The Hidden Hand of The New God - The Media

[Teddy Bear]

There's a vicious circle that can be observed that enables the balance of power that mostly affects our society to continue:
The media don't refer to their own influence in affecting public opinion; and politicians don't refer to it either, because to do so would diminish their own illusion of potency.

Thus the media really control in large part how most of the public will think, and the politicians have to pander to it. This insidious silent force, corrupt by its very nature, continues to brainwash the masses. Any form of spirituality must be stifled, as this might lead to 'enlightenment' about the status quo, and in its place - materialism, and the frenzy for the 'latest' is pushed to the limit , with no consideration or perspective put forward about how little this brings happiness or contentment into anybody's life beyond the short term.

Journalists prey on the fact that most people are content to allow others to think for them, and will adopt what they perceive as 'the popular attitude', regardless if it initially has any basis in fact until it becomes 'the popular attitude', when it is then too late to change it, or risk being ostracized by the mainstream for differing.

For this reason, ANY journalist that is trying to present an observation on our society that doesn't also address the power of the media in shaping whatever behaviour is being described, is disingenuous and corrupt. They are engaged in perpetrating the brainwashing described above.

In the excerpt below from the BBC presenter John Humphreys' book 'In God We Doubt', published in today's Telegraph, he relates how politicians in the UK don't mention any faith they might have in God for fear of being ridiculed by the public. Either Humphrey's is a fool or enjoying his role swaying public opinion to his desired point of view, since it is the very media that first pours scorn on this faith that makes politicians here have to keep it under wraps. I believe he's the latter, which makes him a fool of another kind.

Though personally I am not religious, I much prefer the higher values that Christianity embodies, than the immoral and foul self serving antics that presently leads our society.

We prefer politicians without a hotline to God
By John Humphrys
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 25/11/2007

So now we know. Tony Blair does God. In fact, to quote Alastair Campbell, he does God "in quite a big way". Both men have been talking to David Aaronovitch for The Blair Years on BBC1 next Sunday. What they say casts light on one of the more intriguing aspects of the Blair character.

He admits that his faith is "hugely important" to him: "You can't have a religious faith and it be an insignificant aspect because it's…it's profound about you and about you as a human being." He even says there's "no point" in denying it because "I don't actually think there is anything wrong in having religious conviction. On the contrary, I think it is a strength for people."

So why did he allow Campbell to intervene when he was asked about his religion and warn the interviewer that "We don't do God"? Well, the obvious answer is that that was then - when Blair was prime minister - and this is now and someone else sits in Number 10.

"You talk about it in our political system," he says, "and frankly people do think you're a nutter."

Do they really? They don't in many other countries. In the United States they think you're a nutter if you don't talk about God. As Blair puts it, they respond "quite naturally" when a politician talks about his religious faith. Are we really so different?

On one level we clearly are. The vast majority of Americans believe in God and most of those fully expect him to return to Earth pretty soon - probably to Arkansas or thereabouts. Research I conducted for my latest book suggests that fewer than a third of people in this country believe in the sort of God worshipped by Tony Blair. About the same number believe in something, but they're not sure what. And almost half think the influence of religion is harmful. Fewer than a fifth think it is beneficial.

The obvious explanation for that is fear of religious extremism, of the terrorist who flies a plane into a building with the name of Allah on his lips. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, thinks the general unease in the West over Islam gives other religions a bad name. Earlier this year he said the acts of terrorism had "shaken up people's perception of the presence of faiths in this country and around the world".

It's hard to argue with that, but it only partly explains Blair's reluctance to "do God" while he was in power. Campbell put it like this: "I just always worry in Britain the public are a bit wary of politicians who go on about God. I said my worry is that the Tories will pick this up and say: this is you saying to be a Christian you've gotta be Labour. And that's a bad political position to be in."

What Blair seems to have been worried about was creating the perception that he allowed faith rather than reason to dictate his actions. I remember his reaction when first Jeremy Paxman and then David Frost asked him whether he and George Bush prayed together. He looked like a man who'd been asked whether he regularly sat in a bath of cold custard to ward off evil spirits. The answer, it seemed after some very uncomfortable shrugs, was no. By any political measurement he was right to duck the question.

Here's what he suspects we might think if our leaders admit to a religious faith: "I mean they sort of…you know…you maybe go off and sit in the corner and commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say: 'Right! I've been told the answer and that's it.'?"

Fair enough. If our prime minister decides to invade a foreign country we want to think he's not doing it because God told him to do it, but because he has been satisfied by the evidence that it's in the best interests of the British people. But I wonder if he and Campbell and the political class in general may have got it all a bit wrong.

Menzies Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, says the public might have been less willing to give Blair the triumph of three consecutive general election victories "if they'd known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism". Yet there is a world of difference between ethical values and hardline religious dogma.

For all our unease about extremism we are still remarkably tolerant of other people's beliefs or non-belief. We still seem perfectly willing to accept the presence of 26 bishops in the House of Lords, even though it has been reformed in so many other respects. Middle class parents still fight like tigers (and lie when necessary) to get their little Tarquins into the local C of E school if it happens to be the best in the area - which it often is. There are still howls of outrage when some daft bureaucrat suggests that the Christmas carol concert might better be replaced with a nice secular concert featuring appropriate green symbols rather than angels in a manger.

There is a curious and not unwelcome dichotomy here. We don't, by and large, believe in God but we defend the rights of others to do so. When I "came out" on Radio Four and admitted through a series of interviews that I no longer believed in a personal God, the reaction was overwhelmingly sympathetic - especially from those who do believe.

Alastair Campbell describes Blair as "pretty irreverent". He swears a fair bit, says Campbell, has a wandering eye for a very attractive woman and "doesn't look like your classic religious sort of guy". Peter Mandelson says he's "not an exhibitionist when it comes to religion but deep inside him it is very, very important… This is a man who takes a Bible with him wherever he goes and last thing at night will read from the Bible." And yet, in 10 years running the country, Blair did not do God.

More than 30 years ago, when I was a young correspondent in Washington, I got a call from a Republican congressman who was a friend of mine, to tell me that he had just left a prayer meeting at the White House. President Nixon had asked for God's guidance as to what he should do over Watergate. Eight hours later he went on television to resign.

I still want to know if prime minister Blair really did ask God what he should do. And I still want to know how we, the voters, would have reacted, if he'd told us.

• John Humphrys's latest book, In God We Doubt, is published by Hodder & Stoughton

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips also makes observations regarding the reticence of politicians to make any religious faith they have public knowledge. Somehow it seems like a contradiction in terms to believe in an ALMIGHTY God, yet be afraid to declare it. Doesn't inspire one with any real faith.

Losing faith in reason
Daily Mail, 26 November 2007

Oh God! Tony Blair has confessed to religious faith being ‘hugely important’ to him during his tenure as Prime Minister.

The full force of the secular inquisition will not hesitate in pronouncing its anathema upon him for committing this heresy of religious belief.

For as Mr Blair also admitted, he was previously unable to be open about this key element of his character because ‘Frankly, people do think you’re a nutter’.

Too right they do. Especially these days when people turn themselves into human bombs and blow countless innocents to bits in the expectation that they will be rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise.

Islamic terrorism and the demented beliefs that fuel it have given all religion a bad name. But this kind of death cult can scarcely be equated to the ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ pieties of Christianity.

Besides the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism. It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the equivalent to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Though most people still say they believe in some kind of God, religious faith has become progressively more enfeebled and unable to resist the secular onslaught. Hence the enormous success of books such as The God Delusion by the biologist and militant atheist Professor Richard Dawkins.

He and his followers have created a climate of rampant intolerance towards religion, in which to acknowledge personal faith is to risk professional and social ostracism.

Yet the foundations of British society and Western civilisation rest upon the Bible and Christianity. It is the concept of a rational creator that lies behind the rationalism of the West. The idea of equality — fundamental to Western liberalism — derives from the belief that all human beings were created in the image of God.

The great 19th-century campaigns of social reform, which brought about an end to slavery, universal suffrage and the transformation of Britain from a criminal cesspit into an orderly society, were motivated by Christian evangelicalism. The Labour party was famously created by Methodism rather than Marx.

So what a desperately sad commentary on our times it is that a Prime Minister felt unable to acknowledge that he subscribed to the faith that underpinned his society.

Of course we expect political leaders to take decisions based on empirical evidence of what is in the best interests of their country. But certain acute situations require judgments which are, in essence, unavoidable leaps of faith.

In such circumstances, would we really prefer it if the Prime Minister decided what to do by just crossing his fingers, closing his eyes and sticking a pin into conflicting advice?

Wouldn’t it be a source of some reassurance that he draws instead upon his faith for guidance - thus acknowledging the limits of his own judgment and shoring it up with convictions which have shaped civilisation for centuries?

As Mr Blair said, it would have been seen in this way in the U.S., which is still a much more religious country than Britain due to the centrality of the evangelical tradition going back to the Pilgrim Fathers.

But in Britain, the Church of England has turned into a kind of social workers’ convention where faith in God is too often seen as the equivalent of making a rude noise in church.

It is almost as if Christianity is fine - with its high-minded concerns about poverty, the environment, war and so forth - as long as no one believes in it.

Of course, the irony is that Mr Blair’s government seemed determined to attack and undermine bedrock Christian ethics. This appears to have rested on his misguided equation of Christianity with a sentimental universalism which held that everyone’s viewpoint was of equal value.

Nevertheless, he did believe in a Christian God which he was unable to reveal without doing himself political damage. That is because, to a secular society, religion is merely a form of organised superstition. Acting on religious faith is thus seen as irrational, and praying to God regarded as evidence of clinical insanity.

The idea that secularism is rational and peaceful, however, is very wide of the mark. Terrible global despotisms such as Nazism, Communism and Maoism have been unreligious or anti-religious.

Moreover, as the influence of religion has declined in Britain, far from becoming more rational, people have become more credulous, superstitious and irrational than ever before. They place their faith in a range of New Age cults, paganism, witchcraft and belief in psychic phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and parapsychology.

What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has given rise to mainstream treatments and therapies. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory of Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

And New Age, Islamist, green and far right groups are united by their predilection for crackpot conspiracy theories, whether about aliens and crop circles or the perpetrators of 9/11.

In any event, the idea that religious belief and reason don’t go together is contradicted by many distinguished scientists, such as the botanist Sir Ghillean Prance, the director of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, and Allan Sandage, reputedly the greatest living cosmologist. These are all staunch believers - and it is science itself which has confirmed their faith.

As John Lennox, an Oxford University-mathematician, has written in his devastating book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, it is people such as Richard Dawkins who are guilty of the most profound irrationality.

This is because, in claiming that only atheism is scientific, they make nonsensical assertions which contradict scientific knowledge and evidence-based thinking.

In suggesting that life sprang into existence without any kind of governing intelligence, they fly in the face of the evidence emerging from science that the hitherto unimaginable complexity of life forms, including the living cell, makes it scientifically impossible for life to have emerged without some kind of intelligent design.

Nevertheless, the Dawkins-ites are lionised as apostles of reason. Meanwhile, those scientists who are doing what scientists are supposed to do — follow where the evidence leads them — and who have concluded as a result that life was created by a guiding intelligence, are hysterically smeared by the Dawkins camp.

In a shocking campaign of intellectual thuggery, this camp has falsely accused such scientists of being religious fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days - when they believe no such thing at all. Some of these scientists then find they are threatened in their posts or even forced out altogether.

Of course, there is intolerance a-plenty within the religious world; terrible things have always been done in the name of God.

Which is why it is essential to separate Church and state, as has been the case ever since the 18th-century Enlightenment curbed religious authority and ushered in the age of reason based on political liberalism, individual freedom under law and the tolerance of minorities and dissent.

That legacy, however, is under grievous threat from without, in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, and from within, in the form of secular fundamentalism.

The fact that a British Prime Minister has to keep his Christian faith secret is sorry testimony to the self-inflicted damage of a society that is in danger of losing not just its faith, but its mind.