If you've got €10 to spare ...

... You might like to pick up one of the Tarot kits on offer at Easons. Price €9.99. For that you get a set of Tarot cards, a book explaining how to use them and an hour-long explanatory DVD. I saw a stack of them there today. For the benefit of foreign readers, this is one of the major Dublin bookshops we're talking about.

A phrase beginning with the words "A man who stops believing in God ..." springs to mind.

The only remotely positive thing about this stomach-churning sight was that the stack of Tarot kits looked relatively untouched; not too many people seem to have been willing to splash out on one, even for such a low price.

My goodness, I thought, is there no hope for western civilisation? I went downstairs and browsed in the religion section (now rebranded "Spirituality"), but that did not improve my mood. That section contained outright attacks on Christianity (the Hitchens-Dawkins oeuvre), sensationalist accounts of the Secret Marriage of Our Lord and Mary Magdalene and the Sinister Vatican Plot To Cover It All Up, and various thought-for-the-day-type tomes by ageing 1960's relics like Fr Brian Darcy - but scarcely a single orthodox work. There were spiritual classics, of course, like the writings of St Teresa of Avila and St. Augustine, but there were hardly any books by a modern conservative writer. C.S. Lewis was about the only one - and he died in 1963! Is it any wonder that people, deprived of spiritual nourishment from the Christian churches, are turning to things like Tarot?

I thought of writing a cross letter to the manager of Easons; maybe I will yet. But I think the best way to react to things like Tarot kits with the pitying contempt they deserve.