Feeling worried about Brexit? Well, worry no more. Theresa May has got someone very important to support her during the difficult years ahead. It’s not Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. It’s not a politician at all. It’s God.
She tells the Sun that her moral sense of right and wrong is helping her work out what is best for Britain at a “hugely challenging time.” Says May: “There is something in terms of faith, I am a practising member of the Church of England and so forth, that lies behind what I do. If you know you are doing the right thing, you have the confidence, the energy to go and deliver that right message.” Oh no. The British prime minister gets her sense of moral compass from the bible. God help us all.
Allow me to quote from the renowned scientist Richard Dawkins about ‘God’: “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.” But Mrs May says the God character is by her side as she marches the country away from the rest of Europe.
If you are to believe the bible, God was responsible for the deaths of 2,821,364 people, but this doesn’t reckon with those who perished in Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc., which take the total to around 25 million. I am sure that old Noah, had he actually existed, wasn’t a bad sort, building the ark when he was between 525-545 years of age and 600 years old when the flood finally came. The fact that he got drunk on wine and would lie naked with his sons (well, we’ve all done that, haven’t we? Well, not in this house, but we don’t do God) is neither here nor there.
I don’t wish to be disrespectful, but presumably our prime minister believes all this stuff and because of this we should all be bricking it. Can you imagine the reaction of some members of the cabinet if God was appointed to some vital Brexit job? Do you think Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox would defer to his greater knowledge? I doubt it. God might have created everything in six days but he didn’t reckon with the enormous egos of the gruesome threesome.
Religion may provide comfort to many. It suggests, after all, that we will somehow survive our own deaths and meet up with those who died before us in eternal life. Who, after all, wants to think that death is it? But just because it is comforting to believe that we will never die and live forever doesn’t make it true. And, returning to the original subject, if the PM is relying on the advice and guidance of someone who almost certainly never existed should be call for concern, especially if she is hoping for God to call by sometime and ask her to explain what she means when she says Brexit means Brexit.
The idea that divine intervention might be part of the Brexit negotiations is absurd. It’s every bit as absurd as the idea that May and the rest of the government have the faintest idea what they are doing. And doing “the right thing” on the basis of scripture is simply irrational. And if God is a Tory (an absurd assumption since a fictional character can’t have a political affiliation) I am delighted to be an atheist.
