Leslie Thomson (of the Scottish Secular Society – although he did not indicate that in his letter) had a letter in the Scotsman in response to my earlier one and article. It is typical of the kind of ahistorical hysteria that our militant secularists put out, accusing Christianity of turning Scotland into a thousand year theocracy which left ‘nothing but bloodshed and heartache in its wake”. Today the Scotsman published the following in response: You can get the original here –
http://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/letters/religious-freedom-1-3438199
“Leslie Thomson of the Scottish Secular Society (Letters, 9 June) is afraid that I am blinkering myself to “historical facts”, which apparently include the “fact” that “Scotland was a theocracy for 1,000 years, which left nothing but bloodshed and heartache in its wake”, that Christianity was rarely to anyone’s benefit and led to centuries of oppression and that Scots law was not based on Christianity but pre-Christian Roman law.
In a post-modern age this Alice-in-Wonderland view of history, where history is just what you want it to be, may ring true for the more fundamentalist secularists whose faith tells them that any public expression of religion is bad, but anyone who actually reads history would know that this is a grotesque and laughable caricature.
The Romans did not bring their law beyond Hadrian’s Wall, although Christians writers did adapt some aspects of Roman law (Christianity does, after all, teach about God’s common grace reaching to all human beings who are made in the image of God).
Theocracy is the rule of the state by the Church, and that clearly did not happen in the supposed “1,000-year reign”, although, as my letter pointed out, there have been those who have used Christianity for political ends and vice versa).
Ironically, Mr Thomson’s letter reinforces the point of my original Scotsman article, that if we remove Christianity from Scottish public life, we will end up with a state dominated by fundamentalist secularism with its extremist language and its rewriting of both the English dictionary and Scottish history.
Do we really want to sell our birthright for this Brave New World?
David Robertson
Solas CPC
St Peter’s Free Church
St Peter Street
Dundee