Churches in unity? Dream on, your Holiness

I am pretty happy with my life, but I know it must come to an end and I am not worried about that either, except I hope it will not hurt: the perfect conclusion would be to keel over after a slap-up dinner, my last gasp flavoured with oysters, asparagus, foie gras and claret. As for an afterlife, I am positively averse to it. Flapping around in some immaterial sphere for eternity strikes me as tedious in itself and as likely to sour the savour of every enjoyment I have had here. And will the most interesting characters not be in the other place?

Entertaining this outlook on life and death, I can view with detachment the inability of religious people to attain or even promote the peace they all say they aspire to. Instead, at every opportunity, they fight like cats in a sack. The latest example has come in the reaction to the remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in advance of his visit to Scotland this year.

He is a learnd chap, but I doubt if he has spent much time labouring in Scottish history's vineyard, with its stony soil and gnarled growths. As you might expect of a Pope, the Reformation is the latest thing there that interests him. And, naturally, the Reformation is a Bad Thing, a "tragedy of division" as he called it in his address to the Scottish bishops at the Vatican. Benedict went on to express the hope this division would one day be healed, indeed that all Churches will come together in Christian unity. It is easy to read into his remarks what more precisely he means: that the others, including the Scots Kirk, will return to Rome, though he was diplomatic enough not to spell that out.

Dream on, your Holiness. But while a great many Christians ramble on about unity, I often doubt they really mean it. The early Church, largely drawn from the oppressed underclass, was not seriously split. With the conversion of Constantine in 336, the Roman Empire took over the Church and all hell was let loose, if the metaphor may be permitted.

Like the empire itself, Christianity started splitting and splitting again, and continues to do so right down to our own day. Whenever it runs out of reasons to split, it thinks of new ones, these days the sex or the sexual activity of its priests. If we were to take Christianity as an object of organisation theory, we could only conclude that split, not unity, is its normal condition. In the United States, where there has never been an established Church, though no hindrance to unity by free consent either, Christianity is more split than anywhere else and becomes more split by the year.

Yet what I really do not get about Christianity is why the splits should then lead to persecutions. Again, this started with the early Church and its heretics, and again in modern America there are fundamentalist Christians who think it perfectly all right, say, to murder the doctors and nurses at abortion clinics; here is a record of 2,000 years of grim intolerance. As it happens, I rather disapprove of abortion myself when adoption is easily available.

But then I am a soppy western liberal believing in personal and public freedom, or political and economic liberty. I have never met anybody else of the same persuasion who wants to kill those that disagree with us. In the world today, more or less the only people who go around killing others on the grounds of their differing beliefs or opinions are religious people. They are mainly Islamic fundamentalists (far from typical of all Islam, I hasten to add), yet Christians have been no better. "Kill the lot of them," said the medieval inquisitor on seeing a captured crowd of suspected heretics. "God will know his own." It is true that, in order to perpetrate mass murder, you do not have to be religious; Communism and Nazism were the worst of all. Yet being religious helps. You know then, as you kill, that God is on your side.

Still, so soppy a western liberal am I that I would defend to the last ditch the right of Pope Benedict XVI to say what he has to say – not, you understand, as the Truth but as a "contribution to the debate". In fact, I would also support some of the particular points he made when directing the attention of his Scottish bishops to things they need to battle against. No more than he do I consider it should be illegal for Catholic adoption agencies to refuse custom from gay couples; the agencies are entitled to disapprove of homosexuality if they wish, quite apart from the fact their Church instructs them to do so, and there are other places where gay couples can go. Nor would I approve of Scotland making any move to abolish separate Catholic schooling so long as Catholics want it – and all the evidence is that they do.

Soppy as my liberalism is, I fear a time is near when it will just have to get savvier, not to say sterner. The liberating forces of my youth have, by the time of my middle age, themselves become oppressive. I need look no further than Harriet Harman's obnoxious Equality Bill, now pending before parliament, to see one man's tolerance turn into another woman's tyranny. Its declared purpose is "not only to build a new economic order but a new social order". I think I have read this sort of thing before – but perhaps, as I have already mentioned Communism and Nazism, I need labour the point no further.

It is typical of the way socialists, having been forced to forget their ruinous economics, seek a new sphere for their control freakery in trying to impose on each of us a uniform personal morality fashioned to their liking. In Scotland, the potential of this is, if anything, worse than in England. Not only have the ruinous economics never at heart been abandoned: all parties would still pursue them if they could. But it has long been accepted by most Scots that the state knows best about everything, even as its manifest failures stare them in the face. If no other public figure is going to point out the folly and peril of all this, then it will have to be an 83-year-old German celibate sitting in Rome.