In the right hand corner of my screen, News 24 patches together eye-witness stories from the latest scenes of the police hunt in London. Everyone hopes today's operations mark the beginning of the end of the nightmare most of us had been waiting for, but hope isn't matched by optimism. It seems conceivable that London could be joining Jerusalem and Baghdad as a city of endemic, indigenous terror. And, for once, 'nightmare' is not hyperbole but a precise description of the claustrophobic, physical fear this prospect engenders. (And I'm not in London, just sitting here reading emails from friends who are.)

But the process of comment and analysis isn't suspended. And Polly Toynbee's latest piece in the Guardian provoked me.

It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.

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All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion.

Now, I will grant you that a minority of religious people commit atrocities because of their beliefs - if you will grant me that a minority of atheists do the same. At which point we can factor out the question of "religion" and recognise that we are dealing with something intrinsic to "human nature" as we encounter it in this world. After which, perhaps we can think about what's going on in Toynbee's thinking.

One of the things I admire about my father, a free church minister, is that (unlike me) it's remarkably difficult to get an opinion out of him. What I learnt from watching him is that if you really believe something, you don't feel a compulsion to force it on others - crude "evangelism" is generally a mechanism for denying your own doubt, converting others to convince yourself. Faith, as I experience it, co-exists with doubt and transcends it (when it does) by grace, rather than by certain proof. Though we disagree regularly, it was my father's example that brought me back to the church eventually, after coming in close contact as a teenager with the kind of spiritual abuse that can go on in evangelical churches.

I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of certainty that characterises Toynbee's brand of atheism, and I've never had the wholesale contempt for others' beliefs that gleams through her words. But if I do not treat others with contempt, it is not because I am "moderate", a tamed believer who has learnt to keep his faith in a closet. For that matter, I don't accept the ethic of "tolerance" - to be tolerated, in the terms of secular liberalism, is to be treated with magnanimously-veiled contempt, a veil likely to be removed when the circumstances no longer reinforce the tolerator's sense of superiority.

The core of what I disagree with in Toynbee's article lies in her distinction between "the real world and the world of dreams". To be human, as Shakespeare constantly reminds us, is to live in a world of dreams. The most dangerous people on earth are those who believe their particular dreaming is "the real world". It may seem crazy and appalling to imply that there is anything in common between Toynbee's belief system, however rude she is to others, and that of the young men blowing themselves up on tube trains. I'm not equating them, but I am saying that they share a particular quality of certainty (about their rightness and others' wrongness) that I find quite alien.

Belief is not an optional extra, but a part of being human. Any culture or society values certain things - that is, gives worth to them - that is, worships them. The society in which we live primarily worships money, a jealous god that demands burnt offerings of oil and human sacrifice on a terrible scale, seeking to contain and/or eliminate all alternative belief systems.

Watching the pictures in the corner of the screen, realising I'm not being entirely coherent - still, what more to say? (The police are releasing CCTV stills of yesterday's would-be bombers.) Just that those of us who can must pray. And that we must seek to keep open the lines of communication with those of different beliefs, seek out common ground without pretending that difference doesn't exist, recognising that no two people's beliefs are ever quite the same.