Be careful before we swap Christianity for Islam

Over the years, it’s become fashionable to describe many countries, including Ireland, as post-Christian societies.

If that’s true, we’ve sold our heritage very cheaply. Something will fill the vacuum.

It won’t be secularism, which after all is more a series of building blocks for human development and understanding, irrespective of the religious faith which sustains us.

It won’t be nationalism, which is more and more evidently an exclusive and sectarian construct, derivative in nature and blighted by violent paradigms (as evidenced by our continuing love affair with the ‘Men of 1916’ and the whole mythology of the Easter Rising).

It won’t be materialism, which is limited to transient satisfaction and comfort.

It may be something much more all embracing and demanding, something spiritual and physical, something which is staring us in the face at this very moment. That something is Islam.

The religion which defines itself as the way of submission to the will of Allah.

But the will of Allah as understood, enforced and spread to the corners of the earth by whom?

And by what means?

And by whose all-too-human authority?

These are questions worth asking before we consign the richest part of our heritage to the annals of history.

Richard Dowling

Patrick Street

Mountrath

Co Laois