I count myself a rationalist and a skeptic, and I find myself constantly defending Christians and Christianity...All the things that we value, the right of free speech, the right of the individual conscience, these evolved in first and second century Roman Christendom, where the individual Christian said, 'I have a right to believe, what I believe and not what the Emperor tells me.' From that our whole idea of democracy and the equality that we have has developed...We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have and to slight it and to dismiss it as being irrelevant is the detritus of rather ill read minds, I think.

John Rhys-Davies to The Christian Post