When a culture loses its soul

For broadcast on 2CH Sydney, 16 Jun 2013

According to Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Spectator,

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true … the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down … and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

The new atheists forget that religious beliefs underpin the ethical foundations of Western society, and you cannot destroy the foundations and leave the rest of the building intact.

Rabbi Sacks says he has “not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, [and] altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other.  A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also.”

I’m Rod Benson for the NSW Council of Churches.