BBC’s Sunday morning religious broadcasting programme The Big Questions today discussed whether blasphemy law should be repealed and whether fundamentalist religious indoctrination of children was child abuse.

On the panel are Ann Widdecombe MP; Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; Professor Richard Dawkins, the scientist and atheist; and Jonathan Bartley, the Director of Ekklesia, the religious think-tank. The special guest is the actor and singer, John Barrowman.

Members of the public apply for the rest of the slots. I doubt that the competition is intense. :-)There’s a number to call and a form on the BBC page, if you ever want to attend one of these.

Lord Carey supported Dawkins’ argument that blasphemy law should be repealed.

Dawkins pointed out that no one says “This is a post-modernist child ” although they will identify a Catholic child or a Baptist child. Naturally, the Archbishop disagreed on faith schools equalling indoctrination. He said baptism identified a person’s adherence to Christianity, rather than to any sect (which is surely missing the point) He even got slightly panicked, as he sought to distinguish UK religious schools from the behaviour shown in a film clip about US Faith camps, without saying anything to offend any fundamentalists in the lunatic wing of the Anglican church.

Generally, there was interesting and well-argued debate. Dawkins (wearing a fetching red A lapel badge) made excellent points throughout and was treated with respect by the celeb and non-celeb panel members and the presenter.

Astonishingly, a psychologist (who defined herself as culturally Jewish but religiously atheist) reported that a section of her degree students actually insisted that dinosaurs walked with humans and so on. She pointed out that, despite being in the final year of a science degree course, they had no understanding of science. Everyone – Christians, Muslims and atheists alike – expressed horror at the currency of anti-evolution beliefs. In fact, creationism was pretty well identified as child-abuse by at least one speaker.

The only reliably nutty person in the panel was former Conservative politician Anne Widdecombe, (wearing a less fetching cross on a necklace chain and a fish brooch.) She gets dragged into almost any televised discussion of religion, being so bizarrely un-mainstream as to be compelling.

I wasn’t taking notes – I didn’t know this would be on the test…. Someone might Youtube it.