IF YOU are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.

The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.

There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.

Violent clashes between adherents of different religions, and just as much between supporters of competing creeds within the same religion, have been a regular occurrence for well over a thousand years.

All of the world’s major belief systems are culpable, to the point where none has a meaningful claim to be more pacifistic than the next. You can more or less pick any combination at random, and find a bust up.

Catholics versus Protestants, Maronites versus Shias, Sunnis versus Shias, and even three-way Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim conflicts; there are many parts of the world where theological errancy comes with a price tag attached.

Numerous responses are available to thinking people. A range of internally consistent off-the-shelf theodicies are on offer, from St Augustine to Alvin Plantinga. Marxists stress that all religious doctrines are ultimately ideological refractions of class interest.

On the other hand, mainstream liberal atheists often intellectually limit themselves to the overly-simplistic  assertion that ‘religion poisons everything’.

Many on both left and right will explain what occurred in Jos by reference to local disputes over land, thanks to a system whereby Hausa Muslims are classified as settlers rather than indigenes and therefore discriminated against.

My one brief visit to Nigeria was confined to Lagos. I have no expert opinion on the specificities of the latest round of fighting, although materialist accounts obviously make the most intuitive sense.

But at the very least, religion is once again seen to be perpetuating divisions that would be sooner healed without its baleful influence complicating the Nigerian political process.

This brings me back to the tell-tale giveaway mark of totalitarian secular fundamentalists everywhere, namely our support for the separation of church and state. The less input religion has into politics, the better things are for everybody, including believers themselves.

This idea is rooted in Locke’s observations of the sometimes bloody tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism in seventeenth century Britain, and typically comes in a buy one, get one free package deal with freedom of religion. There is simply no other way forward in the multifaith society.

Those countries where the principle obtains, even as incompletely as it does in the UK, are manifestly the better for it. What happened in Jos last weekend is a timely reminder of the default setting.