A Ban on God

http://www.christian.org.uk/news/downton-abbey-banned-god-for-fear-of-alienating-viewers/
 So now we know why God does not feature in Downton Abbey: He was banned from it. For all those years! All those hours of filming! All those times when we didn't quite notice that we never saw the beginning of a meal, only its middle or end, so as to avoid the potentially offensive matter of saying Grace. The actors knew it, inevitably; did not one of them object to such a systematic distortion of history? This Downton development is not as silly as one might think. One could say it's a sign of our times, and ties in grimly with recent events in this sense: that the glaring absence, in the reaction to the Paris massacre, has been the absence of any clerical figure either commenting or praying or advising. Not a single one. A desert of Christianity has descended on Western Europe. It's as if these outrageous, terroristic attacks have outed the West as a full-on secular society. And to see the rest of the world projecting the Tricolore blue, white and red as a mark of solidarity, or singing La Marseillaise, is almost surreally ironic. For of course France did declare itself a secular state in the late 18th century - not with peace and love, but with the streets of Paris awash with blood - in that instance, the blood of royals, nobles and priests. This secular West is also very sad. Confronted with young men who are all too eager to die in the cause of their version of Allah, all we can muster are small public gestures (flowers, candles), improvised symbols (Eiffel peace sign) and hashtag declarations. I doubt the ones who hate the West with a passion are trembling at this. They know that not one cafe patron is going to give up his life for the ideology of having a cup of coffee, or of eating dinner on a rickety outdoor table - which is what these 'values' everyone is talking about seem to amount to.