One is held by Piers Morgan, who has just left ITV's Good Morning Britain breakfast programme in a huff. It is doubtless shared by millions of less voluble Britons.

According to Mr Morgan, Meghan's contribution to the Oprah Winfrey interview was a ‘diatribe of bilge'.

He declared with characteristically colourful hyperbole that he ‘didn't believe a word she says' and ‘wouldn't believe it if she read me a weather report'.

The opposing view — dominant on Twitter, favoured by the BBC, and supposedly held by most young people — is that Meghan is a victim of racism, and that all her allegations about the Royal Family must be unconditionally accepted.

Some who sign up to this set of beliefs go further.

They maintain that white people either have no right to doubt the Duchess's testimony or, even more tendentiously, that anyone who does so must be racist.

Here are two examples.

In The Sun newspaper, a black journalist, Nana Acheampong, wrote: ‘If Meghan is telling you that she suffered racism in the Palace, then she did. Anyone who suggests otherwise is not black.'

Meanwhile, on the Thought For Today slot on Radio Four's Today programme a young Anglican ordinand, Jayne Manfredi, also nailed her colours to Meghan's mast.

She spoke of the ‘deeper malaise' evinced by the ‘backlash' against Meghan, who ‘had the audacity to tell her own truth'.

So there we have it.

Many of those who rally to Meghan's cause do so because she is a youngish woman of mixed race, and therefore anything she says must be believed without qualification.

And those who question any part of her account (which, it must be said, was delivered with extraordinary aplomb) are written off as old, reactionary, mean-spirited and bigoted.

How did it come to this?

There have always been hotly contested differences of opinion - between Left and Right, Christians and atheists, pro-abortionists and anti-abortionists, and so on.

But people used often to arrive at these opposing views through the exercise of reason.

No longer.

Many uncritically believe Meghan's very serious allegations against the Royal Family because of her background.

In their view, it's not what she says that makes her right. It's what she is.

I accept, of course, that we all see the world through the prism of our ethnicity, class and age.

But if we do no more than that — if we refuse to consider the facts as dispassionately as we are able to — we will end up with a fractious and divided society.

Despite what Jayne Manfredi says, truth is not something personal to us.

It's not something we can own as individuals.

It's an absolute, always hard to attain and sometimes even to recognise, but nonetheless the lodestar of any civilised community.

Despite what Jayne Manfredi says, truth is not something personal to us.

It's not something we can own as individuals.

It's an absolute, always hard to attain and sometimes even to recognise, but nonetheless the lodestar of any civilised community.

Let's examine what the Duchess said.

I think Piers Morgan was wrong to dismiss her entire interview as ‘bilge', not least because it suggests that her revelations about her suicidal thoughts can be swept aside.

He is saying she is either a fantasist or a liar — or both.

That's rash. Continue reading

Jillette, part of the Penn & Teller illusionist team, is the author of Every Day is an Atheist Holiday and God, No!

Morgan, former editor of British national newspapers including the Daily Mirror, hosts Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN.

During their discussion on the CNN show, Morgan listed some Catholic rulings that are not spelt out in Scripture, such as priestly celibacy, no remarriage for divorced Catholics, and no female priests.

He said none of these actually came from Jesus Christ's mouth, prompting Jillette to respond by saying that Morgan sounded like a Protestant.

"That was Martin Luther saying that an individual…could interpret the Bible themselves," Jillette said. "The idea, as I understand it, of the Catholic Church is that it's not interpreting the Bible yourself. You have somebody who is actually able to do that….

"It seems like you either agree or you don't," Jillette argued. "You either say, like Martin Luther, I'm going to have a direct relationship with the word of God, or I'm going to go through a conduit of God on earth, which would be the pope."

Earlier the atheist magician asked Morgan, "You call yourself a Catholic. Don't you follow everything?"

Morgan replied, "No, that's the point. I have become increasingly like many young Catholics, I think, really disgruntled by the failure of successive popes and the Vatican to move at all with the times when society is changing so fast."

Jillette responded: "I would say on my side that if you have someone who is a conduit to God and is speaking God's word, even if you can't understand exactly what God's plan is, even if you do see suffering that you consider unacceptable, or any suffering is unacceptable, that still doesn't mean you get to vote on what God actually believes."

Source:

Christian Post

Image: Knowledge Video