A new Catholic magazine, Faith Today, asked questions of Gordon Brown and David Cameron (and Nick Clegg, but let's assume he's not going to be the next PM), one of which is below:
Do you see religious faith as essentially a private, personal pursuit - or has it a role in the wider community? If so, what is that role?
Mr Brown: Our common realm is not and cannot be stripped of values – I absolutely reject the idea that religion should somehow be tolerated but not encouraged in public life. Our Equality Bill is specifically designed to protect religion and belief on exactly the same terms as race or gender or sexuality. I welcome the role that people of faith play in building Britain’s future - and the Catholic communion in particular is to be congratulated for so often being the conscience of our country, for helping ‘the least of these’ even when bearing witness to the truth is hard or unpopular. Mr Cameron: I believe faith groups have a huge role to play in building a stronger and bigger society. I’m convinced faith is a force for good in this country. Compassion, fairness, tolerance, responsibility – these values are shared by people across faiths; they are exactly the values our whole country needs today.
I'd like to highlight two bits. First Mr Brown:
"...the Catholic communion in particular is to be congratulated for so often being the conscience of our country..."
This makes the UK almost unique; in Ireland, Germany and America, to name but three, the Catholic Church has completely failed to act on the issues of child-abusing priests and has repeatedly acted to preserve the interests of the Church ahead of those of the victims. This corruption appears to go as far as the Pope (details in this story on the BBC) and the scandal looks to have some distance to run. Child abuse is pretty awful but the leaders of the Catholic Church pursue other life-destroying policies, predominantly in Africa where they make regular attacks on the distribution of condoms (see an example here from Mr Murphy-O'Connor). Conscience of our country? I really do hope not.
And how about Mr Cameron? His own piece of stupidity (if I'm forced to choose a particular favourite) is:
"Compassion, fairness, tolerance, responsibility – these values are shared by people across faiths"
This is almost laughable; the Christian bishops have repeatedly attacked attempts to pass genuinely equalising legislation in this country (examples from the BBC here, here and here - Google "equality bill bishops" if you want more) and take every opportunity to claim that their institutions deserve special rights to discriminate on grounds of gender or sexuality. It may well be that "people across faiths" are generally compassionate, fair, tolerant and responsible but they aren't getting these values from the examples set by the leaderships of their faiths.
The correct answer to this question is that religion is most definitely a private, personal pursuit and that it has no role whatsoever in the wider community. If you want to believe that your prophet raised the dead, healed the sick, rose from the tomb or flew to heaven on a magic horse then feel free, but please don't try to tell me how to live, when I can work, which clothes I can wear, who I can marry, when I can go shopping or that your bronze-age war-god requires me to mutilate the genitals of my children. And, if you want to claim the moral high-ground, stop trying to pass self-serving legislation, treat all members of society as you would wish to be treated and assist the secular authorities with their enquiries into the horrible crimes committed by members of your Church.
Faith? It's not rational, it makes no positive contribution to society and the sooner the established churches are disestablished the better.
Posted via web from James's posterous
