Synogenes.com

It is understandable that not many people want to see the Pope during his visit to the UK. After all, he's the head of an international business that systematically covered up the most appalling abuses of children across several continents, turning a blind eye to the most glaring evidence, permitting the criminals to hide and continue their abuse.

Instead of looking after the welfare of the children in its care, the church concerned itself only with the spiritual welfare of the child abusers. Such a staggeringly distorted sense of ethics and morality leaves decent people with a sense of disgust, and many wonder why the Pope, as the CEO of the catholic church, doesn't resign and submit himself to the mercy of the courts.

But as if that is not enough, the catholic church has always been a reactionary monstrosity promoting prejudice and discrimination completely out of step with modern society. Through its attitude to gays and to women, as well as its support for authoritarian right-wing regimes, it has shown itself to be anathema to any sense of social progress or justice.

In its pronouncements on the issue of HIV/AIDS, it has elevated following its dogma over the very lives of those at risk of the disease. Condoms can prevent infection and that simple fact alone should, for anyone with a sense of morality, trump any religious dogma. Not so for the catholic church. It would rather see thousands die than compromise its antiquated and socially hostile position.

And then of course there is the position on abortion. Failing to understand the difference between a small collection of cells and a human being, the church insists on the immaterial existence of something called a soul, yet another dogmatic belief that flies in the face of what we already know. Ignoring the welfare of women, it forces desperate people to the backstreet abortionists.

So the church opposes stem cell research which can potentially save many lives. It opposes abortion even in the case of rape victims. It hides child abuse inside its own institutions and protects the abusers. It forces catholics to risk AIDS rather than to take sensible precautions by using condoms. It supports autocratic and dictatorial right wing regimes. And yet it claims the Pope is infallible! It's as anachronistic as the Qur'an and the Pope is every bit as reactionary as the most literal of Ayatollahs.

Why would anyone be surprised that so few people actually want to be in the company of this crowd? What could they expect to see as the slogans of the tour? Die for Dogma? Suffer Little Children? We can only hope that this falling off of ticket sales (did we say "sales"?) is the beginning of mass disillusion with the religious bandwaggon. When an institution is this rotten, the only thing to do with it is to close it down.

To many moral and ethical atheists, the statement from the Pope today is an appalling and disgraceful insult. To compare people who do not believe in a superbeing to the Nazis under Hitler is an monstrous insult, implying that it is the lack of belief that leads people to the inhuman acts carried out by the Nazis.

Ratzinger of course belonged to the Hitler Youth but that was because it was compulsory for boys of his age. He had no choice. The removal of his rights by Nazi society meant that he experienced the indoctrination of a state which glorified race above all else. It fueled the racism against the Jews, and the brutal anihilation of every organisation that expressed independent will. It's a bit like the lack of choice shown children educated in Catholic schools from an early age and it might be suggested that this relates to the torture and abuse of the Inquisition - just a thought.

But of course, such a crude simplistic interpretation of history is just plain stupid. Only prejudice would lead someone to such mendacious conclusions.

Atheism, by contrast, is simply the expression of disbelief in a deity. That doesn't imply that atheists are devoid of ethical judgement, or moral values. Atheists are every bit as moral and ethical as anyone else and they get those values from the society around them, from their peers, from all the cultural and historical influences to which they are subjected, just like any religious people.

Morality doesn't come from religion even in the case of religious people. It comes from the cultural mixture of influences in the society in which we live, and that's as true of Christians as anyone else. To imply that religion is necessary for morality is an enormous arrogance, and historical and socially inaccurate to say the least.

But what the Pope was really complaining about what the free expression of disbelief. In his world, if someone argues that religion is something that should not be foisted on children, that is interpreted as a violation of the child's rights. It seems that the Pope is utterly impervious to the blatant irony of this position, especially glaring given the manifest failure of the Catholic Church to even consider the rights of children during the recent child abuse enquiries.

But the expression of free will, free thought, the right to question values and social assumptions, is a sign of a healthy society. Being willing and able to question religious beliefs, just like political beliefs, is something we should encourage in our children.

The Pope sees this as an "aggressive form of secularism" but what he really means is that it is overt. Openly challenging beliefs is something that happens in a democratic society, a society very far from the cloistered secret world of the Vatican.

In his speech today, he drew attention to the attitude of Nazis to Christian pastors yet failed to mention the attitude of the Catholic church to dissidents and those of a challenging point of view. The Inquisition was hardly the most democratic of methods of opening a constructive dialogue.

People are increasingly turning away from religion for very good reasons. It is based on hypocrisy. It is internally inconsistent and externally inconsistent with what we know of the real world. There is no evidence to support any of the claims made by religions. It morally distorts those who cling to its precepts. It is politically disastrously reactionary. Historically it has always backed oppressors against the common people. And it relies on theologians to reinterpret anachronistic dogma in a vain attempt to make it relevant to modern society.

There is quite simply nothing offered by religion that is not already available in society from secular sources. Morality, ethics, open discussion, reason, compassion, love, caring and all the other valuable social qualities exist independently of any religious belief. People are better able to be moral and ethical people if they dismiss religion and think for themselves.

And that's why the Pope sees this approach as "aggressive". He is an anachronism, a wealthy, powerful man leading a largely secret and conspiratorial society of clerics, and in every sense he is no more progressive than the most reactionary of islamic clerics. More and more people are realising this and we should all be pleased with that.

There is an interesting conundrum facing the advocates of faith schools in the UK because the composition of the erstwhile Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Primary School in Blackburn is now apparently 97% muslim and as a result, there is likely to be a change of management. What that really means is that the families claim the religion of their children is that way - the children themselves haven't had the opportunity to exercise any right to develop their own beliefs.

The Catholic Church though, recognising that their creed does not fit with the majority of their clientele, has decided that it is no longer "appropriate" that the church should be running the school. Instead, they seem to be in negotiations with a nearby mosque.

This will doubtless cause some difficulty for those right-wing advocates of parental choice, who support the creation and existence of faith schools. On the one hand, they want to promote religion in schools, but on the other they will be fearful of the significance of a conversion of a Roman Catholic school to Islam. They want Christian church schools not islamic schools. They want Christian indoctrination, not children learning the Suras of the Qur'an.

Already there are xenophobic responses talking about Islam taking over, about forcing communities to convert, about indoctrinating children. But the irony is that every religious school indoctrinates its children. The whole point of religious schools is to get at children because they are at an age when they will believe what they are told. They have yet to develop their critical faculties and so are unlikely to question the irrational nature of religious belief.

One of the consequences of promoting religious education is precisely that there will be challenges between different religions. When one religion argues that they are the chosen race, or that Jesus was nothing more than a Prophet, or that there is no such thing as the Trinity, or that transubstantiation is an abomination, religious conflict inevitably ensues.

These struggles between different branches of irrationalism harm children, divide communities, and cause conflict. Religion is a problem, not a solution. The obvious answer is to remove religious influence from all schools. We should not accept the subjection of our children to religious indoctrination any more than we would accept political indoctrination in schools.

Already, the comments on web reports of the possible change of management of the school are showing vicious racist sentiments with some people talking about Asian take-overs, forced conversion to Islam and other xenophobic fears. But the reality is that if any school is based on a religious creed, it will encourage those xenophobic attitudes. And as demographics change, so will the dominant religion.

It is this worry that preoccupied many Protestants in the North of Ireland. Larger catholic families led to predictions that pretty soon, the Protestants would lose control of councils, and see their privileges disappear. That fear led to a hardening of prejudice.

Religion and racism are very closely connected. Religions define themselves through difference, suspicion, division and separation. Chosen races, exclusive rituals, separate institutions and hierarchies, together with religious books that express violent attitudes to those not believing the same things, all encourage hostility. Every religion claims their god is loving and compassionate but is also vengeful, violent, and punishing.

Little wonder then that the communities based on these religious beliefs express the same attitudes to each other. There are those who seek peaceful coexistence but within their religious doctrines is embedded just the prejudice against the other which fuels hostility and conflict. Religion is not the solution but one of the problems.

The Blackburn case is a classic example of the damage done by religious indoctrination of children. We should get religion out of the schools and give the children a secular education which equips them to assess the rationality or otherwise of religious claims. That will help undermines the horrible tradition of xenophobia that always surrounds these religious racist attitudes.

Some have argued that it was a case of "white flight", white racists moving out of the area rather than share their schools with families with Asian roots. As they allowed their prejudice to guide them out of the area, they simultaneously blamed muslims for taking over their schools. The connection between religion and racism could hardly be more acute.

Blackburn will doubtless have a public and nasty debate about this school but the interests of the children should raise the issue of the damage caused by religion in school. If the school was secular, with no involvement from any religious authority, why would it matter at all what religious beliefs were held by any of the families sending their children there?

Why would there be any issue to argue about at all? Instead of talking about muslim takeover, or forced conversions, there would be an atmosphere of liberation of the children from oppressive religious dogmatism, a flourishing of rational enquiry, a freedom to believe what they wanted. Isn't that what education ought to be about?