No right to dictate

But it has no right to dictate to the rest of us on issues for which it claims special expertise or authority.

Catholics are free to accept the church's positions on birth control, civil unions, abortion, gay rights, papal infallibility or stem cell research if they wish. Many do. Others don't.

Catholic Archbishop Cormac Murphy O'Connor would have us believe, according to an article in Monday's Guardian, that "atheistic secularism ultimately diminishes us. It kills the human spirit under the pretence of liberating it."

Secularism is not atheistic in nature. It simply provides a social framework for citizens to be free to accept or reject a broad spread of beliefs without precedence given to any one of them.

Wherever the archbishop's sect of Christianity has held sway, the historical record has been far from encouraging of the human spirit or, for that matter, of scientific discovery.

His church has demanded and exercised the right to pontificate on private and public matters on the grounds that it claims to know the will of God.

Those who assert the right to do other people's thinking for them must be told in no uncertain terms: "No."

He and other clergy may believe that they are uniquely placed to lecture the rest of us on morality or to peddle myths that it is religious belief alone that underlies the expression of love and solidarity that leads people to tackle hunger, disease, ignorance or natural disasters.

Many religious people are indeed guided by their beliefs to serve humanity, but so are non-religious people.

Does anyone imagine, for example, that the Cuban rescue teams, doctors, nurses, builders, teachers and so on who serve throughout the developing world are motivated by religion rather than socialist internationalism?

But, whereas a complex character such as Mother Theresa was a household name, the record of Cuba's overseas volunteers are unsung or distorted in most of the media.

The church's opposition to stem cell research and the development of hybrid embryos is based on its hostility to any scientific development that helps to demystify human existence and to show that humanity can understand nature and work with it to minimise human suffering.

It prefers the faithful to accept pain and suffering on the grounds that this life is simply a rehearsal for the next in which all will be hunky-dory.

That's fine, but it is a vision that cannot be allowed to ensnare the rest of us who want scientific research to be free to search for cures for a number of serious diseases and for fertility treatment.

Those who spread panic by claiming that hybrid embryos foretell Frankenstein monsters or "threaten the sanctity and dignity of human life" are simply being dishonest.

If the price of standing up to this monstrous effort to reassert the dominance of superstition in national life is the resignation of the likes of Des Browne, Paul Murphy and Ruth Kelly, who cite conscience as a reason for hamstringing science but who voted for the Iraq war without turning a hair, then that is a small enough price.