Since Paris, I’ve read and heard a small number of angry reactions that I would characterise as pseudo-fascist in nature: blaming Muslims in general for the attacks; scapegoating; suggesting collective punishment; phrases like ‘boot out the Muslims’, etc.

This isn’t just stupid and immoral: it’s totalitarianism by definition, and therefore stands in complete contradiction to the very values that western society, flawed though it certainly is, rightly attempts to promote and defend in the wake of such attacks.

To entertain these incitements to violence, or any suggestion that individuals be treated collectively (on the basis of their religion, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or for that matter anything else) would be to lose the very thing – perhaps the only thing – that we as evolved humans can be truly proud of, the only genuinely sound ethical basis for collective existence that exists: the belief in the universality of individual human rights.

To buy into such incitements would be to become the very thing we are fighting against.

At the same time, though, many other people seem to want to say that these increasingly frequent jihadist terrorist murders have ‘nothing to do with religion’ or ‘nothing to do with Islam’. This is, I am afraid, almost equally problematic.

Yesterday, I saw one particular well-meaning piece of social media sloganeering: ‘Remember, terrorism has no religion.’ The trouble with this thought, well-intentioned though it is, is that it is plain wishful thinking and nothing more. This terrorism, which is called Islamism, does indeed have ‘something to do’ with Islam. It has a very great deal to do with it, and draws authority for its actions from literal readings of Islam’s foundational texts. To relegate that thought to a kind of taboo status, to regard this observation as ‘culturally imperialist’ or even ‘racist’, is to condemn ourselves to a perpetual state of gibbering idiocy and, in the long run, perhaps even the destruction of all that we should hold dear.

We must allow ourselves to criticise totalitarian ideologies – including religious ones – without anyone conflating that criticism with oppression or violence. Without being silenced by self-victimising paranoids or the obsessively politically correct.

We must be less eager to embrace the delusion that terrorism and religious ideology are unconnected simply because we feel this creeping, sickly fear of offending the faithful. The faithful, frankly, need to grow up a little. Whatever your beliefs are – religious, secular, atheist, left, right, whatever – they exist to be debated, challenged and criticised by others. We all have the right to criticise and dispute each other’s beliefs and opinions in civil, non-violent ways. That’s what living in a decent and evolving society – a free society – looks like. Get over it.

We must allow ourselves to discuss these things openly, and those  who identify as liberals and progressives must be unafraid to make liberalism’s most vital case: that an open society, with an ever-increasing growth of knowledge but no ideological certainties, is better (yes, better) than any system based on the principle that one single book written long ago has supreme authority over all other sources of knowledge.

We should feel free, for example, to ask why it is that now, in 2015, more books are translated into Spanish  every single year, than have been translated into Arabic over the last 1,000 years.

Is that a ‘racist’ thought? No. It would be if it carried the inference that the reason for this astonishing fact was that Arabs were somehow ‘inferior’. But that is categorically not the inference and it’s not true.

Rather, the correct inference – and the truth of the matter –  is that the Arab world has been tragically and appallingly held back, its cultural, intellectual and economic development very severely stunted, not only by the imperial depredations of first Ottoman and then western powers, but also by the overweening cultural hegemony of an extremely oppressive totalitarian religion. And if you think that is a ‘racist’ thought, I humbly suggest you may not understand the meaning of the word.

Christianity was tamed in Europe, over the course of several hundred years: slowly stripped of its political power and largely relegated to a matter of personal spirituality and pleasant Sunday-morning community get-togethers. It had its political wings clipped, in other words, and that is as it should be with religion.

America’s take on ‘freedom of religion’, from the beginning, also created, implicitly (and crucially), the freedom from religion. Thomas Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ between church and state set the template for the modern world in this respect: it is a personal human right to have a religion and to practice it… but no religion will have its hand on the levers of power. Personal spirituality?  Fine, wonderful, and indeed, one of our inalienable human rights. But religious political power? Theocratic government? No.

Religion should not – it must not – have the power to coerce anyone into anything. It should certainly not have the power to burn or stone homosexuals, or throw them from tall buildings; to murder infidels and apostates while claiming the authority to do so directly from a holy book. Religious people should not be able to feign moral authority when making statements that plainly regard women as inferior beings, whose minds, private lives and sexualities are to be restrained, controlled and punished by a corrupt caste of jaundiced old men.

In response to events like those in Paris on Friday (and there will, of course, be more events ‘like’ them), reactionary acts of violence and statements of prejudice against individual Muslim human beings going about living their lives would be both morally evil and horrifically stupid. However, a free discussion about old and obsolete religious value systems – including direct and stinging criticism of them – is going to be indispensable for the future of our evolution and the long-term survival of our species. So we may as well get used to it.

It is true that this is a war. And inevitably, a part of that war will be fought against the armies of ISIL using guns and bombs. But the war will never be won using only these means. This ‘war’ is also a moral and intellectual debate, about values and ideas and ways of living; about death and metaphysics and about how we are to behave in this, the living world, the only world we can be sure exists.

It is in this aspect of the conflict – the intellectual and moral debate – that I think we are failing so depressingly.

So, please let us talk openly about it. Let us allow ourselves to be free to criticise religion – to criticise all totalitarian certainties. Even more, let us begin  by opening our minds and our hearts to those brave and vital men and women in the Arab and Muslim world who are attempting to reform and modernise Islamic culture from within. Let us celebrate and support the Arab and Persian, Muslim and ex-Muslim secularists, reformers, democrats, liberals and feminists who will be, in the end, the vanguard of a momentous change within Muslim culture itself, a change without which this ‘war’ can never be won.

Please, my beloved liberals and friends on the political left, instead of making knee-jerk common cause against America and Israel by siding with the Arab world’s most nauseating fascists and gangsters (the most reactionary and conservative forces in the world, in fact, which is why it’s heartbreaking to see the political left so often allied with them), why not pledge that support, instead, to the Arab world’s courageous liberals, its reformers and feminists and secularists?

And who knows? Perhaps across the Earth, the sight of European liberals actually standing up for liberalism might communicate a moral coherence on the part of ‘the west’ that has been hitherto lacking. It might even help to dilute the perception, very common in the Muslim world, that ‘the west’ will be easy to vanquish in the end , because we are spineless, depraved, morally incoherent.

Maybe – just maybe – a strong and defiant, fiercely-articulated argument in favour of liberalism and secularism against religious totalitarianism might be the one thing we really need now, both to defend ourselves from the moral effects of the attack we are under, and to help our reform-minded brothers and sisters in the Muslim world begin to win their desperate battle for hearts and minds.