KEEPING THE FAITH; Saturday Essay; on His Historic Visit to Scotland, the Pope Said Religion Was under Threat from Aggressive Secularism. Here, a Leading Writer from a Different Church Background Says Benedict Is Right

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Byline: by John MacLeod

ONE might readily groan at the earnest, online description of the Prayer Room at Liverpool's John Lennon International Airport. It is set beside a 'Rainbow Garden' and marked with a chaplaincy logo 'which represents human spirituality'.

'The many colours of the rainbow serve to remind us that, while all human beings may be different from another, when we stand side by side in peace and harmony, every hue enriches the whole...'

Such group-hug inclusiveness owes less to the great creeds of the church than the engineered, politically correct righteousness of Topsy and Tim. And one imagines few passengers ever bother to negotiate the terminal's ramps, malls and corridors to find this little space and 'address issues of wholeness' in a 'moment for reflection'.

But, on several occasions in 2008, a 59-yearold self-styled 'philosophy tutor' and militant atheist called Harry Taylor went to great and repeated trouble to locate the chapel and on three occasions he left extraordinarily offensive literature.

It contained cartoons so blasphemous, obscene and puerile that they cannot readily be described in a family newspaper. One anti-Muslim image was so vile that none of the websites that subsequently ranted in Taylor's defence dared carry it.

In April this year, Taylor was very properly convicted of religiously aggravated intentional harassment and given a five-year Asbo, while his six-month prison sentence was suspended. Yet even this light sentence was an outrage of the first order for Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society.

It was, he insisted, 'totally out of proportion for what Mr Taylor did. Nobody can deny that he …