Religion provides the instruction manual for society. Constructing a moral framework for how individuals live, it establishes the principles that govern political choices. Its moral laws lay down the benchmarks for the temporal laws passed by parliaments. Since religion is timeless, its teachings are treated as sources of wisdom and ethical guidelines about how to act. It promotes civic values, builds social capital, and creates national character. Its normative influence binds people together. It is society’s cultural glue. Melanie Phillips

Human rights culture is steadily replacing the biblical codes that uphold reverence for human life, justice, and community obligations by a set of secular values tailored for a narcissistic and godless age. The result is a culture of human wrongs. Melanie Phillips

Anyone who identifies as part of a designated victim group is deemed to be beyond reproach. The only people who can ever be guilty are those deemed to be in power over such “victim” groups—men, the middle classes, white people, the sexually “hetero-normative.” In other words, mainstream society, whose principal crime is that it is mainstream and is therefore innately elitist, racist, exist, and oppressive towards any group considering itself to be disadvantaged by anything. Melanie Phillips

It’s as if people no longer see life as something that should be organized around a specific vocation, a calling that is their own way of doing good in the world. Everything feels personalized and miniaturized. The upper registers of moral life—fighting for freedom, struggling to end poverty—have been amputated for many. The awfulness of the larger society is a given. The best you can do is find a small haven in a heartless world. Melanie Phillips

The fragmentation of family life damages personal identity and can lead to a catastrophic loss of self-worth. This promotes promiscuity and the inability to form meaningful relationships. Melanie Phillips

These characteristics of irrationality and mind control made Eastern religious manifestations particularly attractive both to totalitarian movements of the Left and of the Right. Which is why the embrace of meditation, mindfulness, and other such practices reflecting “spiritual narcissism” isn’t just a harmless absurdity but part of the West’s ongoing cultural tragedy. Melanie Phillips

According to a study by Dutch researchers, practices such as mindfulness and meditation that are supposed to make people less judgmental and egotistical actually make them more self-centered and narcissistic. Melanie Phillips

A Pew study in 2009 found that people who described themselves as liberal were almost twice as likely to say they believe in astrology than self-described conservatives. Melanie Phillips

When man dumped God and assumed his role, this became the agenda of secular idealists who believed they could create paradise on earth. Stalinism is no more, but its legacy endures in new forms. That secular idealism is today channeled into a range of ideologies, all of which replace the biblical belief in a created world by the intention to create the world anew. Melanie Phillips