Right to reply

I am glad that some eminent figures have not just responded to the Humanist association's attack on David Cameron's pretty mild comments about Christianity.  A letter to The Telegraph today does not have quite the star quality or quanitity of Monday's letter (Professor Roger Scruton the most high profile) but three-quarters are professors and all hold PhDs, skewering a main atheist claim that religiously minded people and their apologists are stupid.  Citing Christian humanism, it evokes the history that the first humanists were Renaissance christian men-of-letters and how Anglicanism in particular is a liberal 'public orthodoxy' which 'imposes no civil penalties on non-Anglicans', which is why it is generally supported, something which gets up the noses of convinced atheists.  It does not deride Humanists, merely expressing the benefits of religious 'establishment-lite' and saying that the Humanists need to offer a better alternative if they are to be more persuasive towards the two-thirds who claim to be religious, if only of a fuzzy kind.  The response from the chief executive of the Humanist Association ignored the pluralistic aspect in today's letter, stating the need to build an inclusive national identity not a narrow one.  When people are convinced of their cause they tend to ignore the bits that disagree with them.  Being slammed by both atheist Nick Clegg, of Muslim heritage Nadhim Zahawi MP and Hindu Alok Sharma MP displays that Christianity is far more inclusive in its approach to faith and national identity than Humanism.
Going on to say they didn't want  'a war of words over religion' (despite initiating it), shows how aggressive atheists couch their language regarding religion in terms of conflict, for unlike Gibbon and fellow eighteenth-century sceptics who detested Christianity's pacific nature, since war was discredited by the First World War, it has become fashionable to label religion as the source of most, if not all, conflict (historically inaccurate anyway).  If you are instinctively opposed to two separate things, it is understandable enough to want to link them.
In the end, both letters won't change the mindsets of those on the other side.  I wonder though if today's letter will get as much coverage in the national media as Monday's did.