First, though, why do I have it on my RSS to begin with? Well, there's something about the combination of utter bewilderment by the world, the staggering poverty of the reasoning, the ability to misunderstand things that're really quite straightforward, and a compulsion to crowbar a Biblical verse into every second paragraph that I find compelling. But the fundamentalism does sometimes grate; some of the attitudes there are - to use a word that the contributors there almost certainly think relates to actual historical fact - antediluvian. And they stop the posts being quite as funny as they might be.
Peter Saunders' latest is a grotesque example of all that's wrong with the CMF. "We live in times when the very foundations of our civilisation are being destroyed," he begins.
[T]he NHS with its burgeoning needs and shrinking budgets, mounting national debt, political and economic uncertainty following ‘Brexit’, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, creeping atheism and secular humanism.See the problem here? The utter lack of perspective? Even if you think that these things are bad - on which, more anon - I'd wager that the very foundations of our civilisation are not being destroyed. At most, they're changing. Saunders has form when it comes to secularism, though. It's one of the things he simply doesn't understand. He's used the phrase "secular fundamentalism" as though it actually exists, for example (in a piece that offers a defence of the pointless genital mutilation of male children, to boot). He thinks that Britain is "slid[ing] into secularism". He doesn't seem to notice (a) that secularism is perfectly compatible with Christianity - and arguably draws some of its intellectual strength from the Christian idea that one should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's: a doctrine that is quite possibly an early call for a separation between religion and politics; (b) that, as such, a commitment to secularism is precisely the thing that guarantees his right to publish this gibberish irrespective of prevailing religious views; and (c) he is in no way representative of what most Christians think anyway. (Maybe he's a bit takfiri when the mood takes him.)
But then again, I've thought for a while that there's the whiff of the theocrat about Peter. I thought I'd written something to that effect elsewhere, though I can't seem to find it right now.
