Posted: Nov 28, 2010 9:22 pm
From the second page of this transcript:
See, this was the major thrust of Blair's argument all night. His assertion that every religion has pluralism, love, reason, and other secular humanist values at its core. This is pure hand-wavey waffle, and it's just plain false. Had he read the Quran and understood its real meaning, its 'true' meaning, he'd realise that Mohammed's god wasn't all that interested in making friends with non-Muslims or treating woman equally. Blair basically picked from every religion's values, a-la-carte, the good bits, and threw away the bad bits.
But who is he to say that this is the 'true nature' of all religions? How is he objectively any more correct than someone who says the true core of Christianity is about land grabs in the Middle East, extremely brutal punishments for transgressions, homophobia, disrespect for woman, etc? It's just Blair arbitrarily assigning positive values to religion and calling it religion's 'true values'. How that is not false is beyond me. And Peter Brown, CdesignProponentsist, and Scar above... Blair's argument WAS false, in the way I've just described. I might as well try and defend the North Korean regime because I assert that the TRUE nature of the regime is love for its people and the desire for peace and happiness... it's just unfortunate that some bad apples have given a bad name to the Kim Il-Sung worship clan.
Come on.
Tony Blair wrote:What I would say to you is this exclusivism is not -- you know, this type of excluding other people because they're different, let's just nail the myth that this is solely the prerogative of religion. I'm afraid this happens in many, many different walks of life. It's not what true religion is about. True religion is not about excluding somebody because they're different, true religion is actually about embracing someone who is different. That is why, you know, in every major religion, this concept of love of neighbour
See, this was the major thrust of Blair's argument all night. His assertion that every religion has pluralism, love, reason, and other secular humanist values at its core. This is pure hand-wavey waffle, and it's just plain false. Had he read the Quran and understood its real meaning, its 'true' meaning, he'd realise that Mohammed's god wasn't all that interested in making friends with non-Muslims or treating woman equally. Blair basically picked from every religion's values, a-la-carte, the good bits, and threw away the bad bits.
But who is he to say that this is the 'true nature' of all religions? How is he objectively any more correct than someone who says the true core of Christianity is about land grabs in the Middle East, extremely brutal punishments for transgressions, homophobia, disrespect for woman, etc? It's just Blair arbitrarily assigning positive values to religion and calling it religion's 'true values'. How that is not false is beyond me. And Peter Brown, CdesignProponentsist, and Scar above... Blair's argument WAS false, in the way I've just described. I might as well try and defend the North Korean regime because I assert that the TRUE nature of the regime is love for its people and the desire for peace and happiness... it's just unfortunate that some bad apples have given a bad name to the Kim Il-Sung worship clan.
Come on.