G.K. Chesterton has been attributed with saying, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

Melanie Phillips, an award-winning columnist for London’s Daily Mail, critically examines beliefs that have replaced God.

In what we tell ourselves is an “age of reason,” she says we are behaving increasingly irrationally. More and more people are signing up to wacky cults, para-psychology, seances, paganism and witchcraft. There is widespread belief in ludicrous conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack being an American plot.

This unreason is due to the erosion of the our civilisation’s building blocks. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible, but Christianity and the Hebrew Bible gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world – the foundations of science and modernity.

The loss of religious belief has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition. The result has been a kind of mass derangement as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are turned upside down.

In medieval-style witch hunts, scientists who are sceptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonised; and the United States is vilified over the war on terror – all on the basis of propaganda that is seen as truth.

By Melanie Phillips
Encounter Books: London, 2010
ISBN: 1-59403-375-7

– David McLeod-Jones