Ideally one wants to banish fear from one's thinking, in order to assess the difficulties and dangers at their true worth; provided one remembers that the courage of the battery commander is different from the courage of the regimental commander, and the courage of the general is most cautious of all. Someone once wrote, “Perfect love casts out fear”; with qualifications, I agree.
This is the “good news” that the writers of the Report confessed themselves impotent to find. When two people trust each other absolutely, it is impossible to divorce them! It is not surprising that a Report, which had little that was wise to say to the secular world, should have been bankrupt in idealism as well. Nor is it surprising that more recent pronouncements by the Church of England on how to run a secular society are met with derision. In the professional world, you do not employ someone a second time, when on the first occasion they led you into disaster. The Church was given a unique opportunity to advise on a subject she should have known all about; and the writers of the Report threw it away.
I am not saying that two people who are atheists can never trust each other absolutely. They may be able to; but if so, then they must have as complete a confidence in the intangible spiritual world as they have in the tangible outer world. If God exists, and is the living reality in the intangible world, then one way or another they will have to come to terms with him. In a much lower key, there is the similar problem of how to reconcile love of friends with love of God. Marriage between husband and wife is only a very special type of friendship; and the argument put forward in the New Testament to prove that a man cannot reconcile God and marriage can be used just as legitimately to prove that a man cannot reconcile God and friendship. The argument runs, “How can a man please God, if all the time he has to be thinking how he is going to please his wife?”. However if that argument is taken…