Societies without God are more benevolent

The pope's visit to Britain has been the perfect excuse for many commentators to traduce secularism

Writing sometime around the 10th century BC, the furious author of Psalm 14 thundered against those who say there is no God. "They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." If the denunciations of wicked atheists coming from today's apologists for religion are any guide, the spirit of Iron Age Israel is abroad in 21st-century Britain.

In advance of the pope's visit, clergymen and commentators are deploying every variety of bogus argument against those who advocate the superiority of secularism. Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs for the Catholic diocese of Westminster, led the way when he denounced the "wasteland" secularism produced. If he had been condemning the atheist tyrannies of communism and fascism, I would have no complaint. However, Adamus was not objecting to Cuba, China or North Korea, but to the wasteland of secular, democratic Britain "with its ever-increasing commercialisation of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the 'gay' agenda".

Rightwing columnists and, depressingly but predictably in these appeasing times, leftwing journalists have joined the moaning chorus. The arguments of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Professor Richard Dawkins that the cops had grounds to ask the pope to account for his church's failure to stop the rape of children in its care drove them wild. "The hysterical and abusive nature of some of the attacks on the pope will do nothing but discredit secularism," said Andrew Brown in the Guardian. "I accept, of course, that lots of secular humanists are tolerant and reasonable people," says the more restrained and judicious Stephen Glover of the Mail. "But there is a hard core which embraces and promotes atheism with the blind fervour of religious zealots."

Not that I agree with Robertson and Dawkins that the police should arrest the pope. The best way for anyone caught up in religious crimes to make amends is to convert to secularism. The odds are that they will be better people for it.

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