Spot On, Mate

Former British PM, and recently converted Catholic Tony Blair had this to say about the Pope's anti homosexual stance:

We need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you approach your religious faith....What people often forget about, for example, Jesus or, indeed, the Prophet Muhammad, is that their whole raison d’être was to change the way that people thought traditionally.

Beyond the whole gay business, Blair points out another problem with religion. To too many so called believers, their faith is their faith, and the idea of "rethinking," or even thinking, just doesn't come up. Slowly, religion gets cozy with whatever the prevailing "traditional" attitudes are, and it becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution.

How else would one explain American Catholic's preference for Republicans, anti abortion, anti gay, and anti stem cell rhetoric over the far more pressing moral concerns of poverty and violence? (One cannot help but recall the odd spectacle of "pro life" parades taking place while our military was decimating actual human beings on the most specious of pretexts.)Some may say "keen spiritual commitment." Others may say "marked intellectual laziness." Isn't religious faith supposed to help steer you clear of making the same assumptions, mistakes and miscues as everyone else? Isn't it supposed to make you somehow different? More compassionate, more humble, more intellectually rigorous. Instead religious people have transformed a tool for radical change into a tool for mass conformity.