Blaironfaith
Tony Blair preaches the gospel according to Armstrong.
Common to all great religions is love of neighbors and human equality before God.
That’s a falsehood. I won’t even bother to elaborate, because it’s too obvious. It’s just a pious, smarmy, conventional, wishful falsehood.
Blair admits as much himself in the very next paragraph.
Unfortunately, compassion is not the only context in which religion motivates people. It can also promote extremism, even terrorism. This is where faith becomes a badge of identity in opposition to those who do not share it, a kind of spiritual nationalism that regards those who do not agree – even those within a faith who live a different view of it – as unbelievers, infidels, and thus enemies.
Which rules out both love of neighbors and equality (before “God” or otherwise). So why the bromide? Because…I don’t know, because it sounds good, I suppose.
…for those for whom religion matters, globalization can sometimes be accompanied by an aggressive secularism or hedonism that makes many uneasy.
Nice. He pairs secularism with hedonism, and labels it “aggressive” for good measure. Passive-aggressive theocracy meets “aggressive” secularism. I’ll take the latter.
Aggressive secularists and extremists feed off each other. Together, they do constitute a real challenge to people of faith.
Even nicer. He pairs secularists with Islamists and other theocratic thugs.
Happy new year to you too, Mr Blair.
What a completely bogus analysis of the state of things. Does this man never try to think, instead of throwing together a few clichés and trying to make it sound, somehow, profound? (And failing at that miserably. He never sounds profound, but disturbingly shallow for a man who was once PM of Britain.) And why, since he does know that lots of religious folk are miles from any kind of compassionate regard for those who do not share their beliefs, should he think it appropriate to suggest that compassion is somehow at the heart of religious belief? All he has to do is spend a few minutes reading what the head of his church says to realise that he is a particularly uncompassionate man, more worried about the reputation of the church than bringing comfort to others. And notice one of the articles that has been arbitarily selected, “Aggressive mean naughty bad atheists.” It’s a meme that has colonised too many minds, including the ridiculous Blair.
Which article, Eric? I seem to have missed that.
And to answer your question, no – he apparently never does try to think, at least not on this subject. He does indeed just string banalities together.
I do wish people wouldn’t do that. It’s so stultifying.
How that got through his irony detector is anybody’s guess.
I seriously want to know how you take on political Islam religiously! On second thought, no. I don’t.
Well, real faith is compassionate and loving. Not compassionate and unloving faith is by definition not faith.
There are several types of definition, three of which come to mind: usage definitions like one finds in a dictionary, conceptual definitions one finds in specialized articles, and convenience definitions like one finds in Blair and Armstrong. A convenience definition can be distinguished from a conceptual definition by the carelessness and insincerity with which the author treats it. If, for example, an apologist says “and that first cause is what we call God” in the context of a cosmological argument, and then proceeds quietly to the identification of that first cause with Jesus, the first cause God is in this case a convenience definition.
Similarly, when an apologist says that “and that love and compassion is what we call faith”, and then proceeds carelessly to identify that with religious traditions, defining away all others as `not religious traditions’ in the process, we have a convenience definition.
Where conceptual definitions bring clarity, convenience definitions sow confusion. But they are useful for those who can rely on their intended audience to forgive and forget, if noticing at all. Or worse, as I suspect in this case, such definitions are useful for closing the ranks against common enemies, usually including those who do not buy the premises implicit in the definition. To not buy the premise is to be the other, and the premise is almost always prima facie pleasant.
`Faith’ has become a euphemism for itself.
One thing that struck me from the Blair/Hitch debate was Blair said much the same sort of thing, but funny how he included all sorts of qualifications. It’s almost as if he was afraid of saying something he’d easily get crucified for.
That’s politicians for you.
I remember when Tony Blair announced his Faith Foundation. I didn’t think much of then, and I think even less of it now.
Sorry, that’ll teach me to read more carefully. Often these programs collect related articles, and they’re really funny sometimes, but your ‘Related Post’ feature collects your own articles. I thought this one about Blair had attracted some crazy article about aggressive atheists, when it was one of your great titles! Meanwhile, back at the ranch!
But I was just thinking, after I had pressed the Post button, how absurdly aggressive the pope was when he came to the UK in September, comparing atheists to Hitler, and speaking, without a shred of evidence, about secular relativism. In fact, the pope comes across as very aggressive indeed, insisting, for example, over and over again, that ‘god’ should be included in the European constitution, forceful, and perhaps rightly so, about Islam, changing the attitude of the church even towards ‘separated brethren’, reintroducing the physical place of suffering called hell, reaffirming the penalty for abortion — excommunication, even if it was a 9 year old girl bearing twins! — luring anglo-catholics to the Roman Catholic Church by creating and Ordinariate. The man’s a walking bulldozer of aggression. And Blair thinks secularists are aggressive! The guy’s looking in the wrong place. And, as for compassion, what can I say? Has anyone heard a compassionate word form Ratzi? I can’t remember one offhand.
What really gets to me about this ‘faith is compassionate’ meme, ‘atheists are aggressive’, is that anyone with an ounce of honesty couldn’t say it. I mean, faith is not compassionate. Have Blair and Armstrong not looked? Have they not read? What reasonable person can read through the Bible or the Qu’ran and not recognise that these are not compassionate books, and they do not speak about a compassionate god? It’s beyond reason to think that they simply cannot see this. Trust me, anyone who has tried to “preach” these texts has had to jump over hurdles and twist their mind into pretzel shapes in order to find a meaning that is tolerably humane let alone compassionate. And what is especially not compassionate is to claim that the texts and the religions are compassionate, because they are not, and to say otherwise is simply to mislead. It cannot be compassionate to teach what is untrue.
And Blair’s remarks about Islam are so impossibly blinkered. Has he read the history of Islam? Does he remember how it all began? It was a militant, violent faith from the very beginning. And the Andalusian experiment was about the only place where the faiths seem, for a time, to have found a way of thriving together. This had nothing, however, to do with the central features of the religions. Islamic extremism is simply not a perversion of Islam, just as the violent excesses of Christianity are not a perversion of Christianity. Christianity, as the pope knows, feeds on division and the expression of intransigent certitude. These are not things that make for peace. It is so tiresome to have someone like Blair speaking as though he really knows something about religion. The man was a politician. He dissembled for years, apparently, regarding his beliefs, and now, full of fervour for his new faith, though quite prepared to misrepresent it ad libitum, he is talking as though he had made world religion a specialist study. The man is flying around making millions out of speaking engagements where he speaks about things for which he is not qualified, and he has the nerve to speak about compassion! I’ll retire to Bedlam (as Scrooge would say).
Yes, this is the same drivel that Mr. Blair emitted, again and again, in his debate with Hitchens in Toronto. Boiled down or stripped down to its essentials, without the misdirection and atmospherics, all Blair was actually claiming was that many religious people feel subjectively and sincerely motivated by their “faith” to act in kindly, charitable, and neighborly ways toward some (but not all) other human beings.
Mr. Blair did not demonstrate, and he cannot demonstrate, that superstitious beliefs of any particular content are either a necessary or a sufficient precondition to being charitably or humanely motivated toward one’s fellow human beings. At best, “people of faith” are operating under a widespread and common misconception or delusion that they need their superstitions to motivate them to do good.
“Convenience definitions.” I like that term. But “convenience definition” seems to me to be just another label for a Humpty-Dumptyism. It’s arbitrary, it’s special-case, and it is useful in perpetuating or perpetrating a distortion.
Tony Blair has purified his religion to the essence of Christianity, which is of course (in his mind) compassion. And he needs to believe this, because he has a heavy burden to carry on his shoulders, what with supporting a misguided war on terrorism based on lies.
The BSA survey over the last 30 years is evidence of a very strong shift away from religious belief in the Britain. Similar surveys in America show the same shift, albeit about half as much as in Britain, It is not an assumption, it is now a fact.
There is a very obvious reason why Islam remains at such ridiculously high levels in Islamic countries: apostasy is punished. Take away apostasy and blasphemy laws, and watch Islam plummet. According to some evidence, faith is a social status simple, a badge that says you’re a good person or you’re successful. Faith in America is superficial.
I would say that the majority of humans are good people, but it is religion that corrupts them, and can twist their otherwise normal compassionate nature into a cruel barbaric one. Why is this? Why does the essence of religion promote hatred and barbarism? Because religion is about good and evil, and those who don’t follow the religion are evil, and deserve death and punishment. That is the ‘stick’ behind religion.
Technology, in other words science, is responsible for the great shift in wealth and health in the world, not religion. People live longer, not only in the developed world but developing, thanks to new medicines and technology. Religion wants to believe that it motivates compassion and creates aid, but that aid is ultimate the life-saving drugs and immunisations, water treatments and technology that is developed from science.
It is of course a fallacy to pretend that secularism is fundamentalist or extremist. Secularists aren’t blowing up people for secularism, secularism is basically a liberal and pragmatic neutrality between people of faith and non-faith, where no-one has any special status.
Most conflicts have a religious dimension, because religion is the problem. It is not extremism that pervades Islam, but Islam is extreme, fundamentalist. And liberal Catholics and Christians are only liberal because they’ve prospered in liberal secular societies. Christianity contradicts the very environment you were brought up in. Christianity, at its essence is no less fundamentalist than Islam.
Religion has been allowed to prosper within liberal societies, leading to a far-right reaction. Liberalism offers no solution against Islam, and hence Islam becomes a greater political threat, as does far-right politics.
Blair’s evangelical missionary goals are to promote religion, because he believes that it is a conflict between two views of religion, but this is the religious thinking at work, he wants to purify religion, or purify religious people from the elements of evil that they have mistakenly followed. All he is doing is throwing petrol on the fire.
And of course secularists, they’re automatically bad and evil because they have no religion.
Blair has justified and rationalised in his mind the great historical story of the clash between the west and east, it just so happens to be both false and part of his wishful thinking. Religion is not the solution, but the problem, for which he is doing nothing but increasing.
I wish believers,particularly the monotheists, would actually read their sacred,psycopathic, texts, then we’d be spared such verbal diarrhea. Listen to the ‘fundamentalists’ and be afraid,they take scripture seriously and possess an intellectual honesty that Blair and his fellow travellers lack.
Oh I see, Eric – I didn’t notice the link here! That’s funny.
Blair and Armstrong both realize their “faith=compassion”mantra isn’t straightforwardly true…they just still think, or at least say, that it’s nevertheless true in some non-straightforward way. It’s all “yes but.”
I have little doubt that Blair and Armstrong are both perfectly aware that “faith is compassion” is absolutely false when taken as a statement about the real world. They think, rather, that faith should be about compassion, and that the world is filled with barbarians who are doing it wrong. But repeated gentle proclamations of “faith is compassion” will eventually cause all of these barbarians to see the light and stop attacking one another. This sounds eminently sensible to me and I think we should all rally under Blair’s banner forthwith.
@Egbert: “I would say that the majority of humans are good people, but it is religion that corrupts them, and can twist their otherwise normal compassionate nature into a cruel barbaric one”.
I would say that if it were not religion it would simply be something else. It is primarily fear (of whatever) that causes people to twist their nature into a cruel barbaric one. Fear leads to hatred and there you go – they’re off and running again. For some reason people want certainty and just can’t cope with the reality that there is no such thing. The best exemplars of this here in the USA are the teabaggers and the republicans (just look at the fear and hate there) – but they are far from the only ones!
Only rationality can save us. And rationality can only be produced by an educational system that is not the province of those who are themselves irrational and ill-educated. Not that I don’t accept the rest of your arguments. Very true!
Ophelia: “Blair and Armstrong both realize their “faith=compassion”mantra isn’t straightforwardly true…” – yes but, more than that, they both realize that their religious explanations themselves are untrue. You cannot say “I believe because the scriptures, the absolutely true divinely inspired word of doG says that it is true” and then turn and say “but of course we do not take these scriptures literally – it’s really all about compassion”…..but that is the position of many of followers in the west today. We are left with a cynical manipulation by religious “leaders” of people who are too lazy and/or stupid to investigate the matter for themselves.
I recently had a conversation with a cousin who is a catholic mystic (and therefore a misfit in the modern catholic church); he told me of his wonderful ecstatic experience. I responded by telling him that buddha said “these experiences are not the reason that we meditate” and then told him of the zen patriarch who said “before I was enlightened I drew water from the well and cut wood for the fire, but now that I am enlightened I draw water from the well and cut wood for the fire”. I don’t think he had ever thought beyond his ecstatic experience even though he’ll probably live another forty years…….as I said our only hope is rationality!!
‘Blaironfaith’ : In the past, as Marx said, religion was the opium of the masses in that it helped them to endure; now it has become a kind of designer drug that allows the well-heeled and sentimental to burble on vacuously.
Something that does puzzle me, after reading that article, is the motivation behind all his war campaigns while he was prime minister. He was supposedly fighting for freedom, humanitarianism, human rights and democracy. But are they not all secular values? And hedonism embraces freedom. His self-belief and conviction were so strong, that he still believes he’s right to have gone to war. But wait, he now argues against secularism and the red herring ‘hedonism’. This only makes me suspicious about his motivations. Also, the article he rights, if stripped away from its banality is actually the language of a holy war.
I think that Blair and Armstrong are simply using religion to become powerful “forces for good” so that the world will be changed for the better and it will all be their very own work. They don’t think the religious are doing it wrong, they think that their own plans are simply much better and that the religious are a ready-made market for their particular brand of the “real truth” (in spite of everything the latter have previously been told).
Religion is a very easy band-wagon to jump onto if you can do the rhetoric and wish to enhance your reputation (and reputation is something which, I have always thought, is what Blair at least is essentially about: we’ve had the decisive war-leader, and now we are going to get the reconciler and saviour of the world). Armstrong, I think, is in the same business. It is why they are both liars, ignorers of fact, rewriters of history.
It won’t work, of course. The desire of Blair and Armstrong to tame religion is too transparently a wish to change it according to their personal and self-aggrandising schemes, and the religious will only see it as a corruption, or a new heresy. The result will be the result we always have when people cannot (or more likely will not) see that their noble dreams and their egos are the same: yet another bloody mess.
Is Blair really that basd? Karen Armstrong, I beleive, has some mental health issues
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-islamification-of-britain-record-numbers-embrace-muslim-faith-2175178.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12075931
Is Blair really that bad? Well, yes, I think so. It is difficult to account for an obviously intelligent man being able to rewrite history and find deceptive ways of presenting rather bad things in a good light if one doesn’t accept that he knows what he is doing. “The Office of Tony Blair” rather says it all, doesn’t it? The ambitious pretension to authority blended with his famous personal charisma in one single shamelessly arrogant title.
Re Armstrong, I know nothing about her mental problems, if she has in fact had any. I don’t put any stress on them: anyone can have mental problems, fact of life. But I don’t like what she writes, or how she writes it. But there’s been enough on her on this site recently, and just now I feel I’ve had more than enough of her.
I think the links you posted, Sonia, reflect the lamentable state of education in Britain: no teaching of critical thinking, nothing about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. It doesn’t surprise me that youngsters who lead a hedonistic kind of life without any attempt to think things through critically might end up plumping for a ready-made “solution”. I suspect that Islam is only one such. Maybe if we had more critical thinking over here, Blair would not have been elected in the first place. Or maybe…
@7: Eric, on Blair’s dissembling, a veteran UK politician, David Owen, said that he was very impressed with TB when he first appeared, but one day, watching Blair on TV with his daughter, the latter said something like: “But, Dad, can’t you see it’s all just acting!
@9 Egbert: surely religion is not _the_ problem, it is _a_ problem. Most conflicts are surely over resources, and religion is a convenient excuse.
I think Blair is that bad when he talks about religion, at least. He’s got influence and he’s abusing it. His influence stems from a secular job he had, and he’s abusing it to peddle theocracy.
As I grow older and with each passing year it’s The Spokespeople of Faith (SM) who turn me off organized religion; much more than any logical inconsistency, absurd belief, schizophrenic morality story, or mind numbing ritual ever could.
Maria, nothing to add but: Me too. Gah, they set my teeth on edge.