Of course religious people find talk like this frustrating because for real believers the question will always be, ‘Why do you not just believe?’ Yet this latter question ignores the most likely irreversible damage that science and historical criticism have done to the literal-truth claims of religion and ignores the fact that people cannot be forced into faith. Meantime the non-religious in our culture are deeply fearful of any debate or discussion that they think will make some concession to the religious, thereby allowing faith-based discussion to flood back into the public space.

This may be an error, not least because it encourages people to go to war with those whose lives and outlooks – whether they like this or not – descend from the same tree. There is no reason why the inheritor of a Judaeo-Christian civilisation and Enlightenment Europe should spend much, if any, of their time warring with those who still hold the faith from which so many of those beliefs and rights spring. Likewise there is little sense in those from a Judaeo-Christian civilisation and Enlightenment Europe, who between them maintain a different understanding, deciding that those who do not literally believe in God are therefore their enemies. Not least because we may yet face far clearer opponents not only of our culture but of our whole way of living. Perhaps this is why Benedetto Croce said halfway through the last century, and Marcello Pera reiterated more recently, that we should call ourselves Christians.5

Unless the non-religious are able to work with, rather than against, the source from which their culture came, it is hard to see any way through. After all, though people may try, it is unlikely that anyone is going to be able to invent an entirely new set of beliefs. In the absence of anyone coming up with a wholly new faith system, it is not just that we lose our ability to talk of truths and meaning. We even lose our metaphors. Popular culture is replete with talk of ‘angels’ and love that will last ‘forever’. Candles and other flotsam of religion also drift through. But the language and ideas are empty of meaning. It is the metaphor absent of the things to which it refers: symptoms of a culture running on empty.