress.

Of course, he also said that faith doesn’t tell you what to do but gives you the strength to do it, so either he’s not reading the Bible properly or he has the most wishy-washy version of faith ever. If everyone had that kind of faith, there’d be no problem, but that’s not gonna happen.

He talks like a man to whom it hasn’t occurred that some people aren’t like him. He says faith is necessary, and maybe it is for him but I manage okay without it. He says it doesn’t tell you what to do, but clearly in many (most?) cases it does.

Yes, Andrew, I do agree with many of your points. I do not believe that you have to have any kind of faith to have the strength to do the “right thing”. And I do not accept that only faith will see you through when everyone is agin you. People without faith have had to struggle by for aeons reasonably successfully, I suppose. But it’s clear it works for some. It must be a comfort, even if to some of us it’s cold comfort, if we think it is based on a lie.

Still, as I said at the start, there are many people of faith in this world, and since it is the complexities and/or doctrines of faith that often seem to cause wars and not the complexities of differing cultures per se, I suppose SOMEONE has to try to deal with it.

If Blair is re-enforcing the prejudices by trying to bring things out into the open and get people to stand back and look at how their faith shapes their lives and societies, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In the end that might be the message – there IS NO compromise with terrorist fundamentalism of whatever colour.

Then – decision time. But it could be some off time yet.

If Blair is re-enforcing the prejudices by trying to bring things out into the open and get people to stand back and look at how their faith shapes their lives and societies, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

That’s not what he’s doing, though, is it? He’s not asking people to “look at how their faith shapes their lives”; he’s asking them to believe that it can create mosquito nets. It can’t. All it does is cloud their judgement. In some cases that will, quite accidentally, lead them to the right decision (probably by playing up the advantages of toeing the line). Other times it will nudge them the other way — and that’s why we have honour killings.

But no, Blair never seems to acknowledge that faith can be a terrible, dangerous and evil thing. He just pushes more of it as the one-stop answer for everything. Schools failing? Add faith. Malaria? Take Faith every hour until you feel better. No willpower? Faith. (But heavens, don’t feel you have to tell anyone about it if you think it might affect your odds of re-election.)

Faith is not the answer. Faith is the arbitrary and unquestioning belief in unsupportable nonsense. You don’t have to think hard to realise that that’s unilaterally and necessarily a bad thing. And positive effects it may have are quite incidental. And anyone who promotes it as “important” or “necessary” is wrong to do so. If you just preach your own religion, that’s still bad but at least it makes sense. But no, Blair is all for faith in religions he thinks are wrong. Even if that helps, that’s like telling people “don’t trust astrologers — my tea-leaves say they’re making it up”: it’s good advice but you’re no better than them if you phrase it that way. And that makes you part of the problem.

Andrew, I don’t think he’s asking them to believe that their faith can “create mosquito nets”. It weakens your arguments to mislead his words in this way. He’s only asking them to get their “act” together to help provide the nets. This can’t be bad. It’s good (religion) in action, surely?

And he certainly DOES accept that religion can be a force for evil, and says so in his recent speeches. This is why he feels it is so important to head it in the right direction.

Here are the major religious groups as a percentage of the world population in 2005 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It’s food for thought. In summary, religious adherence of the world’s population is as follows: “Abrahamic”: 53.5%, “Indian”: 19.7%, irreligious: 14.3%, “Far Eastern”: 6.5%, tribal religions: 4.0%, new religious movements: 2.0%.

From the above, it seems that Christians are 33% and Muslims 20%. Atheists are, according to this, only 2.35% of the world’s population. And non-religious 11.92%. If nothing else, Blair is speaking on behalf of the other 85.73%!!! Some of us may not be included in the 85%, but I think we are being unrealistic if we don’t recognise the huge majority, right or wrong.

His task is huge – to bring them together. I don’t see why we should criticise that ambition so blithely.

I’ve nothing at all against his ambition. Noble ambition, that. I just don’t like his methods. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see all those people on his little list there come together to do something useful (although of course it happens already without anyone feeling they have to make ridiculous inferences from it). But I’d love to see it so that the useful thing gets done. It wouldn’t show faith in action, it wouldn’t show the importance of faith, and it wouldn’t show what faith can do for progress.

If he thinks it would show those things then he’s a fool. If he doesn’t then he’s a liar, and is simply manipulating people. For the greater good, perhaps, but since when was that his call?