Alastair Campbell, when he was Tony Blair’s chief spin doctor, always said “We don’t do God.” Sound advice, if you ask me; advice that the current prime minister has not taken. David Cameron says we must “stand together and defend” Christian values. He went further: “(Britain is a) Christian country with Christian values. But they are also values that speak to everyone in Britain – to people of every faith and none. And we must all stand together and defend them.” Dave: have I got news for you.
The British Social attitudes survey of 2014 shows that the biggest group in the country is that of atheists. 49% of us have no religion. Just 17% of people regard themselves as Anglicans, which is about 8.5 million, of whom less than a million attend church regularly. The facts, never a Tory strong point, do not stand up.
Cameron gushes about Christian values. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says this: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Sometimes, I wish he’d get off the fence. But then, God killed a lot of people, some say as many as 25 million. He asked two bears to rip apart 42 boys for making fun of a prophet’s bald head; he killed 14,700 people for complaining about his killings and he made Jehoram’s bowels fall out. Some of the stuff in the Old Testament would sit happily with the murderous psychopaths in ISIS. (No, I am not making comparisons: I am making a point.)
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need the words of a celestial dictator to help me shape the way I live. Because of the person I have grown up to be, I have a reasonably decent idea of what is right and what is wrong. I am not interested in the ramblings of people who wrote stuff, in many cases hundreds of years after so called events took place at a time when no one knew what was going on. And what I certainly don’t want is to be preached at by a politician who has presided over cruel attacks on the disabled and has generally made the poor poorer and the rich richer.
How sincere is Cameron with his Easter message, as he slumbers on his sun bed in Lanzarote? This is the same PM who once said his faith is “a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes”. My faith is a bit like Magic FM in Bristol: I can’t get it at all.
Allow me to conclude by using a quote from a BBC website article: ‘Mr Cameron also praised the work done by faith and voluntary organisations – helping the homeless, caring for the sick and bereaved and risking their lives to help people in war-torn regions across the world.’
These must the Christian values he keeps banging on about, as homelessness rockets, as the sick and disabled are being attacked and abandoned and how voluntary organisations, like the one I work for, are picking up the pieces of the wreckage politicians like Cameron are leaving in their wake.
Don’t do God, Dave, unless you think you can do all of us a favour by quitting politics and becoming a vicar instead. Much as I have no time for organised religion, vicars always seem to be throughly decent chaps with their hearts in the right places. Unlike you.
