The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, used to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq. When he told the British Parliament that before the invasion, I believed him.
Years later, and after extensive and determined searching by experts, those weapons have never been found. I now believe that they probably don’t exist, and I suspect that Tony Blair now believes that too. However, if new evidence comes to light in the future, both of us will change our minds to accommodate the new facts.
In becoming a Roman Catholic, Tony Blair has also changed his official beliefs (whatever his personal beliefs may be).
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Officially, he no longer just believes in the Virgin Birth (a god miraculously impregnating a virgin) but in the Immaculate Conception (a dogma defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854 stating that although his mother Mary was conceived by natural intercourse, she was born without original sin and lived a life completely free from sin).
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Officially, he no longer just believes in the Eucharist celebrating the fact that god the father sacrifices god the son in order to appease himself, but in the Mass, where the bread and the wine become transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of Christ.
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Officially, he no longer believes that a god will listen to just his tortured, sacrificed and resurrected son, but will listen to his perfect mother, and a whole host of other people who the church have declared to be intermediaries as well.
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Officially, he no longer believes that the church has a human leader, but that it has a human leader who when speaking ex-cathedra, is speaking the infallible truth of god - this, despite the church’s own bible warning against adding to revelation, and hundreds of years of history where the infallible ex-cathedra pronouncements were fallibly very wrong.
A belief about the absence or presence of weapons of mass destruction is testible. Where things are not certain one has to make judgements about the balance of probability. Tony Blair used to be a lawyer. If arguing in court about the balance of probability of his official new religious beliefs (or even his old ones for that matter), I seriously doubt that he would be able to build a strong case.
This has been very valuable because I didn’t know any of this and was going to look the differences up between Catholics and the Protestant position.
My husband has been wanting to look more into the Catholic faith. I see now why I could never subscribe to it.
Thanks. I will show him this.
I think the WMD debacle will turn out to have been one of those turning points in political attitudes. It made us realize that governments - including the warm fluffy governments of the “free” West - cannot be trusted and will tell lies to advance their cause among the public. I don’t think Blair ever believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. I think he always knew that was a lie. Maybe he didn’t realize quite what a heinous and far-reaching lie it was but that too, in a man in his position, would be a further condemnation rather than an excuse. Maybe he is running away from the guilt into the arms of God.
Inserting “officially” in each of the belief-clauses above is the right thing to do. I very much whether all Catholics rigorously believe all tenets of the faith. I doubt whether even the Pope does. That point is made by the fact that dogma is changed from time to time: that means that the Catholic hierarchy at some point ceases to believe something it allegedly believed before that point.
Your final paragraph illustrates for me the trouble we atheists have in talking to believers. Intelligent dialogue requires a common viewpoint. Atheists and believers have no common viewpoint so we continually talk past each other. We atheists defend our position with logic and reason but believers allow God to escape logic and reason, making their beliefs invulnerable.
We know that Saddam had WMD. He used them in Halabja, in the war against Iran, and on other occasions. His attempts to build nuclear weapons are very well documented and even video taped. With the state of terror that he maintained and the inability, through fear, of his compatriots to tell him the truth, it is quite possible that Saddam himself believed that he still had some WMD when he tried to face down the international community after his failed invasion of Kuwait and when he committed his country to the ‘mother of all battles’ rather than seeing his own weakness and taking another course.
Accusing Blair of lying, rather than making a misjudgement is politics, not truth.
Thank you