The problem with sealed-room philosophy such as John Gray’s (What scares the new atheists, 3 March) is that it provides no evidence for its claims about the world. I spend my professional life studying the popularity of religion and see no evidence for his assertion that “religion is … in fact flourishing”. Church membership and attendance data, third-party censuses of church attendance, time-use diaries and surveys all show that religion in western liberal democracies (and that includes the US) continues to decline in popularity.

The only areas of religious “growth” in the UK are the result of immigration from traditionally religious countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, and far from attracting religiously indifferent white British natives this make such conversion less likely by reinforcing the notion that religion is what foreigners do. Recent surveys show the deeply religious to be markedly less popular than the non-religious. The evidence is on the British Religion in Numbers website. Perhaps Gray means that religion has become more controversial but he ought to appreciate that notoriety and popularity are rather different.

Steve Bruce

School of social science, University of Aberdeen

• John Gray asserts that new atheists are in a state of panic because secularisation appears to have stalled. His withering assault on Dawkins et al for having the temerity to criticise the malign impact of religious faith on the world is farcical. Furthermore, Gray wantonly misrepresents these “missionary atheists” (among whom I count myself) who have never claimed that modern liberal values have arisen out of science or that they are innately superior to any other socially constructed values system.

There is a need for a robust promotion of secularisation in Britain because our society is fragmented and rendered less tolerant by religious affiliation (surveys suggest that we are overwhelmingly agnostic or atheist). The incubi of faith rights and assumptions are embedded in many of our civic structures. As a recently retired social sciences teacher, I was appalled by instances of proselytising masquerading as objective RE teaching in state schools. Dawkins is not being intolerant when he asserts that there is no such thing as a Roman Catholic or Muslim child. The ability of different faiths to be able to use state schools to coerce and socialise some of our children into particular world views is a pernicious outrage and an assault on their human rights.

Philip Wood

Kidlington, Oxfordshire

• John Gray helpfully advises atheists not to obsess about religion. The corollary is that people of faith should not waste time fretting about atheism. We have plenty of more important stuff to worry about and struggle with – not least understanding atrocities committed by people of any faith or none, who debase conviction and exalt certainty. What people believe matters enormously, usually much more than what they don’t believe.

Rev Geoff Reid

Bradford

Perhaps Gray hasn’t noticed that atheists face discrimination and abuse across the globe, including in Britain Graham Wright

• John Gray makes many interesting points but one of his conclusions is surprisingly odd. In saying that “there is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically – as a human adaptation to living in the world – and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion”, he seems to be missing the point about adaptation and evolution. There are dozens of things that are a result of evolutionary adaptation that are nothing to do with adaptation itself; male nipples give us one fairly obvious example; appendicitis another. He would do well to remember the words of Green Gartside (Scritti Politti) in the song The Sweetest Girl: “Politics is prior to the vagaries of science.”

Matthew Loukes

London

• John Gray repeats the canard that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian religions. In truth, the golden rule is at least as old as Confucius, freedom of thought dates back at least to Socrates, and the whole idea of a liberal education owes everything to that great Roman sceptic Cicero. Most of the political history of Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, is an attempt to stamp out rationalism and liberalism in the name of the one true God, as Bruno, Galileo and countless others learned to their cost. It is only with the declining influence of these religions in western Europe that liberal humanism has triumphed.

Brian McClinton

Lisburn, Northern Ireland

• John Gray suggests that religion may fulfil an evolutionary function: “A need for illusion is built into the human mind.” This would indeed present a serious problem for atheists. However, the illusion is often imposed from outside. Typically this is by a religious upbringing, but in the most extreme cases dissent and apostasy are punishable by death. What is needed is certainly the freedom of individuals to choose any faith (or none) but also transparent democracy and the right to dissent within faith groups. This would allow what he calls the need for illusion (or simply, belief) to further evolve.

Francis McGonigal

Faculty of business, law and social sciences, Birmingham City University

• Just who are these “evangelical atheists” that John Gray rants against. Could he be talking about the National Secular Society who, while campaigning for the removal of unfair religious privilege, also promote freedom of religion? Or the humanists, who simply want to point out that it’s possible to live a good life without religion?

His extract begins by insinuating that atheists are racist, using the example of a couple of atheists from the early 20th century who were also interested in eugenics. He mentions the Nazis, who actually put those ideas into practice, with terrifying results, but somehow fails to mention that they were actually part of the German Catholic establishment. Gray then changes tack, equating atheism with liberalism, but this too is done pejoratively. And any worthwhile values that atheists promote apparently have their foundation in religion, and so don’t count.

He portrays religion as benign and friendly, undeserving of criticism. No mention that it subjects our children to indoctrination and enforced worship on a daily basis in church and state schools alike. No mention of the increasing difficulty of getting a job in a school in Britain unless you profess religion. No mention of religious privilege in government and its use to deny us freedoms such as the right to self-determination through assisted dying. No mention of the institutionalised child abuse, or the shameful cover up of it by the Catholic church.

Perhaps Gray hasn’t noticed that atheists face discrimination and abuse across the globe, including in Britain, hasn’t heard of Charlie Hebdo and doesn’t see the regular reports of atheists being murdered for their beliefs.

All we ask is the right to express our beliefs without fear of persecution or discrimination and perhaps too, the right to at least let people know that there is an alternative to religion should they want it.

Graham Wright

Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

• John Gray argues that certain “unbelievers” in the past peddled racial theories to support their views, the principal figure adduced in support of this claim being the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Inspired by Darwin but also by Goethe and Lamarck, Haeckel proposed a new science of ecology, a word invented by him which meant all the interrelationships of species in their environments. In Gray’s account, Haeckel was not only a scientist and monist, he was a repugnant racist who contributed to “an intellectual climate in which policies of racial slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science”.

When people engage in history in order to construct a story for the present, there is always a temptation to blur inconvenient facts and highlight others. This seems the case with much of the historical writing about Haeckel. The biologist died in 1919, long before the ascent to power of the Nazis to whom he has more recently become linked. Let me guess that Gray’s sources are Daniel Gasman’s book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism and Richard Weikart’s book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, in which the author also extends similar criticisms to Darwin.

It’s likely, therefore, that Gray’s reading list failed to include the infinitely more subtle and detailed scholarship of Robert J Richards of Chicago University. In a variety of articles and in a major biography of Haeckel (The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought), Richards takes up these and other charges. Yes, Haeckel differentiated racial advancement but not only were Haeckel’s views on race not embraced by the Nazis but Nazi officialdom made efforts to expunge all those works which supported “the superficial scientific enlightenment of a primitive Darwinism and monism”, by which they meant Haeckel.

Gray says that the current generation of atheists seem to know little of the history of atheist movement. That may indeed be true, but it also might be true that faulty historical scholarship can also produce equally faulty “lessons from history”.

Geof Rayner

London

• The silent atheist does not share John Gray’s Parnassian heights, or his bemusement at a “fuss” made about nothing: he or she cannot come out and instead lives their life contrary to their beliefs, for fear of family hurt or ostracism. The damage done by what James Joyce called the spiritual friction of silently doing things that you do not believe in, can be considerable.

The Catholic Ireland I left in the late 1970s so that I could live almost as an unbeliever is – remarkably, and contrary to Gray’s thesis – different today. But the last thing on my mind on the Liverpool ferry was “freedom from doubt”; nor did I believe history underpinned my values, or that those values were liberal.

I still live in a culture where belief is valued and privileged far beyond unbelief, but the emergence of a public voice for unbelief has been, well, a godsend.

Gray, in his joust with other great men of ideas, is welcome to the yah-boo polemic of framing his “evangelical atheist” opponents as the thing they most oppose; but if he would silence the apostate voice and have us express ourselves less, it would be a great shame.

Peter McKenna

Liverpool

• John Gray makes the common error of conflating morality with religion and belief in God (or gods). In fact, morality is orthogonal to the other two.

Humanity evolved with an inheritance of pecking order as a way of regulating society. This is the enemy of cooperation, the true engine of progress. In order to minimise the damaging consequences of internal conflict that result, moral rules had to be developed, which ran almost completely against instinct. Trying to explain these to the rest of the tribe was difficult. It was much easier to say “it’s the will of God” – after all, you can’t argue with God, can you? Since then, priests (or rabbis or imams) have had enormous power over the rest of the population, determining morals according to their own needs and prejudices.

Religion has been used to justify the divine right of kings, slavery, racism and empire. Now it is the backing for the rampant, murderous homophobia now current in Uganda and some so-called Christian churches in the US, and for the nauseous excesses of Isis. Morality is much better achieved through reason than through a blind appeal to “God-based” prejudice. Atheists – or just plain secularists – have nothing to fear.

Tim Gossling

Cambridge

• John Gray seems keen to chart historical developments within atheism. But of the 25.1% of the British population who say they have no religious belief I shouldn’t imagine many are familiar with ideas of earlier atheists. They are atheists because they do not believe in a god. That is all. They find the “evidence” for a god unconvincing and get on with their lives. Most do not seek to convert others. As an atheist I leave others to their own religious beliefs. The only changes I would seek are the disestablishment of the state church and the ending of faith schools.

John Boaler

Calne, Wiltshire