benign benighthood

The Guardian on the Hitchens-Blair religion debate:

On the backfoot for much of the debate [Tony Blair] kept returning to his theme that many religious people all over the world were engaged in great and good works. They did that because of their faith, he argued, and to slam all religious people as ignorant or evil was plain wrong. "The proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable," he said. Blair called religion at its best "a benign progressive framework by which to live our lives."