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Dr Rowan Williams’ barmy comments on the potential implementation of sharia law in the British Isles strike me as perhaps one last throw of the dice for a silly old man who is watching helpless as religion (especially his own) is being eroded.

On his inauguration, the Archbishop was presented as a funky modernist, in stark contrast to his old-fashioned predecessor, George Carey, another total mediocrity. It was said that he was a fan of The Simpsons. Then he travelled to the mass graveyard of ground zero in Manhattan and declared that terrorists can have serious moral grounds and that the 9/11 murderers shouldn’t be called evil. Well, some people described as terrorists may have some serious moral grounds for their actions, but if the incineration of 3000 random New Yorkers, people of all faiths among the murdered, is not ‘evil’ not surely nothing is, therefore destroying one of the cornerstones of Christianity and smashing Williams’ entire theology to bits.

But, then, this isn’t much of a surprise, because, to listen to him talk with John Humphries some time ago, the Archbishop didn’t sound too convinced that he believed in god at all. What use this man and his ilk?

Two separate systems of law cannot possibly exist side-by-side in the same state. Think of the implications of such a thing. Who decides which system is used in each case? Does the accused select which set of laws he or she wishes to be tried under, or does the judiciary decide? Unworkable chaos.

As should be obvious by now, you cannot run a country from the dubious and arcane ‘wisdom’ of scripture. The holy books of the dominant monotheisms were written by our dim-witted ancestors as they scrabbled through the dust of early history, the collective mass of them knowing less about the natural world, about science and reason than the average 10-year-old in our present day.

Look to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran. These are failed states. What holds them back? Why are they not free and stable societies, capable of enriching human understanding and engaging with the modern world? It is simply because of their insistence on abiding by a set of rules created for a time that has long since past. They haven’t moved on but the world around them has, as things tend to do.

The present laws of the land are, of course, fallible. They have been created by human beings so they have to be. However, they have come about through centuries of debate and experience, and are always open to refinement depending on new circumstances and fresh knowledge.

This is not the case in holy law, because scripture, being the so-called word of god, is fixed. It is immutable. Mere humans, subjects as we all of an apparently very strange deity, cannot change the decrees of the creator as we see fit.

Why would the Archbishop advocate the imposition of medieval ideas onto contemporary society? I think that he sees in Islam a piety that has almost completely burnt out in British Christianity. The average Brit might be a believer for the census board but he or she certainly doesn’t observe Christian rituals with any conviction, if at all. Sunday’s just another day. No one goes to church. People live their lives pretty much completely free of religious contemplation. Then what use the Archbishop and his other bizarrely dressed chums? In British Islam Williams’ has detected a community that still practices religion with the fervour of old, a community that, on the whole, still adheres daily to the teachings of an imaginary sky-lord.

This, though it’s the wrong religion, probably brings him comfort while he wonders if he’s completely wasted his life with nonsense, which in fact he has.