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By Melanie Phillips

'In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. More and more people are signing up to weird and wacky cults, parapsychology, séances, paganism and witchcraft and believe ludicrous conspiracy theories like 9/11 was an American plot.

The basic reason for all this is a steady loss of faith in God. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible but in fact the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible which gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based.

The loss of religious belief has meant the west has replaced reason and truth by ideology and prejudice, which it enforces like a secular inquisition. The result has been a kind of mass derangement as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. As a result, scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized and the US vilified over the war on terror -- all on the basis of falsehoods and propaganda which are believed as truth.

As a result of these medieval-style witch-hunts, the west is losing both its rationality and its freedoms and is succumbing instead to a 'soft totalitarianism', which is not only creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. With the Islamists intent on returning the free world to the 7th century, the west no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.'