I think all opinions should be heard, no matter who they come from. I wish I could say the same for the producers of BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day. They insist this slot is the sole preserve of religions, and say that every other minute of their morning programme is open to secular opinion.

Isn't it annoying when people just don't get you? What I like about Thought for the Day is that it is a strand devoted to ethics, and we humanists have plenty of that to share around. We don't have any answers given to us by God, so we view ethics and morality as a shifting sea and accept the fact that society changes. Homosexuality used to be illegal but is accepted now. I'm not about denying the existence of God: she may exist, she may not. It's not something that can be proved, which is why many humanists are agnostics - and there are lots of religious people who'd call themselves humanists too, which is why from today we are inviting them to podcast on Thinkhumanism.org. We are open-minded that way. The first three contributions, printed below in an edited form, are from AC Grayling, Stewart Lee and Nigel Warburton.

I see nothing wrong with people following a faith if they believe it makes them a better person (though I can't understand people saying grace before dinner and thanking God "for what they are about to receive" when there are so many in the world receiving no sustenance whatsoever). But humanists have been pestering the BBC for years about Thought for the Day - and, as there are only so many times you can be told to go away, we decided to do something about it. Thinkhumanist.org will be linked to more than 7000 humanist-oriented organisations throughout the world, who will be invited to put their own podcasts on the site so there is always an alternative Thought for the Day.

On Sundays, we can go hillwalking rather than churchgoing and appreciate the beautiful planet that nature gave us. We have time to think, read the papers, talk to people and try to understand someone we didn't yesterday. Maybe the BBC doesn't understand our wish to be on Thought for the Day but I bet they "see the light" eventually.

Juliet Lawrence Wilson is a Humanist Society of Scotland celebrant. To hear the alternative Thought for the Days visit www.thinkhumanist.org or www.humanism-scotland.org.uk
A C Grayling
Tolerance is vital as long as we know where the limit is.

One of the essentials of a good community - that is, a community in which each of us can build flourishing lives for ourselves and those we care about - is tolerance. Tolerance matters for the obvious reason that the diversity of interests and desires people have is sometimes so great that we don't even understand why others should think and behave as they do; and yet we acknowledge their right to do so, because we cherish the same right for ourselves.

Thus the very possibility of society turns on tolerance. Society involves people getting along peacefully all the time and co-operatively most of the time, and neither is possible unless people recognise the entitlement of others to their choices, and give them space accordingly.

But here, of course, is the familiar rub: the paradox of tolerance, which is that a tolerant society is at risk of tolerating those who are intolerant, and allowing movements to grow which foster intolerance. The profoundly dismaying spectacle of the contemporary Netherlands illustrates this point. What was one of the most inclusive and welcoming societies in Europe has been stabbed in the heart by people it sheltered and who have grown into intolerant activists wishing to impose conformity and censorship on others by violence. And alas, it has happened here too.

The remedy for the paradox of tolerance is, of course, that tolerance can't tolerate intolerance. But this truism is often greeted with the response that if tolerance is intolerant of something, it is in breach of itself: it becomes self-defeating in another way. The answer is to insist that although it's natural to think that tolerance is a warm, woolly, feel-good attitude, in fact it is a principle: it's an ethical demand that everyone should respect everyone else's rights and liberties. And this does the trick all by itself.

Tolerance is not a demand to license just anything whatever, least of all behaviour that threatens the rights of others. Tolerance thus has its central place in the good society along with other principles that stop it from being a merely flabby acceptance that anything goes. These are the principles of pluralism and individual liberty, which essentially require tolerance, but indicate its rational limit. Insisting on this vital point is what explains why tolerance not only cannot but must not tolerate intolerance.
AC Grayling is a philosopher and historian. He will be appearing at the Aye Write! festival in Glasgow on February 20.

Stewart Lee
Religious education has a new role in a more secular society.

Last year, as I crossed a picket-line of religious protesters trying to ban a theatre piece I'd co-written, a phrase popped unbidden into my head. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Few would disagree that the stories and sayings of religions and myths are an unavoidable part of the imaginative fabric of our daily lives, whether one accepts them as literal truth or not. Everyday language is consistently and quietly informed by religion and myth. But should this source material be available as imaginative resources for everyone, or should its usage be restricted?

Last month, at The Bush theatre in London, I performed a one-man show about the last week of Jesus's life, as seen through the eyes of his disciple Judas. On some nights I was aware of the predictable and menacing presence of believers looking to object - but I also had lots of positive feedback from thoughful priests and enthusiastic secularists alike. Two years ago, right-wing Christian fundamentalists closed down the theatre piece I co-wrote, Jerry Springer: The Opera, because of its religious content. Ongoing attempts to take us to court for blasphemy, and a general doubt over religious freedom of expression introduced by the goverment's failed religious hatred bill, led to the collapse of the opera as a financially or artistically viable entity.

So, given this, why return to religious themes for a new work? Well, it's 30 years now since half of the population watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show together at the same time, and even longer since the majority of the nation claimed to believe in the same God, or indeed any God at all. We live in a society where common ground is increasingly hard to find; where communal points of reference are increasingly rare. The multi-channel media narrowcasts to ever-more focused demographics rather than broadcasting to broad ones. But what better way is there to look at - as we did in the opera, for example - the most essential notions of good and evil than through the Christian vision of heaven and hell in conflict? What better-known tale of betrayal is there than the story of Judas and Jesus?

Believers say religious stories survive because they are literally true, but even rationalists accept that religious tales, myths and folk-stories, while not always actually true, can be true in terms of what they tell us about human experience. As rationalists, we should be careful, in trying to block religious education in its most pernicious forms, that we do not prevent young people from accessing a treasure trove of invaluable material.

As I travelled the country defending the opera, meatheads made the banal point that we would not have used the Koran in the same way as we appropriated the Bible. They attributed this to fear, which is understandable, but ignored the fact that there would be little point in using Islamic stories as a shortcut to bigger ideas when they are not commonly understood by most people in the UK.

So, how do we maintain a shared frame of mytholo-poetic reference in a country both increasingly secular and multicultural? Religious education needs, if anything, to be increased, to teach the folk-tales and ancient stories of all religions and pantheons of Gods alongside each other, without ever addressing the argument of their literal truth. A child learning that his parents' faith is another person's myth - or even another person's blasphemy - must find in these great, ancient metaphors key common elements, rather than, in ignorance, defending the inescapable rightness of a position he has merely inherited culturally. Besides which, I quietly believe that the best way to get society en masse to abandon any dangerous, literal, fundamental belief in religions is actually to expose young people to all of them.
Stewart Lee is a comedian and author, and the co-writer and director of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Nigel Warburton
We tend not to think much about death. Perhaps we should.

I was on the train to London a few days ago when, as we were passing through a station at high speed, there was a disconcerting jolt. We'd gone over something on the rails. The train carried on for a few hundred yards, and then stopped. We waited. There had been an obstruction on the track, we were told, and we had to get clearance. An "incident" had occurred. Nothing more specific. After an hour and a half of waiting, during which we discovered that the driver was being replaced, most of us realised what had happened: someone had thrown themselves under the train.

At this point, selfish concerns about being late for appointments evaporated considerably. Most people's thoughts, I suspect, were with the train driver and with the friends and family of whoever had taken this desperate step. But not for too long. We had to get back to our lives, despite having been unwilling accomplices in someone else's suicide. When we eventually pulled into Paddington, we bustled into the underground and got on with whatever we had to do. That's what being alive is like.

It's a cliche, but still true, that death is all around us, but we are shielded from it most of the time. We rarely encounter death or even give it much thought. But perhaps we should. As a philosopher, I think it is something worth thinking about. I like the classical idea that philosophy should teach us how to accept death. But it can take a real death to focus the mind.

If, like me, you believe that death is the end of all experience, there is great consolation in thinking that when it has happened there won't be anything else. That's it. We don't worry about the eternity before we existed; why be concerned about the eternity during which we won't exist in the future?

Atheists often describe believers as indulging in wishful thinking when they claim there is a wonderful afterlife to come. But, from my perspective, never-ending life would be a kind of hell that would remove meaning from everything I did, like an interminable piece of music that never reached its final chord. If wishful thinking is believing something that would be pleasanter than the truth, this is a misnomer. I don't want what the philosopher Bernard Williams called the sheer tedium of immortality - even if it were an option.

What is bad about death is what it does to other people: the ones left behind to grieve. Slow death, and pain in dying, are terrible facts of the human condition. But death itself is nothing to fear. Paradoxically, like love, it makes life worth living.
Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His blog, Virtual Philosopher, is at www.virtualphilosopher.org.