John Azzopardi is always boasting about the “triumph” of faith in Africa and in Third World countries, all of which have no knowledge whatsoever of European intellectual development from the 18th century. Europe is now secularised and de-Christianised, so much so that God is not even mentioned in the EU Constitution. How did this come about? Richard Tarnas says this in his book The Passion of the Western Mind, in a chapter entitled ‘The triumph of secularism “In the 18th century, Hume and Kant systematically refuted the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence... Neither human reason nor the empirical evidence could give any direct or unequivocal indication of a divine reality.

“If the unsentimental human reason could adhere closely to the concrete evidence, there was no necessity to posit the existence of such a God and much that argued against it.”

The 19th century brought the Enlightenment’s secular progression to its logical conclusion as Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, Haeckel, Spencer,Huxley and Nietzsche all sounded the death knell of traditional religion.

The Judaeo-Christian God was man’s own creation and God was “an unnecessary hypothesis”.

“With its apocalyptic prophecies and world saviour motifs, its miracle stories, moralisms and veneration of saints and relics, Christianity seemed best understood as a singularly successful folk myth.”

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