Too right they do. Especially these days when people turn themselves into human bombs and blow countless innocents to bits in the expectation that they will be rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise.

Islamic terrorism and the demented beliefs that fuel it have given all religion a bad name.

But this kind of death cult can scarcely be equated to the "turn-the-other-cheek" pieties of Christianity. Besides the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism.

It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the equivalent to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Though most people still say they believe in some kind of God, religious faith has become progressively more enfeebled and unable to resist the secular onslaught.

Hence the enormous success of books such as The God Delusion by the biologist and militant atheist Professor Richard Dawkins.

He and his followers have created a climate of rampant intolerance towards religion, in which to acknowledge personal faith is to risk professional and social ostracism.

Yet the foundations of British society and Western civilisation rest upon the Bible and Christianity.

It is the concept of a rational creator that lies behind the rationalism of the West. The idea of equality - fundamental to Western liberalism - derives from the belief that all human beings were created in the image of God.

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* Blair: I kept quiet about God so I wouldn't be seen as a nutter

The great 19th-century campaigns of social reform, which brought about an end to slavery, universal suffrage and the transformation of Britain from a criminal cesspit into an orderly society, were motivated by Christian evangelicalism. The Labour party was famously created by Methodism rather than Marx.

So what a desperately sad commentary on our times it is that a Prime Minister felt unable to acknowledge that he subscribed to the faith that underpinned his society.

Of course we expect political leaders to take decisions based on empirical evidence of what is in the best interests of their country. But certain acute situations require judgments which are, in essence, unavoidable leaps of faith.

In such circumstances, would we really prefer it if the Prime Minister decided what to do by just crossing his fingers, closing his eyes and sticking a pin into conflicting advice?

Wouldn't it be a source of some reassurance that he draws instead upon his faith for guidance - thus acknowledging the limits of his own judgment and shoring it up with convictions which have shaped civilisation for centuries?

As Mr Blair said, it would have been seen in this way in the U.S., which is still a much more religious country than Britain due to the centrality of the evangelical tradition going back to the Pilgrim Fathers.

But in Britain, the Church of England has turned into a kind of social workers' convention where faith in God is too often seen as the equivalent of making a rude noise in church.

It is almost as if Christianity is fine - with its high-minded concerns about poverty, the environment, war and so forth - as long as no one believes in it.

Of course, the irony is that Mr Blair's government seemed determined to attack and undermine bedrock Christian ethics.

This appears to have rested on his misguided equation of Christianity with a sentimental universalism which held that everyone's viewpoint was of equal value.

Nevertheless, he did believe in a Christian God which he was unable to reveal without doing himself political damage.

That is because, to a secular society, religion is merely a form of organised superstition. Acting on religious faith is thus seen as irrational, and praying to God regarded as evidence of clinical insanity.

The idea that secularism is rational and peaceful, however, is very wide of the mark. Terrible global despotisms such as Nazism, Communism and Maoism have been unreligious or anti-religious.

Moreover, as the influence of religion has declined in Britain, far from becoming more rational, people have become more credulous, superstitious and irrational than ever before.

They place their faith in a range of New Age cults, paganism, witchcraft and belief in psychic phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and parapsychology.

What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has given rise to mainstream treatments and therapies.

The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory Of Alternative And Complementary Medicine promotes 'dowsers', 'flower therapists' and 'crystal healers'.

And New Age, Islamist, green and Far Right groups are united by their predilection for crackpot conspiracy theories, whether about aliens and crop circles or the perpetrators of 9/11.

In any event, the idea that religious belief and reason don't go together is contradicted by many distinguished scientists, such as the botanist Sir Ghillean Prance, the director of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, and Allan Sandage, reputedly the greatest living cosmologist. These are all staunch believers - and it is science itself which has confirmed their faith.

As John Lennox, an Oxford University-mathematician, has written in his devastating book God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, it is people such as Richard Dawkins who are guilty of the most profound irrationality.

This is because, in claiming that only atheism is scientific, they make nonsensical assertions which contradict scientific knowledge and evidence-based thinking.

In suggesting that life sprang into existence without any kind of governing intelligence, they fly in the face of the evidence emerging from science that the hitherto unimaginable complexity of life forms, including the living cell, makes it scientifically impossible for life to have emerged without some kind of intelligent design.

Nevertheless, the Dawkins-ites are lionised as apostles of reason. Meanwhile, those scientists who are doing what scientists are supposed to do - follow where the evidence leads them - and who have concluded as a result that life was created by a guiding intelligence, are hysterically smeared by the Dawkins camp.

In a shocking campaign of intellectual thuggery, this camp has falsely accused such scientists of being religious fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days - when they believe no such thing at all. Some of these scientists then find they are threatened in their posts or even forced out altogether.

Of course, there is intolerance a-plenty within the religious world; terrible things have always been done in the name of God.

Which is why it is essential to separate Church and state, as has been the case ever since the 18th-century Enlightenment curbed religious authority and ushered in the age of reason based on political liberalism, individual freedom under law and the tolerance of minorities and dissent.

That legacy, however, is under grievous threat from without, in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, and from within, in the form of secular fundamentalism.

The fact that a British Prime Minister has to keep his Christian faith secret is sorry testimony to the self-inflicted damage of a society that is in danger of losing not just its faith, but its mind.

END