A UK judge has launched an assault on attempts to protect the conscience rights of religious people in law as 
“irrational” and “capricious” and attacked religious belief dismissing it as “subjective” with no basis in fact.
Lord Justice Laws said that laws aimed at protecting people of faith could turn Britain into “theocracy”. His critics say he is imposing secularism.
His comments came as he dismissed a legal challenge by a Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked for refusing to go against his Christian beliefs by offering sex therapy sessions to homosexual couples.
Gary McFarlane, 48, argued that forcing him to offer such sessions, which directly contradict his deepest held beliefs, constituted religious discrimination.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey, in a highly unusual move, supported McParlane by writing to the judge warning of a tide of discrimination against Christians that threatened “civil unrest”.
Lord Carey called for the Lord Chief Justice to set up a separate panel of five judges with “proven sensitivity” to religious feelings to hear the appeal and other similar cases in the future.
However Lord Justice Laws dismissed Lord Carey’s views as “misplaced” was “mistaken”.
Campaigners and leading clerics warned last night there that the judgment could enshrine the “persecution” of Christians in modern Britain and sideline religion in public life.
Lord Carey described the ruling as “deeply worrying”, saying that it downgraded the right of religious people to express their faith.
“The judgement heralds a ‘secular’ state rather than a ‘neutral’ one,” he said.
“And while with one hand the ruling seeks to protect the right of religious believers to hold and express their faith, with the other it takes away those same rights.”
Lord Justice Laws held that people had the right to hold religious beliefs, those beliefs no right to be treated with special respect under the law.
“In the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence,” he told the court.
“The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified,” he said.
“It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”
He added: “If they did … our constitution would be on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.”
Mr McFarlane said that the ruling was an example of Christians being persecuted in modern Britain.
Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, which supported Mr McFarlane, described the depiction of traditional religious views on marriage as subjective as an “alarming” development.
“In effect it seeks to rule out Christian principles of morality from the public square,” she said.
“It seems that a religious bar to office has been created, whereby a Christian who wishes to act on their Christian beliefs on marriage will no longer be able to work in a great number of environments.”
But Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, hailed the judgment as a defeat for “fundamentalism”
“The law must be clear that anti-discrimination laws exist to protect people, not beliefs,” he said.