Today it’s the turn of the Catholic church – don’t worry, Snowblog has not gone religious. Actually today’s is a more political than religious issue.

But as my Snowblog of two days ago triggered a reference to the Pope’s reported intervention into British politics, I feel bound to return to the matter.

I’m discussing the supposed spat involving the Pope and the Equality Bill being pushed through parliament by Harriet Harman.

The Pope is reportedly angered that the bill threatens the human rights of the Catholic church.

He is also said to be angered by the Adoption Act, which it is claimed has led to the closure of Catholic adoption agencies which refuse to accept the requirement to consider gay people as potential adoptive parents.

But there is some confusion as to whether the Equality Bill does exclude the church or not. Some clauses may still affect church staffing. But should any religious institution be excluded?

Has there not been enough evidence of singularly unequal activity in the Catholic church to require legislation by the civil power?

Consider the activities of the Catholic church as exemplified from Boston to Dublin. In short, it displayed the practice and cover-up of activities that were both exploitative and abusive. Paedophilia has long-stalked the celibate end of the Catholic church with disastrous consequences.

Many have argued that celibacy in the human male is a rare and often unachievable condition. The current president of Paraguay, a former Catholic bishop, became a father while still a bishop.

Catholicism is not alone in refusing “holy orders” to women. Why are women unequal when it comes to entry into the priesthood?

Worshippers at mosques, temples and churches argue that their own human rights are being violated if they are not allowed to pursue the ancient beliefs upon which their institutions are founded.

In decrying the record on human rights to which some churches, and some other religious foundations have demonstrated, it would be very wrong to tar every practising priest with such criticism.

Anyone who has worked in Latin America, and Africa is strongly aware of the incredible work done by Liberation Theologians and the priests who followed them in defending the poor from brutal regimes.

But in my experience, these people did not prioritise church teachings on celibacy. In my youth, I worked for a year in a Catholic mission school and developed real admiration for the work the two priests achieved there.

As Irish and American victims testify, it is the priestly bad apples who reap the harvest of pain, suffering and lifelong mental damage in their victims.

Isn’t it they in the end whom the temporal law must protect? If in the future this takes the form of according equal rights to those who work for the Catholic church, in a mosque, a Hindu temple, or the Anglican cathedral, why not?

Imagine for a moment that the American Baptists from Idaho, who have been arrested heading out of Haiti with a busload of ‘orphans’, had been a group of Islamic fundamentalists. Would the world have been quite so sanguine about an incident that has been represented as involving naïve God botherers, or worse, child trafficking?

In truth there is a distorted use of language when it comes to religious fundamentalism. There is a spirit of Christian fundamentalism abroad, which is at least as numerous, if not considerably more so than its Islamic counterpart. Its heartland is in America – particularly in landlocked states like Idaho that have traditionally sported a wariness of the world beyond America’s shores.

These ‘evangelicals’, as many describe them, represent a very broad church that extends from the mad-cap tele-evangelism – that feathers the nests of many of its leaders, to the ‘mega church movements’ that are sprouting everywhere from Texas to East London. They spawn and sponsor many causes ranging from opposing Obama’s health care bill, to advocating the death penalty for homosexuals in Uganda.

Yet the column inches devoted to the threat from Islamic fundamentalists far outstrip the equally concerning antics of Christian fundamentalists. In each case followers are ‘captured’ in places of worship by ‘charismatic’ operatives. In each case funds are raised on a huge scale to fund ‘the work’ of the Bible or Koran. Both groupings depend upon a highly literal application of both books in support of their activities.

It is also true that many of the ‘believers’ caught up in these movements have little context in which to place the issues around which they are being asked to rally. So when the charismatic preacher tells his congregation that ‘thousands of children have been orphaned by the earthquake in Haiti’, they have little way of knowing quite what this means.

My own inquiries in Port-au-Prince revealed very few absolute orphans. The extended family is very much still a part of Haitian life. I found a ten month old baby girl, whose mother had been killed and whose father was missing. But the child’s aunt, who was cradling the child as I spoke to her, told me she would bring her up as her own. According to NGOs I spoke to, there are very, very few children who have been completely dispossessed of all family and community. Yet even in these circumstances, I have heard evangelicals stating as a fact that a loving, childless, Christian family in America will give the child a better life.

Christian and Islamic fundamentalists both play on immigrant and ethnic minority groupings in western countries. They play too on communities in the developing world – from Africa to Europe, from the Caribbean and Latin America to South East Asia.

Christian fundamentalists have yet to carry out bomb attacks against the state. But among many other practices, they kill doctors who carry out abortions, they abduct children, and they threaten the social cohesion of emerging societies by advocating the outlawing of homosexuals.

Do we ignore the dangers inherent in hysterical fundamentalism in all faiths at our peril? Perhaps the time has come to ask why, in the age of technological breakthrough, religious fundamentalism is developing such a stranglehold on societies across the world.

On Tuesday I blogged about my visit to a Muslim girls’ school in north London. Can you spot me?

The collapse of the case against the alleged 7/7 bomb accomplices coincided with a meeting I attended yesterday of community leaders.

The Muslims amongst them were warning that relations are becoming very strained, and they fear that government policy – in particular, the continued existence of the Prevent programme – is radicalising many young Muslims.

These leaders told me that the whole scheme created divisions between Islamic groupings, raised suspicions, provoked dangerous compromises, and worse.

Indeed, some at the meeting appeared to hope that the credit crunch would dispose of this scheme and other such programmes that have sprung up in recent years.

These are the kinds of issues that critics are raising.

The government has spattered large amounts of taxpayers’ money on this strategy. But would it ever have decided to target Jewish leaders, or Catholics, or Pentecostalists, with this stuff?

And why is a secular state spending money like this? In America it would be banned under the constitution. And almost certainly in France, too.

Finally: who can possibly have thought that setting up something called Prevent (a negative enough connotation, even in its title) would in some way encourage peace and harmony rather than patronise and alienate its targets still further?

I’m sure there others of you out there who have more positive views of this particular scheme – which is aimed after all at preventing more acts of terror killing people in our towns and cities.

Maybe if you have been the lucky recipient of Prevent monies and have benefited thereby, you can have your say? The space below is yours.

The Pope’s remarks outlawing condoms yet again, this time in a sermon delivered in Yaounde, Cameroon, call to mind an eerie experience we had on this programme next to a swimming pool in Kampala back in 2005.

We had gone to Uganda to report ahead of the Gleneagles G8 summit, which was dedicated to Africa.

What we found beside the pool was an extraordinary gathering of virgins, male and female. Now, I was unable to prove they were virgins, but they all declared they were.

A swimming pool, surrounded by virgins

They spoke lyrically of the joys of abstinence and swore they would never have sex until they were married.

Of course, their radical Christian evangelical church had been in receipt of significant American funding – the Bush administration believing strongly in abstinence as a means of combating Aids-HIV.

But I’m afraid the cynics amongst us suspected that not everything that glittered was as golden as they pretended.

Hard at work on assignment in Kampala

Landing at Heathrow this morning, well slept on my BA flight from Washington, I suddenly recall an experience I had last week coming in from Jerusalem. I had been there for tonight’s Dispatches (Gaza Unseen at 11pm tonight, Channel 4). This is the mental blog I made at the time -

Strangely, these days a lot of movements at the new T5 terminal seem to involve a bus ride. The bus was there at the bottom of the steps. So was a very beautiful attendant in a chadoor, exceptionally beautiful. I boarded the bus along with many others from my BA flight from Tel Aviv and was suddenly conscious of the chadoor-clad woman outside, contrasting with an array of yarmulkes. There were half a dozen Hassidic Jews too. And I thought, if my old dad had been there we’d have had a dog collar on the bus, too.

Then I thought about the God Doesn’t Exist bus ad that’s doing the rounds in London and I thought about religion and wondered why we have to wear so inner a conviction so ostentatiously on our outer sleeve. How much of the woe I have had to report over the past quarter century has been about outward religious difference.

Arriving at the multimedia emporium I work in, I saw my Muslim friend already at her desk. No outward visible sign that she is one, and I have never asked her how much of a Muslim she is anyway. It’s no business of mine, and she wears nothing to suggest that it should be.

I suppose some would say that I am in the heart of a pagan enterprise. I never discuss faith with people I work with – it doesn’t honestly interest me. I have no objection to people having the freedom to wear whatever they want to. I’d protest to defend them. And yet…