So I just got back from hearing Tony Blair speak and wow, am I impressed. He’s without a doubt the most famous person I’ve ever seen speak and just his ability to engage and interact with the audience is unbelievable. Besides his charisma and his illustrious oratory ability, what he actually had to say was quite inspirational. I’m going to try to reiterate it below, but it will come nowhere near to how well he was able to articulate it. If you ever have the opportunity to see him speak, I highly recommend it.
The title of his talk was “The Road Ahead - Faith and Reconciliation in a Time of Global Interdependence”, so as you can imagine, he talked about the many problems that we face as a world, and how we need to come together as a global community in order to fix those major issues. Specifically, he talked about faith and religion and how if we were able to eliminate religious boundaries than the road to eradicating poverty, and dealing with the many other global issues (financial crisis, global warming, energy, etc) would be much more tangible. He then goes on to list three things that we need to focus on in order to eliminate religious boundaries.
1) Eliminate extremism. And not just Islamic extremists, but extremists of all religions. He says that best way to do this is by taking advantage of “the people” (i.e. the majority) and of the wide majority of moderates. He believes that empowering them to take action against the extremists of their own religion will help mitigate much of the racial divide.
2) Get religions to work together. He starts by giving the example of abolishing Malaria in Africa, and in fact, The Tony Blair Foundation is a major supporter of the Malaria No More initiative. He says how hospitals are very sparse throughout most of Africa, yet churches, mosques, and temples are located in multiples in every town. If religions would look past their differences for the common good of their own people and use these religious centers as health care centers as well, then bed nets and malaria prevention can be rapidly spread.
3) Resolve the Palestine / Israel conflict. He says that if politicians were able to negotiate a legitimate and sustainable peace treaty, then this would be the ultimate symbol that religions can co-exist in peace. He says that the best way to accomplish this is by allowing Palestine to attain statehood, while still keeping Israel in tact.
He finally concludes by telling the story of the Northern Ireland peace process (something that he helped broker), in which Protestants and Catholics that had battled for years (called The Troubles) over religious and political differences were able to come together and create a peace treaty.
By focusing on these three things, Blair thinks that we will be able to work together as a global community to help solve the plethora of global issues that we face. I do believe that his approach is quite idealistic and overly optimistic, but I can’t say that he’s wrong. And, frankly, I do hope that he’s right and that someday we’re able to live in a world where there are no religious boundaries and where we do have hormonal peace.
What do you think? Is Blair’s viewpoint right?
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