The most-read post in the history of this little blog was this one. Written almost twenty years ago, it began with the words 

I regret that I have no religious faith.

To my surprise that regret has gone. Not because I have resigned myself, but because I am, once more, a Christian. Hence, this post is entitled “Credo 2”. 

When the late Mrs P. became a Roman Catholic, her church tried for a little while to make it a “twofer”. I had various contacts with priests and took a course in Catholicism at my local church. Not because I planned to join, but because I wanted to understand what the late Mrs P had done. This, after one of my daughters said she no longer knew what her mother would have thought about her life because: 

I knew mum well, but I don’t know Catholic mum at all.

I thought the course might help me tell my daughters what “Catholic Mum” would have thought at critical points in their lives. It was interesting and the other participants were lovely – an advertisement for their church by their personalities and behaviour –  but didn’t draw me in at all. I kept my initial promise not to evangelise for atheism, but to listen quietly. I only lost control of my tongue once, when the priest told us that God is so merciful that;

While we are certain there is a Hell, it is perfectly possible that it’s empty.

At which, I blurted out;

What?! Not even Stalin made it?!”

I won't be a fire and brimstone Christian. I sincerely hope that everyone makes it to Heaven, but one of the attractions of religious faith is surely the hope of justice? Stalin’s life was a complete success from his point of view. He died of natural causes without ever facing (thanks to his ferocious handling of potential enemies) even the fear of retribution. It's hard to imagine him rubbing shoulders in Heaven with the souls of his victims.

The other participants were nice Catholic ladies of a certain age. They empathised with my grief in widowerhood. I became a distraction, not because I was in any way disrupting the course, but because – once they got to know me – they spent a lot of time trying to bend their theology to get me into Heaven. When we parted, they promised to pray for me. Who knows? Perhaps their prayers were heard?

That said, I am not (yet) becoming a Catholic though the last contact I had with that church was – I think – the catalyst for what has now happened. Some 14 years ago, my Catholic friend the Navigator proposed a weekend outing to Oxford. The plan was to have a meal and a drink at the Eagle & Child pub there, where Tolkien and CS Lewis (who called it "The Bird and Baby") had read the manuscripts of the Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books to each other over pipes and pints. 

On the way there, he’d asked me to turn into the driveway of an old house on the river as there was someone he wanted me to meet. The someone was Father Andrew of Opus Dei. I sighed but went along with it. Father Andrew was – as has been every priest I’ve met in the wake of the late Mrs P’s conversion – intelligent, articulate and thoughtful. At the end of our conversation, I’d said essentially what I said in that long-ago blog post. I knew I owed the civilisation I lived in to Christianity. I could see how it was deteriorating as faith died. For myself I’d love to believe again as I had as a child, but I just couldn’t get past the idea of faith – of belief without evidence.

He said to stop trying. He said (paraphrasing from memory after a very long time);

Get in the water and paddle about. Don’t worry about evidence, just pray.

On the basis of Pascal’s Wager, I took that advice. For years I have been (and only my Catholic friend knew this) a “praying atheist”. I have found it a useful exercise. I don’t know what, if anything, my prayers meant to God. I do know that they changed me. 

You may say, gentle reader, that daily meditation might have done as much. That taking time out to focus on the truly important is good for mental health. You may think, and you might be right, that I have self-administered a form of therapy. Perhaps. I don’t know. I can only say that it didn’t feel that way. 

For ten years, I noticed no effect at all. In the past few years, I began to see that the nature of my prayer was changing. I had begun in full Stephen-Fry-meeting-God mode. He famously said once that, if he was wrong in his atheism, and eventually met God, he would have a lot of issues to raise with Him. My prayers consisted largely of an (on reflection) incredibly-arrogant critique of how God “If You Exist” was doing His job. 

Apart from the obvious points made by atheists about injustice, poverty, war, childhood cancers etc., I had very specific criticisms to offer. Why was I held to the test of faith, for example, when it seemed He was quite happy to call young Spanish and French virgins to sainthood by having the Virgin Mary appear to them in person? 

After a decade of this narcissistic nonsense, I began to pray thankfully. My life, by comparison with most humans alive today - and still more with most humans who have ever lived - is what the woke call “privileged”. I was given gifts of skill and intellect that allowed me a rewarding and entertaining career. I have seen more of the world than all the members of my family in history combined. I had a loving upbringing to begin with, I had my health (despite taking no care of myself). I have been loved by fine people, I have splendid friends and above all I have my daughters.

In short, I had many reasons to be thankful and no-one to thank. I found myself - while still not believing in His existence - thanking God. Again, you may just say I’d self-therapised myself out of depression and was seeing the bright side of life. Again, I’d just say you might be right but that’s not how it felt to me. 

A few short weeks ago, to my entire surprise, I began to pray as usual and found that by the time I said “Amen” something in me had changed. What my Catholic friend called “The God-shaped hole in my life” was filled and a huge burden lifted from my shoulders. Please don’t get me wrong, I have heard no voice from Heaven. Nothing has been “said” to me in words. I simply feel different and better. 

This world is no closer to how I’d like it to be but somehow it’s a relief to feel that Someone somewhere has a plan I just can't grasp. I no longer have to feel responsible for everything that’s wrong.

I have been breaking the news slowly to the people I care about. I still haven’t told my daughters and must give some thought to that. 

My most atheist friend, after his initial shock, made the thoughtfully kind point that – if I don’t join a specific church – I will miss out on the benefit of fellowship, which in my lonely widowerhood might be a great advantage. I shall take my time over that. The Catholics began this process and I am grateful. There is much about their church that is appealing, but – unlike my late wife – I am still more Armani than Versace. The gilded glamour of Catholicism and its graven images is all a bit off-putting. As, more importantly, is the interposition of the priesthood between God and people.

I have been given only feelings. I've received no words of advice. I know nothing that suggests God has any positive feelings about any one Christian church over another. It would feel very odd to visit all the Christian churches around me, comparison shopping, as if I were putting my soul out to tender.

It’s just too soon, I think. It’s taken almost fifteen years for the seed planted in Oxford to take root. It may take a while longer to see precisely which tree is growing. I can only say for now that I am happy to be of the same faith as my ancestors; the faith that made our civilisation what it is. The faith that spoke to – and in their books through – Tolkien and CS Lewis.

I don't know where I go from here, to be honest. But a turmoil in me that I have lived with for decades has stilled. I am no longer afraid and for that I am thankful. If you are that way inclined, gentle reader, please pray for guidance for me. If my news has disappointed you, I am sorry and will pray for you.

There are some grounds for optimism. They are:

• The Supreme Court (how I hate that stupid Tony Blair name for the highest court in a country where the constitution consists of three words – "Parliament is supreme") has thrown the entire public sector into turmoil by answering a question so obvious that every sane person is embarrassed it was ever asked.
• President Trump is a brilliant negotiator, a reasonably competent businessman but an economic illiterate, it seems. Still, he's shaking up the corrupt parasites preying on American taxpayers pretty well. I find it hard to imagine that his term will end without seriously positive changes to the behaviour of the US Federal government. Let's hope so. At least, for the first time since Ron Reagan left office, the American people have a President who is on their side.
• President Milei in Argentina, the only politician in the world I could vote for entirely without reservations, is achieving undeniable success. It seems likely his democratic mandate will be renewed despite the vicious campaign against him by the parasitical classes in Argentina and elsewhere. 

Yet still I fear the endarkenment – my word for the sustained attack on Enlightenment values that seems to represent current standard thinking.

I had dinner with two good friends this week. The guy is my best friend in the world and I have known him and his wife since they first met. They know two of my three friends in London and asked about them. I mentioned that I had feared losing one of them because of her inexplicable (to me) pro-"Palestine" stance. "Let's stop you there" they said. "We're pro-Palestine too". The wife continued "We can't side with genocide."

We changed the subject and moved on, but my heart sank. If you thought the trans issue was embarrassingly simple, it's as nothing when you consider the war in Gaza. If not indoctrinated in an Islamic country, the morality of the situation is incredibly obvious.

Israel is a free, democratic country. Its citizens - many of them Arabs – all have equal civil rights. Arguably, the only Arabs with civil rights in the Middle East and certainly the only female Arabs, are those in Israel. It's not a problem for an Arab to live in the Jewish State, yet Israel's enemies scream "apartheid". To do so honestly, requires blind stupidity. It is near impossible for a Jew to live in an Arab state. Jewish populations have declined to near zero in all of them. Yet an Arab judge on Israel's Supreme Court could and did sit in judgement on Prime Minister Netanyahu. There are Arab members of the Knesset. There are Arab Israelis in every national institution - including the Israel Defence Force. It's deceptive to call Israel an apartheid state. Clever propagandists are using the term maliciously because "apartheid" is one of those concepts that everyone in the West agrees is wrong. It's a smear.

We all agree that "genocide" is wrong too. Genocide is very wrong. That's why the propagandists of the "Palestinian" cause dishonestly use the word constantly. Yet the IDF's success in minimising civilian casualties in Gaza – despite the fact that Hamas systematically uses civilians as human shields – is arguably the most remarkable aspect of this story. The IDF's  rate of civilian casualties in Gaza is lower than that of the United States Armed Forces and their allies in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's actually lower than the Allies (the last warriors all my friends would agree were fighting a just war) achieved in World War II. The IDF is actually the only army in history to risk greater casualties on its own side by alerting the enemy to their next targets to give civilians the chance to get out of the way. That's nuts. It's also a waste of time because Hamas kills them if they try to run. Hamas wants civilian casualties for propaganda purposes and its leaders boast that "the wombs of our women will replace the dead".

Genocide – the systematic elimination of an entire people - is the actual goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and all Islamist terrorists. It's also the goal of their chief state sponsor - the Islamic Republic of Iran. When their side screams "genocide" at Israel, they're either lying (if they're intelligent) or projecting (if they're ignorant). The indoctrinated morons amongst them assume their enemy wants to do to them what they would do to the Jews if they could. 

As my best friend in Israel once said – "Imagine the Arab Muslims were magically disarmed. You would have peace. Imagine Israel was magically disarmed. You would have genocide."

This simple thought experiment is really all you need to know. My educated and intelligent friends have the capacity for such thought. of course. They're just not using it. They're soaking up as gospel the mainstream narrative from Western Academia and the media, which is that – in simple binary Critical Race Theory terms (facts notwithstanding) Israel is white and therefore an oppressor, whereas the Arabs attacking her are brown and therefore oppressed.

Israel may be the only modern state established without violence or conquest. It was formed by a UN resolution setting out a two state solution under which the Jews gave up most of the historic land of Israel to the Arabs. The Jews in Israel accepted that solution. Their Arab neighbours rejected it and attacked over and again – attempting to wipe out the Jewish state. They have repeatedly been defeated and have lost lands in the process. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of modern Israel, invited Arab locals to stay. Those who did are the only Arabs in the region with equal civil rights. Those persuaded to flee by their Arab brothers promising to wipe Israel out, have been kept in camps as "refugees" and turned into a new synthetic people – the "Palestinians". Their Arab brothers have othered them, keeping them and their descendants in camps when they could have been accepted either in Israel (which would have taken back those who formerly lived there) or in the Arab states that actually took over the land allocated by the UN in 1948 for them to live in. 

Until Yasser Arafat with advice from the KGB, came up with the propaganda concept of Palestine in the 1960s, there had never been a state of Palestine even in imagination. Arafat was an Egyptian and his passport that showed him as born in Jerusalem was a KGB forgery. The lands naifs and scoundrels now call "Palestine" were territories of first the Roman and then the Ottoman Empires. Palestine was geography not politics. Like Leicestershire, but without even a local authority. 

Gaza is a former Egyptian territory captured by Israel during one of these many genocidal attacks. It ceded the territory voluntarily to its Arab occupants, not in the hope that they would do anything different than they actually did (Israel's history of being constantly under attack does not allow for such naivety) but under pressure from the "international community" to allow for the possibility for an independent "Palestinian" entity to emerge there. International aid has poured into Gaza in billions. None has been used to build the mediterranean Paradise it could have been. Billions have been stolen by the Hamas leadership to fund their lifestyles in Quatar and London. Fewer billions have been diverted into building tunnels for military purposes and raining missiles constantly on Israel. 

This war didn't begin on October 7th, Israel's enemies say. In this they are right. The war has never stopped. Israel has simply adopted a defensive stance and sheltered beneath its "Iron Dome" of anti-missile defences. It's accepted regular modest casualties in order to avoid all out war. I suspect it has done so partly because – pressured in some cases by electorally-influential Muslim populations in former Western allies – it's aware that support for it defending itself is weakening.

The brutal inhumanity of the October 7th pogrom, the worst genocidal violence against the Jews since World War II, simply triggered the current campaign to wipe out Hamas's military capabilities and to rescue the hostages. Gaza is under the iron grip of Hamas. There are no independent journalists in there. All the statistics and "information" reported in the Western press and accepted as gospel by my intelligent, well-meaning but misinformed friends, emanate from Hamas. One dead civilian is too many. One dead civilian child is too many. But if you don't want civilian casualties, just don't start a war. And in particular don't start one sheltering your fighters and their weaponry behind your civilians, in their homes and in your hospitals.

Before Hitler made anti-semitism unfashionable, it was common on both Left and Right. Stalin began World War II as Hitler's ally. He would have ended it as such, were Hitler not (thank God) a fool. International Socialism's problems with National Socialism were doctrinal – the kind of factionalism common - thank God - on the Left. Stalin didn't believe that socialism in one country (even a big, resource-rich country such as Hitler planned to make by murdering his way into lebensraum) was possible. It wasn't Hitler's attitude to the Jews that was a problem to Stalin. It was his lack of global ambition!

The greatest propaganda feat in history was the Left's post-war success in disassociating themselves from their erstwhile ally. Hitler was a man of the Left. Those of us on the Right have been demonised forever by the notion – now universally accepted  – that he was the extreme version of us, not yet another extreme version of them. So perhaps it's not surprising that, as the last survivors of VE Day pass away, antisemitism (mostly unconscious and/or euphemised as anti-Zionism) is back. 

I am genuinely afraid just how deep is the darkness that is coming.