WHAT are the greatest evils of our time? You might suggest the atomic bomb or the possibility of germ warfare; or abortion or football, or celebrities or EastEnders or opera in the park, or the national obsession with the mawkish also-ran Tim Henman.

You will therefore probably think that I'm going over the top when I say that one of the greatest evils of our age is the mobile phone. But surely, the mobile improves communication and is an indispensable, life-saving tool in emergencies? Perhaps.

But what's the good of more communication? As Kinglsey Amis remarked, "More means worse". Or as William of Occam put it: "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" - which being translated means roughly, "Come along lads, you don't need all that crap". And crap is definitely what you get over the mobile. I have never - throughout so many thousands of train journeys and adventures in the high street - ever heard anyone say anything remotely interesting - let alone life-saving - over the mobile. They all talk like squeaky dolly birds or insouciant businessmen trying to impress us; either oiks or Beckhamites, clubbers or tarts.

The evil of mobile phones is that they destroy decent human relationships. Anybody walking down the street and turning on his mobile - or called up by his bosom friend to talk drivel - immediately loses all sense of direction and bumps into fellow pedestrians. In concerts at our church mobiles are a nightmare: just what you don't want to erupt during a soft prelude by Bach. I once had a woman turn up to Holy Communion and at the altar her phone went off. She held out one hand to receive the Blessed Sacrament and the other was deployed to clutch the mobile to her ear.

And ringtones! People are so keen on having fashionable ringtones. Could there be anything more babyish? Who bloody cares what noises these idiots want to make when they get in touch with one another? And there is a latent and practical fascism in the phenomenon of the mobile. Have you noticed? A beautiful woman is sitting in your drawing room, reading Schopenhauer and enjoying a glass of Chianti and a strong French cigarette. Suddenly her mobile goes off. Immediately she suspends all natural conversation with you in favour of this remote and artificial jabber to some numbskull 20 miles away.

You will say I exaggerate, but, I mean, you get these morons ringing you on their mobiles, and could anything be worse? They are phoning from the middle of town and you can't hear them for the traffic. Frankly I don't want to listen. I'm not prepared to make the effort. If you really want to speak to me, then do so in the accepted forms which, until our recent insanity, society has always adhered to.

Mobiles are living - I mean dead - symbols of egocentricity and self-obsession. People don't use them in order to listen; they use them in order to prattle their mindless self-advertisement: "I'm on a train". Who cares if you're on a train? I'd rather you were lying down, you loquacious idiot, tied to the track awaiting a close encounter with the 6.40 express from Luton. Mobiles are a great fraud and a kind of pornography, the electronic version of counterfeit, of everything that is noisy, brainless and insincere: in short a sign of the vast, stupid, self-regarding decadence of our times. The ringtones of hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange