Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

'The Double Life of Tony Blair'

It sounds like a high-concept literary novel, doesn't it? In fact it's just the title Newsweek have stuck on this interesting interview-based report by Lisa Miller on the course in 'Faith and Globalisation' that Blair has now begun to teach at Yale. Therein Miller neatly rehearses all the contortions of Blair's public and private positions on what he believed while PM. Her best moment is the assertion that 'in a way, Blair's foundation is the culmination of his life as a double agent' - so making him sound rather like a character out of Kipling or Conrad.

Blair is certainly a character in my Crusaders, for which he also furnishes an epigraph, and he also has a 'double' in the figure of the book's young Anglican priest John Gore - though Gore resists the imputation, as in the following edgy exchanges with Labour MP Martin Pallister:

‘One thing you should know, John – he’s sincere is Tony. His faith is solid, really, it’s what he’s all about.’
Gore was pondering. ‘His wife, she’s Catholic, right?’
‘Cherie? Aye, I think so. What of it?’
‘Just, I don’t know if I recognise his particular brand. Of the faith. And I should say, I don’t know that the public care for politicians who wear that stuff on their
sleeve.’
‘Oh no, not a bit. That’s your job. And that’s what Tony says and all.’ Pallister wore his own thoughtful look. ‘You know what, you’d put me in mind of him a bit. Tony.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Don’t blow a gasket there. No, I think you’d get on, the two of you. What with the faith in common. And you’re both Durham lads, right...?

Anyhow... back to Lisa Miller's interview, Blair's main quotes are humdrum, indeed they might make jaundiced students of Labour history groan and try to amuse themselves by substituting 'The Labour Party' for the 'spiritual faith'/'faith area' bits in the following:

"We have an obligation to present spiritual faith as something that is positive and progressive and solves problems and does good, rather than something that people only read about because people are killing in the name of it."

"To me what is important is that the whole faith area gets some what I would call muscularity, and certainly strategy."

Dullsville, eh? But as usual with Blair the interesting part is trying to figure out what he actually thinks and means, (and intends to do), under the polished patter.

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?