Tony Blair Rambling again

Tony Blair, never one of my favourite people, has been preaching again, he spoke recently at Georgetown University in Washington about faith.

In his speech he called on Christians and Muslims which he claims make up half the population of the world to unite against 'secularism'.

Now it could (and has) been argued that by supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - and few leaders did more lying and dodging to support it - he has hardly been putting his money where his mouth is. Those wars have served as an immense recruiting exercise for Al Queda and radical muslim extremists everywhere, which in turn has fuelled anti-muslim feelings everywhere.

But telling you he's a hypocrite is I suspect (if you'll forgive the ecumenical reference) preaching to the choir. He's a politician after all, and a successful one at that, in that he's now worth quite a few million pounds.

No, what made me audibly scoff (so much so that the first aiders here where I work, all looked up hopefully) was the idea that religious-types should band together against a common enemy - secularism.

Just in case there's any confusion about what secularism means I'll go off on a tangent for a moment. Secularism isn't atheism, it's simply the disconnecting of church and state. I believe that in the christian mythology, 'Jesus' is supposed to have supported that - "give unto Caesar that which is Caesars".

Every religious type in the 'democratic west' hates religious states - where it's another religion. So we look on Saudi Arabia with its Sharia Law, stonings, beheadings, whipping of adulterers and are quite clear that it's a bad thing. While at the same time calling for our own state to bring in laws or otherwise act in accordance with the wishes of our own pet cult. The Catholic Church recently, by way of an example, wanted the law changed so that they could continue discriminating against homosexuals. Bishops in the Church of England even form part of the government, having an automatic seat in the house of lords.

Plus in a multi-cultural country, if you don't have secularism, which religion do you allow to dictate the laws? The majority religion? That's a recipe for persecution. Also, it's building-in intolerance in the society - religious believers haven't, generally, come by their opinion on many matters from a rational viewpoint, based on research, studies, expert-thinking etc. They just 'inherit' their opinions from their religion. If you believe your opinions are heaven-sent, then it's much harder to take someone else's viewpoint, because basically they're going against the word of god, and I mean, how wrong can someone be?

And of course, when I say the majority religion, you'd imagine that it was an homogenous organisation with clear objectives and beliefs, but of course, that's far from the case. Almost all religions have schisms, some of them, as in Iraq, between Sunni and Shia Muslims are deadly. So how do you get a consensus from them? By asking the hierarchy to decide? That's hardly democratic. Even if you asked the whole congregation of a certain religion to decide, that's simply excluding the other members of society who don't subscribe to that religion - again very undemocratic.

In fact, if you want to include everybody in society in the decisions about how society is run, then there's a tried and trusted way to do that - it's called the democratic process. Now alright it's not perfect, but it's better than giving a subsection an unfair advantage, which in the end, is what they want when they complain about 'secularism'.