Situation Normal, All Fucked Up (original) (raw)
footpad resigned
November 25 2007, 13:24
Tony Blair is religious "nutter." (To scurrilously quote his spokesman out of context.)
So he goes to church every Sunday. Fair enough. But I do have to wonder how much his religion affected his policy decisions, not to mention his relationship with Dubya, and it makes me quite uncomfortable that he deliberately concealed his faith on the specific grounds that the electorate would reject him for it.
Some matters are genuinely private, even for statesmen. I wouldn't be at all bothered (or hot) if Tony B. turned out to be gay and had had a vigorous relationship with a strapping young grocer's boy who regularly delivered the vegetables to Number Ten's back door. The observance of religion is also a private matter. I am not especially perturbed that we had a Prime Minister who, unbeknownst to most of the country, read his Bible last thing at night for ten years. Personally I masturbate, but each to his own.
It's well documented that religion has little effect on fundamental moral convictions. If you present people with a critical situation—a medical dilemma, say, or an impending disaster where they can only save certain lives at the expense of others, then you get remarkably similar answers from people of all cultures, regions and religious persuasions. True, some religions develop peculiar fixations like not mixing linen with wool or systematically obliterating all infidels, but humanity's chequered history shows that religion is by no means essential for atrocities. I suspect that it's usually just the excuse.
So I think it's up to Mr Blair what he does with his Bible, and I doubt that his religion itself led him astray. Even so, I wish the people had known about his religious convictions before electing him. I suspect it would have changed a lot of minds. Faith, by definition, suggests a willingness to hold on to principles and beliefs when there's no evidence for them, or even when there's contrary evidence. That makes faith an incredibly bad quality in a leader, and the British electorate knows it, and Blair knew they know it, and he kept his mouth shut in order to get elected anyway.
Sigh.
In other news, the British public appears to be swinging towards the Conservatives on issues which have little or nothing to do with political competence, and which would have been equally probable or mis-handled under any party.