Plenary, 19 Mar 2008
Meeting date: Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Anthony Wedgwood Benn, probably better known to all of us as Tony Benn.
Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. What you have done is an enormous honour, which I deeply appreciate.
My theme is the relationship between religion and politics as I learned about it in my own family. My great-grandfather, James Holmes, was a steeplejack in Irvine and a member of the Irvine Brethren. He was so severe that he would not allow a single book in the house other than the Bible, and that drove my grandfather to atheism. He was a schoolteacher, and became member of Parliament for Govan. His atheism worried my mother when she was a little girl. She said that if we were born with no God, we were all born in an orphanage. At the age of eight, she went alone to the Church of Scotland in Paisley, became a Christian and ended up as the president of the Congregational Federation and a great supporter of the ordination of women. In 1920, she married my father, who was then MP for Leith. My father was a Congregationalist too, and his grandfather was a Congregationalist minister. The Congregationalists have a clear idea that everyone has a hotline to the Almighty—we do not need bishops to show us the way. That was a revolutionary and radical idea.
Every night, my mother read the Bible to me. She taught me that the stories in the Bible were of the conflict between the kings, who had power, and the prophets, who preached righteousness. She taught me to support the prophets against the kings. That has got me into a lot of trouble in my life, but the older I get the more relevant it seems.
The teachings of Jesus are about how we should lead our lives. Although the myths and mythology of religion are moving and exciting, for me it is the teaching that matters. All the great teachers—Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Darwin, Marx and Gandhi—taught us that we are brothers and sisters, and that we ought to treat each other in that spirit, the spirit of solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all.
The people whom I fear are the kings, who use religion to frighten and divide us, so that they can gain power for themselves. In doing so, they contradict what the prophets said. That is why I believe that churches, mosques, synagogues and temples should be kept absolutely separate from the state.
However, faith and politics are inseparable one from another. Even though we live in an age of science and technology, all the big decisions that we make in life and politics essentially are moral decisions: is it right or is it wrong? We can argue about what is right and wrong, but that is the right question to discuss. I believe that the 10 commandments are a better guide to the good life than is a study of every hour of the Dow Jones industrial average. That is my own conviction.
We live at a time in history when the power of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to destroy the human race is as never before, yet it is also a time when we have the resources, the technology, the know-how and the money to solve the problems of the human race. That is the most important choice that humanity has ever had to make, and it raises fundamental moral questions. If we are to make the right decisions, we would do well, I believe, to listen to the prophets, rather than the kings.