More A.C. atheism

A.C. Grayling is looking forward to the possibility of an atheist prime minister. He gives his reasons. With many of them I have no quarrel; but with some of them I do. They're letting the side down. He writes:

Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq.

Grayling has tried this one before. Then, it was that Blair had 'practically said' God told him to go to war in Iraq; this time, it's that Blair came 'perilously close' to saying the same sort of thing. Either way, Blair didn't in fact say it. And he had reasons of a perfectly earth-bound kind for deciding to go to war. Just like (for another instance, picked at random) Christopher Hitchens, famous atheist, had for supporting the war.

Grayling also writes:

Atheist leaders will, by definition, be neutral between the different religious pressure groups in society, and will have no temptation not to be even-handed because of an allegiance to the outlook of just one of those groups.

By definition? But even if, as is false, atheism were a necessary condition of always making sound choices, it is certainly not a sufficient condition, as Grayling must know. Is he seriously proposing that, given the history of this country and the institutional legacy of that history, a British prime minister of the near future would be neutral between the Church of England and some tiny religious outfit without serious roots in British cultural life? To me it seems rather doubtful. In any case it isn't so by definition.

Finally, there's this:

Religion is a matter of choice in that, unlike race, age, gender or disability, you can change it, or not have it at all. True, most people's faith was driven into them when they were small children, and belief can be hard to shake off if your community will reject or hurt you for your apostasy. But it is still fundamentally voluntary. As such it should pay its own way and take its place in the queue along with everyone else.

There are contexts in which it is relevant to stress that a person's race, age, gender or disability are non-voluntary. But to call religious belief or the lack of it a matter of choice and voluntary is, at best, misleading. Matters of belief have to do with what a person thinks is true, and you can't just choose, or not, to think something true in the way that you can choose to take an afternoon stroll. The suggestion that if a person's beliefs turned out to be practically inconvenient in some way they could just change them is not a view worth taking seriously. So if religion should pay its own way, as it should, that's not why it should.