Peter Popham in today's Independent:

The secularists never tire of pointing out that religious belief has led to the committing of atrocious crimes, from the Inquisition to the Irish Troubles and on to the Twin Towers. In that sense both believers and secularists are in the dock of history. But, stripped of fanaticism and self-righteousness, religious faith can do what secularism cannot: open doors on to areas of human experience – compassion, altruism, serenity, even enlightenment – which have no meaning for the secularists. The statement "there are no atheists in foxholes" may be a canard, but genuinely non-egoistical behaviour is much more likely from those for whom the ego and its grasping needs do not define ultimate reality.

This is only a fraction of a tiresome article.  It raises the question as to how we can possibly deal with critics of non-belief who have no hesitation in blatantly lying.  How often do we have to point out that secularism has, of course, nothing to do with religious beliefs or not having religious beliefs.  Secularism has nothing to do with materialism, which is also the subject of a rant in the article.  Or atheism. Nothing to do with that either.

This tedious article is not just written by someone who seems unfamiliar with what he's supposedly arguing against, but it's conclusions are clearly nonsense. Britain is a country full of non-believers, and yet there is no sign of any national failure of compassion or altruism, although serenity is not that easy to measure, I accept.

How does anyone get away with writing such rubbish for a supposedly respectable national newspaper?