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As the West turns on its religious and cultural traditions, it is succumbing to the 'soft totalitarianism' of irrational, relativist ideals. With the Islamists intent on returning the free world to the 7th century, it seems western civilization is no longer willing or able to defend modernity and rationalism. In "The World Turned Upside Down", Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of human irrationality is the slow but steady marginalisation of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based. Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonised, and the US is vilified over the war on terror - all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda. Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.
