Purely for the sake of balance, I think it's fair to observe that it seems Tao will not rest until every sign of faith, every doctrine and dogma (except his own, of course) is eradicated.
As I have said before, I 'wandered off' in my youth, and by the time I found my Catholicism anew, I had a partner and three children being educated in the state system. Neither she nor they are baptised, and neither she nor they have ever had to defend themselves against my Catholicism. My partner is areligious and against religious education. Any attempt to educate my children would have been perceived as indoctrination and would have been fiercely resisted. This is not up for discussion, but purely as background.
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Religious education in the UK which is, as observed, effectively a secular state, is minimal. Gone are the hymns and prayers of the (state) schools of my youth, and RI (Religious Instruction — ie the instruction of being in a religion) became RE (Religious Education — information about various religions) and now is little more than a teenage look at morality and ethics.
Religious instruction, with regard to the central tenets of Christianity, or indeed any religion, is non-existent. In a secular educational system, it's all myth, superstition, an interesting cultural history.
Today its all about societal issues — broadly social morality and ethics. The religious underpinnings of such systems is ignored.
Faith Schools have always existed — Catholic schools since the nineteenth century when the law allowed the practice of Catholicism in the UK once again and Jewish schools ... but UK society in general has grown increasingly more hostile to the idea of faith schools, Tao is among the majority voice there. Attempts have been made to ban them, and there is a strong lobby to do so, but the state finds itself looking embarrassingly authoritarian if it does so, especially as faith schools perform well in the general statistical analysis of education. Its state schools which fail.
Interestingly, Catholic schools are always heavily over-subscribed, and non-religious people will do everything possible, move house, attend mass, to get their kids into a catholic school. Here the 'traditional values' of basic good manners are observed, backed with a disciplinary system that is as tough as the law allows, and if the child continues to misbehave then the parents are called in.
I find Tao's vision, at times, bordering on the hysterical. To say religion holds any sway in the UK is a nonsense, and only last year the BBC was faced with an embarrassing leak of an internal memo which admitted an anti-Christian bias ... BBC religious programming for the most part is a discreet questioning and undermining of the traditional Christian image.
As I have been observing, the representation of the religion on TV has never been other than that of murderous or adulterous priests, and monks and nuns are always maniacs — I have never seen the even-handed characterisation of the religious life. My family delight in shouting "It's him!" as soon as a dog-collar appears in a TV detective show, and in the recent list, they have been right.
If every gay character was presented as a paedophile in the media, there would be an outcry of unfair treatment.
Catholics, who are presented as fanatics, obsessives, peadophiles, murderers, etc ... we're just over-reacting.
The European Commission, fighting for a Constitution, has sought to eradicate every mention of Christianity from the history of Europe and its cultural and social emergence and development, as if it never happened.
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Secularism is, of course, the new fundamentalism — it allows and will stand for nothing but it's own opinion, and Tao is its heroic spokesperson.
Thomas
You raise some very good points. But you are going to have to wait for my response to them 
