This is one thought that really does count

So the wonderfully named Barbara Smoker – think Vesuvius in a satin jacket, exhaling – will be taking the BBC to court under the Human Rights Act if it doesn't open its morning Thought for The Day slot to people of a non-religious persuasion. A one-time and, indeed, long-time president of the National Secular Society, Ms Smoker maintains that her human rights both as listener and contributor suffer continuous and continuing violation as a consequence of the exclusively non-secular nature of this religious item.

That a woman of 79 should choose to busy herself this way, when it would be so much easier for her to while away her hours collecting knitting patterns or taking old time dancing lessons with fellow secularists her own age, is entirely admirable. If more 79-year-olds invoked the Human Rights Act every time they didn't like something on radio or television, or couldn't understand why they weren't themselves on radio and television, the world would be a funnier place. Whether it would be a better, which for Barbara Smoker means a more secular, place, I doubt. It is hard to see how we improve our humanity by trivialising it.

Though I have not discussed the matter with Harold Pinter, prominent among those prominent atheists who first charged the BBC with discriminating against the non-religious, I have yet to meet a person, in possession of a sense of the ridiculous, who gives a fig for his or Barbara Smoker's outrage. The argument that Thought for the Day denies a voice to the disbelieving majority of British men and women answers itself. It is precisely because just about everything else we hear is secular that we should not begrudge a minute or two a day to a little of the old-time religion. Not least when you consider how quaint a privilege, or what condescension towards its ineffectiveness, that minute or two enjoys. Curiously, by threatening to make it an issue of human rights, Barbara Smoker confers a more influential seriousness on Thought for the Day than it would otherwise be credited with.

But then this is often the way with secular-speak – by which I do not mean the ordinary unselfconscious language of disbelievers, but the propagandising of the ideology of disbelief – it makes religionists of us all.

Take, as an example, Richard Dawkins's Alternative Thought for the Day, which the BBC, with considerable cunning, offered last August as a sop to the militant secularists. It began, if you were not lucky enough to hear it, with the following profound challenge to theology. "When a terrible disaster happens" – as opposed to a pleasant disaster, would that be? – but let's not interrupt: "When a terrible disaster happens – an air crash, a flood, or an earthquake – people thank God that it wasn't worse. But then why did he let the earthquake happen at all?"

Hard to believe, isn't it, that a distinguished scientist and academic, the man chosen to smuggle the wooden horse of secularism on to the enemy airwaves, should offer up a thought of such staggering banality as this to combat what he calls the "infantile regression" of religion. Leave aside the little he appears to know about the way humans negotiate travails, the compromises they temporarily reach with superstition, the forms their sorrow and their relief take, the proper compulsion they feel to express both resentment and gratitude to forces over which they have no control. Leave aside the weightlessness of his language and the insensitivity of his rhythms – "We have been born, and we are going to die," he muses later. What is staggering is his assumption of theological triumph – why did God let the earthquake happen at all, blah blah – as though no religious person has ever yet faced up to the problem of suffering, never pondered the seeming absence, when he is most needed, of God or his agents, never found it difficult to reconcile the visible facts of misery with the tenuousness of faith.

What does he think happens on Thought for The Day? Has he never listened? Had he done so, he would surely have known that the earthquake that God permitted is the near invariable subject of whoever occupies that inoffensive little interval. What else vexes Rabbi Blue in all his fretful jestings? Or Anne Atkins, as she binds us in the silken threads of her voluptuous locution, making verbal love to however many millions of us at a time, by way of recompense for God's unresponsiveness?

Myself, I had always thought I could take or leave alone these somewhat marginalised ruminators of the spirit, but if Dawkins is the alternative, I do not just take them, I embrace them.

As for Smoker, whose human rights go on suffering violation even as we speak, there is no reason to believe she would fill the God slot with any more eloquent Godlessness than Dawkins; only witness these lucubrations for the Gay and Lesbian Humanist – "...the idea of deliberate creation raises the moral problem of all the suffering there is in life – for so many people, and also for animals. I am ashamed, in retrospect, that I ever found it possible to worship the supposed creator of over-reproduction, sentient food, disease and natural disasters.'

And also for animals... Bathos – the art of sinking in secularity.

Here is not the place to wonder why declared atheism always sounds so fatuous, even more fatuous, it strikes me, though I am not myself religious, than declared belief. Perhaps there is naivety built into the declaration of anything. Hence the importance of art, which is anti-declaratory. But is it not astounding that people with so little to say should wish to go to court to say it in the one tiny crevice of the media that is closed to them? Is this, then, a feature of atheism, that it cannot bear the expression of opinions other than its own? We had thought that to be the exclusive fault of religion.

Never trust, anyway, whoever would appeal to human rights. It usually means they are after yours.