Life After Death

Chapter One Where it All Began In 1967, Parliament passed the Abortion Act. It was implemented in 1968. Since then, five million children have been savagely aborted. Currently the figure stands at 180,000 per annum, one in five of all pregnancies. Thirty years on, we sense similar pressure beginning to build, this time for Britain to follow Holland's lead in legalising euthanasia. All forms of life are now subject to genetic manipulation.

We select out. We distort unnnaturally. We experiment. 100,000 human embryos are destroyed in laboratories each year. Following the passage of the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which permitted destructive experiments on the human embryo and abortion of disabled babies up to and even during their birth, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, said that Britain no longer had the right to call itself a Christian country. It was a chillingly definitive statement. In common with most Western European countries, Britain has become a post-Christian society. The purpose of this chapter is to examine what kind of society has emerged in its place over these thirty years; to trace the link between the devaluation of life before birth and the devaluation of life after birth. Ironically, many of the secular commentators who helped hasten the process of deChristianisation are now to the fore in mourning the consequences of individualistic materialism, of selfishness and indifferentism. Few make any connection between the unravelling of Judaeo-Christian belief and practice, and the culture which has been built on its ruins. Obsessive interest in the failings of organised religion - and every excess from cruel inquisitions to individual failings of adherents - has obscured the extraordinary role which religions have played in shaping and safeguarding much that is fine in both our history and contemporary lives.

The Judaeo-Christian Legacy Ever since Augustine first arrived in Canterbury, Christians have been at the forefront of educational provision. The monastic schools and the universities of the Middle Ages were the seats of learning and civilisation; the Church provided the first grammar schools. It was the great evangelical Christian reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, who provided the ragged schools. From the earliest times, they provided education and relief for the poor and the sick. We still draw on this rich legacy. Teachers like the late Philip Lawrence epitomise all that is good in the tradition of providing an education which does not neglect the teaching of virtue.

Carers organising charitable welfare, teachers, and reformers - whether challenging slavery or eugenics - are all part of that same Christian legacy. We would be infinitely poorer without their contributions. All the great religions of the world have agreed that there is an eternal reality beyond the flux of temporal and natural things, which is both the basis for being and the basis for rationality. But