George Pitcher, an Anglican priest and Religion Editor for the British Telegraph, is complaining about ’secularists’:

Religious people do have a clearer moral code than secularists

It’s come to this. The secularists have got me sticking up for Cherie Blair. Those barrels of laughs, the British Humanist Association and National Secular Society, have complained, apparently with straight faces, that she has discriminated against non-religious people by taking a convicted man’s religious observance into account when suspending his sentence for a violent crime.

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At a huge risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, Cherie Booth QC, as we must call her when she’s not trading on her married name, wasn’t saying that religious people are morally superior to others. She was saying that, as a religious man, he should know better.

Even Booth, who isn’t herself blessed with an unerring sense of right and wrong, will know that there are bad religious people and good non-religious people.

But what the humourless and po-faced bozos of the BHA and NSS have to get into their restricted imaginations is the answer to this question: Do adherents to a major faith have demonstrable, objective and tangible standards of behaviour towards others enshrined in their religious traditions, to which they can and should be expected to aspire because they are accountable to their divine authority, that are not so prescribed by secular authorities?

That’s a good question, George. Do religious people have demonstrable, objective, and tangible standards of behavior enshrined in their religions? Should be fairly easy to answer if they are, after all, so demonstrable and objective. So what is the answer, George?

Yes. Get used to it, BHA and NSS.

How…..useful. You leave me wondering what precisely these demonstrable and objective standards are and for which religion they are demonstrable and objective for! This would be really great to know, being a secularist myself with no moral codes of my own (gag).

The case in question involves a Muslim named Miah who – get this – broke a man’s jaw with two punches after a dispute in a London bank. The judge, Cherie Blair, trying the case wrote, “I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before,” she told him at Inner London Crown Court. You caused a mild fracture to the jaw of a member of the public standing in a queue at Lloyds Bank. You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.” Blair (who also goes by Booth) herself is a devout Roman Catholic.

So George’s main point, recall, is that this is not a statement that religious people are morally superior but that “She was saying that, as a religious man, he should know better.”

To be sure, while Judge Blair may not be saying that religious people are morally superior, she is saying quite clearly that religious people should be held to a lighter standard of punishment merely for being religious, and that, presumably, non-religious people simply do not know any better!

If Osama Bin Laden was caught would Blair lighten his sentence because he is a ‘religious man’ and should know that his behavior is not acceptable?