From the Independent:
Our next Prime Minister also identified with the rebellious, privilege-hating grassroots of the Church of Scotland. In 1843, the Church split when ordinary churchgoers insisted on their right to pick their own ministers, rather than have the aristocracy hand-pick one for them. As Brown summarised it happily: “They refused to be bound by the Lords.” This blunt egalitarian persisted into Brown’s youth.
But how does this affect his practical politics? The best hint can be found in Brown’s little-noticed endorsement in 2005 of a book called God’s Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it by the theologian Jim Wallis. The author damns the right for focusing “on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice.” So the book is an attack on Falwellian poison – but also on what it calls “secular fundamentalism.” Secularists, Wallis writes, “mistakenly dismiss spirituality as irrelevant to social change.” Wallis believes religion should be a presence perpetually motivating people to pursue “justice” for the poor.
He argues for a revived “prophetic religion”, adding quickly: “Prophecy is not about future telling, but articulating moral truth. The prophets diagnose the present and point the way to a just solution.” He argues that when societies were fairly equal, as revealed by Biblical archaeology, the Prophets did not emerge, because “they had nothing to say.” Brown is, he claims, “listening to the message of the Biblical prophets” when he brilliantly slashes Africa’s debts, doubles aid, and increases tax credits for poor kids here at home. (He is presumably defying it when he permits the super-rich to continue jaunting about all-but-untaxed). Wallis’s favourite Biblical tradition is the Jubilee Year, where periodically the debts of the poor were cancelled, slaves were set free, and land was redistributed more fairly.
All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandary. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?
“All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandary. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?” Well there is evidence and reason, but atheists refuse to accept it. They are locket in the narrow worldview of materialism and what that worldview cannot measure they reject.
Hmmm – I thought conservatives were supposed to be the only ones who believe in slippery slopes. Haven’t some progressives been saying all along that conservatives believe in slippery slopes, without evidence or reason to back them up?
“I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?”
I don’t know, with global warming alarmism and Kyoto? =)
“All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandary. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?”
What do you have to fear, Mr. Hari? So far lately, Christians seem to be the ones brought up on charges, muzzled, fined, and even imprisoned for simply speaking the truth that convicts them as well as the whole world, with your lot seeking (and in Britain succeeding with the SORs) to enshrine in law prohibitions against whatever free speech annoys you. What another master of projection!
RE: “I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up.”
Of course, all people have foundational worldviews which require faith, so he’s merely decrying humans having foundational worldviews, even himself.
Well so far Brown’s god has appeared to be Mammon – liberating as much of it from as many of us as he can.
For all his cocksure preconceptions, Johann Hari evinces extraordinarily shaky knowledge of his purported subject. If you taught writing or rhetoric, you could dissect the rich trove of faulty argumentation he provides.
We should be sure to pray for Hari and others like him. Bigoted though his thinking is, he writes of what the does not know. Let’s not respond as though we were Christian Right politico having a particularly loveless day.
True, and thanks for the reminder.
It’s brilliant all right: making journalists believe that transfer payments from Western taxpayers to multi-billion dollar financial institutions is “slashing Africa’s debts.”
Johann Hari is conflicted by his promiscuous homosexuality, which goes part of the way to explaining his animus toward Christianity. However, he seems to know a few Christians and sometimes recognizes that they are not the ignorant fools he would like them to be. It must be very difficult being a socialist in the world today, knowing that nobody really believes it, while his atheism ‘teaches’ him that existence is arbitrary and meaningless and will end in personal and global extinction. Such ‘knowledge’ completely undermines the arrogant, moralizing bluster of the Left, for if young Mr Hari has heard of Ayn Rand, he should know there is no substance to his dogmas.
Maybe he is not that far from the Kingdom of God?