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Blair And The Nutters
Last week, Tony Blair discussed the importance of his religious faith and its guiding role during his ten years as Prime Minister.
Blair said that he kept the strength of his faith under wraps because "Frankly, people do think you're a nutter".
"Too right they do. Especially these days when people turn themselves into human bombs and blow countless innocents to bits in the expectation that they will be rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise.
"Islamic terrorism and the demented beliefs that fuel it have given all religion a bad name.
"But this kind of death cult can scarcely be equated to the "turn-the-other-cheek" pieties of Christianity. Besides the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism.
"It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the equivalent to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.
"Though most people still say they believe in some kind of God, religious faith has become progressively more enfeebled and unable to resist the secular onslaught."
Philips criticises "militant atheists" like Professor Richard Dawkins and his followers for creating an atmosphere of "rampant intolerance" towards religion - and ignoring the fact that for 2,000 years, Christianity's vision of a rational God and man made in His image has provided the foundation of western civilisation, particularly its more recent focus on the concepts of equality and universal human rights.
This history continues to inform Christians today:
"Of course we expect political leaders to take decisions based on empirical evidence of what is in the best interests of their country. But certain acute situations require judgments which are, in essence, unavoidable leaps of faith.
"In such circumstances, would we really prefer it if the Prime Minister decided what to do by just crossing his fingers, closing his eyes and sticking a pin into conflicting advice?
"Wouldn't it be a source of some reassurance that he draws instead upon his faith for guidance - thus acknowledging the limits of his own judgment and shoring it up with convictions which have shaped civilisation for centuries?"
Moreover, Philips argues, it's not as if religious belief in Britain and western Europe has been replaced by any superior system of belief. Atheism, she claims, gave us Nazism and Communism; meanwhile, the old maxim that "when man stops believing in God, he does not believe in Nothing: He believes in everything" has been proved by the prevalence of quackery and shamanism:
"People have become more credulous, superstitious and irrational than ever before.
"They place their faith in a range of New Age cults, paganism, witchcraft and belief in psychic phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and parapsychology.
"What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has given rise to mainstream treatments and therapies.
"The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory Of Alternative And Complementary Medicine promotes 'dowsers', 'flower therapists' and 'crystal healers'.
"And New Age, Islamist, green and Far Right groups are united by their predilection for crackpot conspiracy theories, whether about aliens and crop circles or the perpetrators of 9/11."
What to do? Philips concludes,
"It is essential to separate Church and state, as has been the case ever since the 18th-century Enlightenment curbed religious authority and ushered in the age of reason based on political liberalism, individual freedom under law and the tolerance of minorities and dissent.
"That legacy, however, is under grievous threat from without, in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, and from within, in the form of secular fundamentalism.
"The fact that a British Prime Minister has to keep his Christian faith secret is sorry testimony to the self-inflicted damage of a society that is in danger of losing not just its faith, but its mind."
