Christianity's part in our civilisation; VOICE OF THE NORTH.

HAVING read Carl Defoe's peevish dismissal of Christianity as an instrument of repression and obscurantism, (Voice of the North, April 30) and his assumption that atheists are the only members of society capable of rationality, I am tempted to believe that admission to their ranks renders them incapable of seeing in the Christian religion any good whatsoever.

It takes an almost culpable ignorance of 2,000 years of European history - there would not have been a European civilization at all if the Christian church had not laid the foundations of the richest civilization the world has seen so far - to subscribe to such a view.

Christian culture was the product of a religious society which saw the birth of modern Western philosophy, literature drama, architecture, music and painting. Any fair-minded reader who approaches the history of Europe cannot fail to recognize that, despite its failings, Western Christianity has been the seed-bed of a rich civilization and a concept of the human person which was translated into our laws.

Sad to say, our humanist friends are doing their best to unravel the rich skein of human relations as promoted by Christianity by their hedonistic view of life.

Only a determination to air-brush out of Western history the Christian contribution to the establishment of the greatest civilization the world has so far seen (although one waits with baited breath the advent of the great age of humanism) can explain the manifest unfairness of such a view.

But why bother to point out to such closed minds - self-styled humanists - such obvious irrefutable facts when all they want to do is to dismiss them as falling outside the peripheral vision created by their blinkers? I wish the well-meaning but misguided Carl Defoe and his fellow atheists whatever will contribute to their enlightenment whatever form this may take. I shall say a prayer for them, which is something they cannot do for me.

ROBERT A MURPHY, Fenham, Newcastle