The young Ratzinger apparently deserted his unit and scuttled back to Bavaria at the first opportunity. Sensible chap. Quite what this tells us about the comparative bellicosity of Christians I am not sure.

The problem with Mel’s thesis, incidentally, is that when she is talking about Actually Existing Christians (or at least the C of E) she either accuses them of a ‘cultural cringe’ towards the beige hordes or virulent anti-semitism when they consider divestment from Israel. What she appears to want is not the re-Christianisation of Britain – a nation of Rowan Williamses is not going to take the robust approach towards the Muzzies that she favours – but the rise of a kind of Christian nationalism which is short on going to church and trying to lead a better life and strong on getting at religious minorities as unBritish. This strikes me as being objectionable coming from anyone and foolish coming from someone who happens to me a member of a religious minority.

“A proper anti-Christian society would be close to Utopia” –

is rather stupid…shame really.

Melanie Phillips is a Dhimmi.

Show your working.

Ooops. I meant, well you know what I meant. I was also intending to say in the original post that the utilitarian arguments for religion show how successful secular liberlism has been. Hardly anyone, for example, is prepared to argue for faith schools on the grounds on which they were originally founded; to make people more religious. Instead they are defended on the gounds of raising standards and ‘ethos’.

Same with Christianity in general. People like Melanie Phillips defend it on the grounds that it strengthens families, reduces crime, instills responsibility and and reinforces social discipline. But making this case undermines the very basis of it, which has to do with faith. No one converts in order to reinforce the family; they do this for the salvation of their souls.

This is the insurmountable problem with what Melanie has written here; she doesn’t believe the Gospel. Did Christ die for our sins? If you find this unbelievable yourself, it is utterly absurd to suggest that others should believe what you are unable to – and even more so that this should be undertaken for the sake of social necessity. In fact, if I were a Christian, I can imagine I might find this idea quite offensive.

Your point is fairly easy to demonstrate from further examples – there doesn’t seem to be a particularly strong correlation between the level of Christianity in a society and the willingness to fight. The Napoleonic wars obviously don’t fit this hypothesis. Wasn’t Ireland neutral during the war? They were, and still are, pretty religious compared to Britain, the country that has since 1820 been involved in more international conflicts than any other country on the face of the planet. Is Switzerland’s historic neutrality explicable as a function of (a lack of) religiosity? Surely not…

Having said all this, the avalanche of criticism she’s been recieving is making me think again. I stand by what I’ve written, and she doesn’t help her case by the way she expresses herself, but there is a problem, I think, amongst liberal secularists in the old confidence department. We agnostics and atheists really could be doing with standing up for what we don’t believe…
;-)

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, frankly. Banging the drum for a pair of ill-conceived and worse-managed wars is enough, surely, without accusing the generation you sent to fight them of cowardice?

For example, Germany, that is, the nation-state and its people, was extremely religious, both Catholic and Protestant. The gangsters who took over the country may not have been, though many were.

Similarly, Russia was, and still is, highly religious, so much so in WWII that Stalin had to cut a deal with the Orthodox Church, which hitherto he had been persecuting, in order to hold on and maximise the people’s patriotism which was intimately linked with their religion.

Your notion that the irreligious British of today would fight for anything other than a football team, is risible, as recent events have demonstratd.