Midnight on Monday found me in BBC Radio 5 Live’s studios at White City discussing faith schools with Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society. We were on Tony Livesey’s late night chat show, and the issue triggering the discussion was the news that Foreign Secretary and avowed atheist David Miliband is avoiding the local state primary school near his home in Camden and sending his five year old adopted son instead to a church school further away (here). Apparently Miliband’s wife Louise attends the Anglican church linked to the school.

It is of course amusingly reminiscent of – but less spectacular than – the decision a few years ago by left-wing former fire-brand Diane Abbott MP to shun local Hackney schools and send her son to the private £10,000-a-year City of London School (here).

But it is the disingenuous nature of Keith Porteous Wood’s National Secular Society that I want to discuss here rather than the hypocrisy or otherwise of David Miliband or Diane Abbott. I’m not surprised that, when push comes to shove, parents want to do the best for their children, nor that the Milibands have chosen a church school in order to achieve this.

But the real hypocrisy and rank cant lies with the NSS, and Keith Porteous Wood is a pleasant and occasionally formidable spokesman for this deceptive organisation. NSS is better described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The organisation likes to present itself as a benign pressure group that aims to achieve an equitable and just secular society in which religious viewpoints are appropriately represented but restricted in public life. “We campaign… against the undue influence of religion in public affairs and education,” purrs the NSS website (here) claiming they also defend values such as human rights and freedom of speech. NSS, it seems, would persuade us that it promotes a sort of ‘procedural secularism’ (to use the jargon) that includes a neutral public square where no religious worldview predominates and where the state benevolently holds the ring between alternative and often competing beliefs and creeds. This secularism entails a separation of religion and state and non-discrimination between religions by the state that guarantees plurality and religious freedom. For historical and pragmatic reasons I personally wouldn’t advocate disestablishing the national church, for instance, but for many people such ‘procedural secularism’ is an attractive way of organising public affairs, and they point to the US and India as societies where religion thrives within a secular framework.

But in fact the National Secular Society offers no such benign vision. Rather it is another vehicle for shrill and aggressive New Atheism, whose intention is not only to ride religion out of public life, but also to attack faith – especially Christianity – wherever it finds it, including in private belief and practice. According to New Atheists, religion should not even be carried on by consenting adults in private. Their virulent strain of ‘ideological secularism’ (to use the jargon again) which attempts to exclude or severely control religion in private as well as public, is what NSS in fact promotes.

How do I know? NSS’s real motives are uncovered by the ‘debaptism’ campaign currently running on the organisation’s website (here) in which we are urged to ‘Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had!’ For a ‘bit of fun’ you can also purchase from NSS your very own ‘Certificate of Debaptism’ printed, indeed, on quality parchment paper. Yippee!

Baptism of course is a sacred Christian initiation rite as old as the faith itself. It is personal to the believer and his/her family and is carried out in and by the church. It has no impact whatever on public life or wider social policy.

So why is the NSS sticking its nose into our private business? Because it is two-faced, publicly proclaiming its vocation to promote fairness and restrict religious privilege in public life whilst actually using this as a front for its all-consuming anti-Christian crusade.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett et al are open and honest about their desire to eradicate Christianity. The duplicitous National Secular Society is not.

And that’s why Keith Porteous Wood could only talk cant about Christian and church schools on Monday night.

This week’s conviction of five Luton Muslim men for the public order offence of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ during the home-coming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment last March (here) is regrettable and wrong.

Our increasingly unconfident and insecure society is, one by one, closing down the freedoms for which previous generations worked and fought and, inch by inch, reducing public space for the genuine difference and debate that’s the life-blood of democratic vitality and progress. We’ve left behind the glad confident morn of the 18th and 19th centuries when Non-Conformity flourished and many of our freedoms were formed and honed; we’ve used up the public moral capital bequeathed us by the Victorians; we’ve replaced public Christianity with a God-less public secularity (if there is such a word) – and our small-minded restrictive nanny state is the inevitable result.

Commenting on the convictions (here), the often admirable Peter Tatchell – no friend of Christianity as he defines it, of course, since he converted to Science-Is-God in his late teens – is exactly right:

“The conviction of these five men is a dangerous infringement of free speech and the right to protest.

“I abhor everything they stand for, but defend their right to freedom of expression. Even though what they said was offensive to many people, their right to speak their mind is one of the hallmarks of a democratic society.

“They want to destroy our democracy and freedoms. I want to defend these values. If we silence and criminalise their views, we are little better than them…

“Democracy is superior to their proposed theocratic state and we need to prove it by demonstrating that we allow objectionable opinions and contest them by debate, not by repression and censorship…

“I defend their right to express their opinions, even though they are offensive and distressing to many people.

“Insult and offence are not sufficient grounds in a democratic society to criminalise words and actions.

“The criminalisation of insulting, abusive or offensive speech is wrong. The only words that should be criminalised are untrue defamations and threats of violence, such as falsely branding someone as a paedophile or inciting murder…

“The best way to respond to such fanatics is expose and refute their hateful, bigoted opinions.

“Rational argument is more effective and ethical than using an authoritarian law to censor and suppress them.”

There’s more to it than this naturally, and certainly it’s right to protect people from verbal harassment in the workplace and children from verbal persecution and bullying in the playground for instance. But the main thrust of Tatchell’s argument is spot on despite the visible distress to members of the public caused by the Luton protest.

However, while rational argument and debate is central to our democracy, they’re not the only weapon in our democratic armoury. Political satire and mockery has an honourable tradition in the UK and that’s also what we need to do against such malicious effrontery. Lampooning, cartooning, buffooning, spoofing and sending-up is what these men should experience in full measure. Their ears should echo with the derision, mocking and ridicule of the Great British Public as we laugh these wacky but dangerous Islamists, their disreputable Caliphate and their misogynistic Sharia law out of mainstream media and off most public stages.

And we have another weapon of mass derision that someone somewhere has suggested: pork scratchings. Or, if they are in short supply due to the decline in the pub trade (here), bacon rashers.

The next time such men make a similarly offensive public protest, they should be showered with pork scratchings or bacon rashers – in large quantities. No one will be hurt by these soft projectiles and the only people who may object is the local Council who would have to clear up afterwards.

But on this occasion I suspect Luton Council would have been delighted to oblige.

A heartbreaking yet inspirational story from Pakistan seems a good way to start the new year. It’s an incident that created a national hero in that strife-torn country and was fully reported in the US by top news outlet CNN (here), yet – as far as I can discover – seems to have been completely missed by mainstream media on our side of the Atlantic. I only heard about it over Christmas, two months after the event. It’s a story well worth re-telling.

On 20th October a burka-clad suicide bomber approached the double-storey women’s cafeteria at the International Islamic University in Islamabad where some 400 students were dining and socialising. He looked suspicious as female students do not normally veil in women-only areas. He shot and wounded a security guard at the entrance to the dining hall, whereupon 40-year-old caretaker Pervez Masih grabbed him and tried to hold him. The bomber instantly detonated the device, spraying ball-bearings and his own body parts over the entrance area and killing Pervez and three girl students.

“There would have been dozens of deaths had the bomber not been blocked by Pervez Masih,” said a senior university security official.

The caretaker, who reputedly earned just £40 a month and was his family’s sole breadwinner, was immediately proclaimed a hero for his self-sacrifice. “He’s now a legend to us,” one student is quoted as saying. “He saved our lives.”

The Pakistan government promised I million rupees (around £7,500) for Masih’s bereaved family; the university authorities contributed towards burial costs and also offered employment for his widow Shaheen and help with the education of his 3 year old daughter Diya; and student volunteers collected £400 plus toys and clothes for the family.

The interesting twist to this otherwise tragic story is that Pervez Masih came from Pakistan’s often-despised 2% Christian minority which regularly suffers discrimination and persecution in this 96% Muslim country. (‘Masih’ means ‘Messiah’ – Jesus Christ – and is the family name commonly taken as a badge of honour by Christians in Pakistan.)

“He rose above the barriers of caste, creed and sectarian terrorism,” said the rector of the university, Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik. “Despite being a Christian, he sacrificed his life to save the Muslim girls.”

True, but the “despite” betrays the Professor’s world-view. A different world-view would explain instead that it was because he was a Christian that Pervez sacrificed his life for the Muslim girls. His instincts made him follow in the steps of his Master who, the New Testament tells us, ‘gave his life as ransom for many’.

The Muslim bomber blew himself up in order kill others; the Christian caretaker sacrificed himself in order to save others. The Muslim bomber would have anticipated – wrongly and tragically – that his act of suicide and his consequent shaheed (Islamic martyr) status would deliver him straight into Paradise; the Christian caretaker will have known – and has now personally experienced – that his faith, confirmed by his self-sacrifice, would deliver him direct into heaven.

Jesus said it all: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”