Today is a special day in our post-Christian calendar.
Christmas sales are at a peak, and millions of people come together to worship and rejoice at the altar of the God of Acquisitiveness.
Shops are his churches, department stores are his cathedrals, Christmas sales are his sacraments and all the grex venalium besieging Oxford Street are his parishioners.
But for the steadily declining numbers there still are different churches, different cathedrals and different sacraments, and those retrograde, stubborn, backward-looking groups aren’t doing well even in Britain – never mind in Islamic lands.
Against that background Dave’s professed commitment to ‘Christian values’ sounds particularly nauseating. Actually, even Jimmy Saville would have less of an emetic effect if he came back from the dead to declare his unwavering devotion to Christian morality.
I don’t know whether Dave’s brand of Christianity includes faith in God among the values he holds dear. If it does, his behaviour is schizophrenically inconsistent.
With energy and dedication worthy of a better use he pushed through the anti-Christian homomarriage law. With uninterested apathy he has done nothing to reduce the number of abortions – in fact he has never once mentioned that this method of birth control just may be at odds with his supposed religion. Nor has he ever stated any unequivocal opposition to euthanasia, in whatever form it may take.
This sham Christian has done nothing to reverse the Middle Eastern policy of his idol Blair. As a direct result of the criminal and, which is worse, idiotic invasion of Iraq, the number of Christians there has declined from 1.5 million to less than 500,000 in the last 10 years.
It’s not just Iraq. Christians are being persecuted, robbed and murdered all over the Muslim world, churches are being razed, hundreds of thousands flee for their lives if they are lucky. The unlucky ones face stay to face the stark choice: convert to Islam or die.
In response, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali regularly risks death in his heroic efforts to save Middle Eastern Christians – and what does Dave do, the bogus communicant in the same confession that Bishop Michael serves so honourably?
Why, only a last-minute parliamentary vote prevented him from committing British troops to the cause of ISIS, the worst murderers, robbers and rapists of Christians anywhere in the world today.
All this proceeds to the accompaniment of mendacious bleating coming from Cameron’s and Blair’s fans in our papers, even the supposedly conservative ones. Thus today’s editorial in The Times claims that “it is not because of Islam that religious liberties are under threat”.
No, of course not, perish the thought. I blame Zen Buddhism myself.
That transparently lying claim is followed by a foray into religious history: “The three great monotheistic faiths in the region … have an inextricable history of cousinship, and trace their origins through Abraham.”
Considering that for 1,400 years the followers of one of those Abrahamic religions, Islam, have been murdering, off and mostly on, the followers of the others two, Judaism and Christianity, the cousinship must be very remote indeed.
Back in 1096 the kind of people we’d call Western leaders today embarked on a crusade to liberate the Holy Lands captured by the Muslims, and to save the people we’d call Middle Eastern Christians today from murderous abuse.
Almost a millennium later, our Western leaders are ready to embark on any foolhardy adventure in the name of democracy, that Enlightenment construct concocted by atheists, but they won’t lift a finger to save Christians grievously endangered by that adventure.
In this so-called democracy, we the demos are helpless to affect our government’s policy in any way, channelling it into a conduit consistent with the founding tenets of our civilisation.
But as we are getting ready to celebrate the incarnation of Our Lord, we can still pray for those who desperately need our prayers, those who crave God’s help even more than the rest of us do. We hope our prayers will help; we know our leaders won’t.
Merry, joyous Christmas to those of you who in their bone marrow feel the divine significance of this day. And happy, profitable shopping to those who don’t.