Having faith and lacking reason

GERALD Warner’s column (Strictly Speaking, 5 May) is an inversion of reality.

Nazism and Communism are not the inevitable product of the Enlightenment but are, in fact, the consistent result 
of the rejection of reason in favour of mysticism.

Totalitarian rule is only possible in a country that is not open to reason and that practises faith. That is why Russia was under the despotic rule of the Czars for centuries, and that rule paved the way for the tyranny of the Bolsheviks.

If militant secularism really is the precursor of dictatorship, then how does Mr Warner explain the totalitarian theocracies of the Middle East and of the Dark Ages?

Bruce Crichton, Falkirk