Tony Blair about his Christian Faith and the role it played in his life and work.
There was no doubt, from the every start, that Tony Blair was a man with strongly held religious convictions. It was clear that he absolutely believes that,
1. God Exists; and
2. That God cares about, and takes an active interest in, what we humans do.
The question was, and remains, how much did these beliefs influence his behaviour and decisions when he was Prime Minister? Not a great deal, according to him, but snippets of interviews with those who had been close to him during this time appeared to paint a different picture.
It seems that he remains convinced of the rightness of his actions, he may appear to back peddle a little here and there but overall he’s never going to admit that he might have been wrong. His point regarding WMD’s is telling; if we’d known they weren’t any there, he says, then we may/would have had to come up with other reasons to justify the invasion and the subsequent change of regime. What does this mean, were WMD’s just a convenient justification for the implementation of a policy that had already been decided upon? For whatever reasons it seems fairly clear that Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, if not before, was determined that the US was going to go to war with Iraq. The question that remains however is why Blair was such a staunch supporter of this policy? It’s hard to believe that in his place Gordon Brown, or any other British Prime Minister, would have followed the US lead so docilely. Bush was and is a “Born Again” Christian and Blair has the air of a religious zealot (you don’t convert to Catholicism unless you’re a zealot). Did they find a common ground in their faith; was the administration able to exert undue influence because of Blair’s feeling? We may never know for certain one way or another but like most secular people I’m loath to put the reins of Government into the hands of someone with these kinds of strong beliefs.
I’m not too concerned if a politician is a Cof E Lite because it usually means he’s/she’s simply keeping up appearances and making a gesture of support toward to the prevailing religious establishment; he/she isn’t likely let this bit of irrationality materially affect their judgement.
It’s bad enough that in “The Land of the Free” you have to believe, or at the very least appear to believe, this bovine excrement if you are to have any chance of being elected to public office. We’ve seen what this can result in, Creationist in charge of Boards of Education and
The Chimp
that said creationist say that Darwin said that man evolved from (he said no such thing) in charge of the White House for 8 long years.
I don’t want this in the UK, I don’t want this in Europe, I don’t want politicians with paper weights on their desks saying “What Would Jesus Do” I don’t give a flying f**k what a fictional 1st Century Jewish carpenter’s position would be on modern policy. What I want is the considered opinion of my elected representative. I want the separation of Church and State because one man’s beliefs are another man’s belly laugh. I don’t want a Sarah Palin thinkie/likie in any position where she/he might take the opportunity to hasten the onset of “The Rapture” by Nuking the Middle-East. No Siree, give me a secular expenses fiddler every time, you know where you are with these thieving bast**ds, in deed, with them, you always gets what they can make you Pay for!
I’ll forgive you your Duck Houses and your Moat cleaning bills as long as you leave your God in the lobbies when you enter the Chamber. I know politics attracts mendacious Kitty-Fiddlers (by that I don’t mean to imply that you insert your fingers or other body parts into pussy’s; I mean you may well insert things into pussy but I’m sure you only do so to human lady pussy not the feline kind because that would be perverted and who on Earth has ever heard of such a thing as a perverted politician, I ask you? No by kitty I mean a fund of monies) like yourselves but so long as you don’t walk into the Chamber side by side with a beardy man who normally lives on a cloud I’ll put up with you!
I didn’t actually get to watch the interview in one sitting rather I managed to catch chunks of it between Han’s demands on my attention. Han is such a funny little thing, so empathic; she came and asked me something about TB during the program that necessitated freezing the programme and having a discussion. I can’t quite remember what the initial question was but somehow, via the US medical system and “Death Panels” the conversation ended up discussing NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) and how scare resources are allocated between sick people, cost v benefit and opportunity costs. Poor thing, I was illustrating the point by explaining why you might not be able to give one person a drug that could extend their life because of the opportunity cost involved. That that single treatment would preclude the funding of other treatments. It was at this point that I noticed that she was crying because she felt so sad about the hypothetical cancer suffered we had just condemned to death. Silly Sausage!
Damn, after sausage I only needed another eighteen words to make these comments exactly one thousand words long!
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