Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi:
Politics [he means democratic politics, as is clear from what precedes this] turns into virtue what religions often see as a vice - the fact that we do not all think alike, that we have conflicting interests, that we see the world through different eyes. Politics knows what religion sometimes forgets, that the imposition of truth by force and the suppression of dissent by power is the end of freedom and a denial of human dignity.Good words. At the end of the same piece, Sacks notes and celebrates the fact that throughout the world people are turning from secular politics towards religion:
In itself that is a blessing. Religious faith is our noblest effort to understand ourselves and our place in the universe.He's entitled to this view, of course. But I'd suggest that there's at least a tension between it, with the exclusivist claim wrapped up in 'noblest', and his own reflections on the virtue of democratic politics and the forgetful tendency within some religious belief.
