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It seems to me that the Vatican is missing a trick in the fall-out from its sex-abuse scandal. Having successfuly walked away from a planet-wide paedophile ring while suffering barely a scratch, it should think about branching out. It turns out that Italy’s most wretched hive of scum and villainy wasn’t the Mafia. In its Crimen sollicitationis, the Vatican even has it’s own version of Omertà.

So why not global-scale armed robbery, drug-dealing or, even, humanitarian interventions? (That last one’s a difficult one to pull off but it currently also carries no penalties for the perpetrator.) Hell, when levels of impunity are running this high, why not go all the way? A satellite weapon made of diamonds perhaps, or a space station ready to bombard the planet and wipe it clean with poisons made from a rare orchid?

Then, once the dust has setteled over devasted capital cities and a Catholic master-race rules the Earth, Benedict XVI can put his hand-made Prada knock-offs up, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to come knocking (other than the victims who can be fobbed off with a piss-poor apology).

(It also occurs to me that there’s something familiar about successive Popes’ taste for belated apologies – Hello Galilieo! You see it from other leaders as well. It’s how Gordon Brown can apologies for children abused from the 1920s to the 1960s while not uttering a word about children suffering at the sharp end of his own policies. That apology is for someone else to make much later on. Clearly New Labour and the Vatican have much to learn from each other. A league of super villains is surely called for.)

In an election year all parties have to make compromises. Before being thrown into the stewpot of a manifesto, issues and ideas must be chopped, seasoned, stirred, simmered and reduced.

Some would argue that there are ideas that shouldn’t be played with for the sake of politics. The health and well-being of our children for instance. New Labour would beg to differ…

Campaigners today accused the government of performing a U-turn over sex education in faith schools, after changes to a bill they said would allow the schools to discourage the use of contraception and teach that homosexuality is wrong.

Why would a self-styled and so-called ‘progressive’ political party do such a thing, undermining the issues of safe sex and tolerance?

Religion should play a role in British politics, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy will say in a lecture later. The UK government minister will say connecting with religious voters could help Labour win the general election.

Ah, that’ll be why.

Matt Buck on top form…

Anyway, happy terrifying-small-Catholic-children day. Do they still explain, in graphic detail, in Catholic schools just what a crucifixion entails? You know, the nails and the spear and the despair? Do they still tell that the two thieves crucified with Jesus had their legs broken? Do they still say that a man died in a slow, horrible way for you? Do they still make the kids kiss the feet of an effigy of a man who’s been tortured to death?

It’s always a highlight of one’s formative years.

We’ll pass quickly over Blair’s latest iteration in fashioning of a get-out-of-Hell free card for himself (‘I do not pass a single day in which I do not reflect on this and think of the responsibility’ – define ‘responsibility’, Tony). Instead have a look at this story I’ve heard him tell more than once:

Blair also revealed his first spiritual experience, as he remembered praying with his headmaster at school when he was 10 years old.

His father – “a kind of militant atheist” – had just had a stroke and was rushed to hospital.

Blair said: “I remember actually praying with the headmaster of the school. I said to him: ‘Before we pray, I should tell you that my father, he doesn’t believe in God.’

“And I always remember the headmaster saying to me: ‘Well that doesn’t matter, because God believes in him.’

“I was in a great state of emotion, and then at the end of the day my father was clear, he was going to live. But what I know is it made a – as it would, on a 10-year-old child – tremendous impact on me.”

If I was lying in a hospital bed, my children not knowing whether I was going to live or die, and a teacher took it upon him or herself to take advantage of impressionable children in ‘a great state of emotion’ in order to push their own strand of belief, I’d have some very harsh words to say upon my recovery.

As the adult Blair looks back at his ten year-old self, it’s as if he sees an escape route for his soul being opened almost at that precise moment. He certainly regards it as a pivotal event in his life.

In the end you accept there is a higher power than yourself and that is both something that should make you fearful, but something that also is a source of comfort.

Well bully for you, Bomber. Someone should tell him that faith is a way of life not a warm-but-slightly-scary blanket. Who does he think he is, St Linus van Pelt?

Tony, I know you’re a busy man with all your money to count and everything but couldn’t you spare five minutes to pass on some of this comfort to the mothers of children with two heads or the men on death row, some there for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual? It’s shame you’re not a little more fearful of and a little less comforted by your spiritual duvet.

While Tony Blair was Prime Minister, Alastair Campbell once said that ‘we don’t do God’. Well, now he’s free of the shackles of high office, Blair has finally found the courage of his convictions. He’s now doing God. Lot’s of God. It’s a bit showy, to be honest. Ostentatious, over-compensating. He’s obviously forgotten his Matthew 6:1-6.

It’s a shame he’s still not doing nuance. It never was his strong point…

Here’s what he said to the National Prayer Breakfast in the US this week…

Today, religion is under attack from without and from within. From within, it is corroded by extremists who use their faith as a means of excluding the other. I am what I am in opposition to you. If you do not believe as I believe, you are a lesser human being.

From without, religious faith is assailed by an increasingly aggressive secularism, which derides faith as contrary to reason and defines faith by conflict. Thus do the extreme believers and the aggressive non-believers come together in unholy alliance.

Unholy alliance, Batman! How did I miss the news report about Richard Dawkins getting together with Osama bin Laden to form a team of supervillains? What’s that? There wasn’t one? It’s all in Blair’s head? You don’t say.

And I’m not sure you can describe religious extremists as ‘unholy’ either, can you? I’m pretty sure they’re famous for being the complete opposite. It’s the surplus of holiness that’s the problem with those chaps, isn’t it?

How about this:

It is that humbling of man’s vanity, that stirring of conscience through God’s prompting, that recognition of our limitations, that faith alone can bestow.

Where was the humbling of vanity and the stirring of conscience and the recognition of limitations in March 2003? Bound and gagged in the basement to stop them getting near a bible, presumably.

Did you know we let Tony Blair be the Prime Minister of Britain for ten years? I can scarcely believe it either.

Didn’t we have Christmas already this year? It comes around quicker every year, I swear (not least because they start advertising and selling it some time in early August).

Anyway, happy thing to you and yours.

See you on the other side.

Ben 16 keeps up with the times:

Pope Benedict XVI has paid tribute to 17th-Century astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories once drew the wrath of the Catholic Church.

He went on to say how he thought Henry VIII was a snappy dresser.

When I linked to Chris Morris’ appeal to raise cash for his new film, BenSix said he suspected it was trap.

I’m tempted to think the same when I see non-believers queuing up to throw cash to pay for posters on the sides of London buses. I worry the whole campaign has been orchestrated by Christian fundamentalist provocateurs who want to show that atheists are also an ovine collective who want to ram their ideology down people’s throats. (And what’s with that sodding ‘probably’? Are you atheist or not?)

We’re not a bloody club for chemical chance’s sake. If that’s what you want as an atheist why not go back to church for the weak tea, digestive biscuits and small talk, and treat the rest of it like a poetry club or something?

You advance atheism by breeding it out – use it as a Dawkinsite meme and give it to your kids. Who are these posters supposed to persuade anyway? Is this a missionary initiative? How many converts are we expecting? Are we in for a spate of believers, upon glanicing at a passing bus, suddenly slapping their foreheads and declaring, ‘Of course! I’ve been wasting my weekends all these years!’?

I humbly suggest not.

The Pope, with the kind of self-awareness we’ve come to expect…

The global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless, Pope Benedict XVI has told a meeting of bishops in Rome.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church said that the disappearance of money as banks collapsed showed that wealth meant “nothing”.

The Pope said that people should instead base their lives on God’s word.

Tell you what, Benedict? You first.

'You should see how much my
underpants cost,' said Benedict.

9:1 Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases.

9:3 And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.

‘I will buy the Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones but only if 20 other freedom of speech supporters will do the same.‘

I think Philip Pullman just about nails it here:

Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn’t true; I like plenty of things that aren’t true. It’s that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Giving or losing power to these kinds of people, as with any institution, is nearly always going to lead you up some blind alley or other. Anti-intellectualism, however it is masked and on behalf of whatever creed, has always been a tool of control. You don’t need to be Galileo to know that.

(Via Jim Jay.)

(Via Warren Ellis)

The estimable Graham Linehan on the hounding of Michael Reiss:

I think it’s a bad moment for atheists. We don’t come out of this one smelling good at all.

I don’t think Reiss should have lost his job either but who’s this ‘we‘? I come out of this one smelling perfectly fine thanks. It was nowt to do with me after all.

Since when were atheists a gang anyway? Are there meetings? A big reason I’m an atheist is because I don’t want to be in a club of people who all think the sodding same. I’m not swapping one hive mind for another, thanks. I didn’t realise escaping Catholicism meant signing up to another cult. The rapidly-becoming-an-annoying-tool Richard Dawkins doesn’t speak for me. He’s not the messiah…

It’s like when they tried to kick off that bloody ‘brights‘ meme a few years back. It all smacks of lemonade and Kum Ba Ya – just what most of us ran from.

A day when Radio 4’s Thought For The Day is given by Anne Atkins is a good day. There’s nothing like being spoken to as if you are a particularly slow five year-old to get the hate, the bile, the misanthropy pumping.

Verily, that bloody woman would make Jesus swear.

Clutching at straws, AC Grayling finds a lone reason recommending David Miliband as Prime Minister: he’s an atheist.

Grayling then proceeds to draw up a list of wishful thinking; a list of all the amazing things a non-believing prime minister will do. All very nice:

Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation.

Wouldn’t that be lovely? Has Miliband gone on the public record anywhere giving even the merest hint that he might think along these lines? He was head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unity from 1997 to 2001, for crying our loud. He backed the Iraq war despite his belief that everyone fighting might squander their one existence without hope of the reward of an after-life.

The thing is, I have doubts whether religious (non) beliefs of any stripe colour the judgement of leaders to any large extent. For all his self-proclaimed Christian beneficence, Tony Blair displays very, very few of the qualities that mark someone as a Christian. Ditto ’son of the manse’ Gordon Brown. See also George Bush.

But here we go again, imprinting another potential Prime Minister with our tenuous hopes. Haven’t we learned our lesson in the last year? Miliband, like Gordon Brown, is a leading figure and architect of New Labour. He is the status quo; another bag carrier for the post-Thatcherite consensus.

He bought into all that when he was a kid. He’s been soaked in power-without-purpose politics for decades. Does he look like a boat-rocker to you? An ‘agent’ of ‘change’? The idea that, as he crosses the threshold of Number 10 as Prime Minister, his atheism gland will kick in and rewrite his New Labour DNA is, frankly, ludicrous.