© Rex FeaturesEmbattled professor:Richard Dawkins
The anger last week against the smug anti-religion brigade was quite startling.
Atheism has had a bad week. First there was the contest between the Church and the unbelievers' Vicar on Earth which ended with a score of God 1, Richard Dawkins 0. Then the equality commissar, Trevor Phillips, came along with a stunningly inept analogy between Christian observance and sharia law - and got so resoundingly pilloried that he had to be carried off the field. Make no mistake: it was atheism that was on manoeuvres here. It may have marched under the banner of "secularism" but that was a deliberately misleading and, as it turned out, not very successful tactic. As Professor Dawkins himself said in one of his broadcasting appearances, secularism and atheism are different things.
You bet they are. Secularism as understood, for example, in the United States - the most famously successful secular society in history - is no enemy of religious belief. The separation of church and state enshrined in the American Constitution is designed to guarantee the freedom of worship: to protect the observance of all faiths from oppression or interference by the state. It is the ultimate acknowledgement of the importance - in effect, of the sacrosanct nature - of religious belief and practice, regarding it as one of the "unalienable" human rights.
This principle has been revisited just recently in a spectacular clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win.
