A response to a Facebook post:

" Christianity deviated from its principles very early according to a couple of books on the early Christian church I read, one written by a Christian. However, I believe that more good occurred than bad and after 300 years and the decline of the Roman Empire the Christian Faith started to shine mostly because of a big promotion by Constantine who may have not been a confirmed Christian but did want some form of unity and used the Christian Faith to get it. For me, that is the key to the great development of Christian civilisation warts and all, an effect we still feel to this day and a great effect. That bad versus good tension is there within the religion all the way through e.g. Christians developed African slavery around the 16th century and Christians in America and the UK got rid of it in the 19th. In other words the religion contains its own seeds of redemption as all religions do. On a personal note I am quite flawed myself and I see the same process at work of mistakes by commission or omission and redemption by getting it right. According to my wife not right enough sometimes!

I do not worry about fundamentalists today because they are legally and militarily fenced in by social democratic forces which I have complete and utter faith in even though as a family which is in a minority religion we have been got at mostly through the education system because of that minority status. It is the same for several people who I have come across in particular Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and all of this in North Yorkshire and Darlington County Durham. Prejudice is alive and well but one of the best things that new Labour ever did in my view was the Human Rights Act 1998 because I felt personally protected by that act and still do: it stays the hand of some of the idiots and they have to look over their shoulder before they do what they do.

 I do not believe in party politics but I do support a democratically elected government no matter how flawed and governments of all stripes do some pretty good things. The home education I did with my boys only came about because of the 1944 Butler Education Act and Butler was a Tory. There is a lot of bad in our system but a whole ton of good as well. It is a legitimate from you, me and virtually everybody I know that we should aim higher and get better justice for people on low incomes, the disabled and the old and I am sure even within this flawed system we are going to get that but like all struggles it has highs and lows and at the moment I think there is a low. But not too low it could be a lot worse and has been!"