Faith full of holes

On the day your front page poses the question “Is faith the missing ingredient that can make western democracy work?”, elsewhere there were numerous media

reports of the demonstration at St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast by the Free Presbyterians against the appointment of a Catholic cleric to an interfaith position, complete with ‘No Popery’ placards and the usual anti-catholic vitriol to be expected from the late Reverend Ian Paisley’s church.

This amply demonstrates a fatal flaw with faith that George Weigel’s Friends of the Scotsman article misses completely, in that its primary purpose is to divide people: the saved and the damned, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, Sunni and Shia etc. One group is saved for all eternity, the other damned both in this life and for all eternity. The fact that there are so many faiths and so many sects (some 400 in Christianity alone) illustrates that disagreement and division is the order of the day.

Faith in the 21st century has morphed from a private religious belief into a political activism whose intent should be judged by its actions. Aside from this week’s events in Belfast, the Christian campaign in Scotland against equality for gay people shows why Mr Weigel’s arguments for freedom by virtue of the “new evangelisation” are holed below the waterline. While it could be argued that the antilgbt stance did briefly unite the Catholic and Protestant sects in a common goal, freedom in the Christian model is clearly to be reserved for Christians and in their gift to be denied to others. Some democracy!

ALISTAIR MCBAY National Secular Society Atholl Crescent, Edinburgh