Where I part company with many Catholics is in the admonition by Christ to 'love your neighbour'. It is an impossible injunction. Neighbour means 'everyone in the world', not just those squatting near to you. While a worthy objective, it is entirely implausible, irrational, and unworthy even regarding moral concerns. Consider the 'neighbour', such as a Moslem, who enters your village, burns your church, rapes your woman and takes your daughter into sex-slavery. Only a fool and a simpleton would 'love' that neighbour.

What morality is there in being a coward, a moron, and requesting the villain to repeat his act in the future ? A real human with a sense of right and wrong would track the Moslem down and kill him, save his daughter and join forces with others to eradicate the Moslem's cult. That is the human and rational response, and there is nothing wrong with it. The old Hebrew adage was perfectly stated, 'do onto others as they do to you'. Depending on the circumstance this is entirely a valid proposition.

Edward Gibbon was an old, fat, Tory-aristocratic fool, who wrote an unreadable book on the Fall of Rome, because the subject matter was only fitting for a man of his girth and ego. There is little in this book of mishmash that makes any sense, but it is taken as a sort of gospel by the big-brains in academia and advertised as an important 'work', to be read by impressionable students, who might believe that Gibbon had a brain and knew his subject. Pity them.

Gibbon in his demented world-view, which was violently anti-Catholic, effuses his anti-Church bigotry with the remarkably inane view that Christian pacifism pulled down Rome. The students never hear about Gibbon's philosophical disposition to naturalism, dialecticism and anti-Catholicism do they? Christians, along with Jews, fought in the Roman army, and were the only segments of society who did not murder en-masse their babies. Christian 'pacificism', or the Gospel of 'love thy neighbour', was no more responsible for Rome's self-implosion itself a process of civil war, corruption, unfettered bureaucracy and taxation, inflation, monetary debasement, and economic contractions; than the elliptical orbit of the earth around the Sun. It is absurd.

The point of love your neighbour is only valid if you know thy neighbour and can reason with thy neighbour in order to resolve disputes large and petty; and also to engage in charity and aid. This New Testament 'law' is indeed novel, important and in many ways revolutionary. But it does not apply to those you don't know, that don't share your culture or world-view, or who want to hurt, maim, or kill you and your family. Loving thy neighbour who wants to crucify you, is a remarkable abdication of rationality and common-sense – both of which are pillars of church teaching. You cannot reach faith without reason. And you certainly cannot love thy neighbour if you end up beheaded, crucified or smashed to bits by said neighbour.

As Saint Augustine said, self-defence and 'righteous' war or conflict is not only normal in human affairs, but vital to preserve civilization.