[DanaC]

Also worth noting that our state-owned broadcaster (BBC) is under obligation to provide/show a certain amount of religious/spiritual broadcasting; this is meant to cater to a variety of religions but naturally in a broadly 'Christian' country this tends to be mostly Christian with some other stuff to balance it out.

My favourite radio station is BBC Radio4: Sunday mornings there are broadcast services, and 'spiritual messages' such as 'Thought for the Day' and spiritual programmes such as 'Something Understood'. I don't know for sure without a bunch of googling, but I believe science and nature come under the obligation to broadcast educational material. Religion and ethics gets its own separate obligation.

Our Head of State (Queenie) is also our 'Defender of the Faith.'

The House of Lords contains spiritual as well as temporal 'Lords' as it has done ever since it was conceived. This is an active branch of government.

We've had this discussion before, but it's always intrigued me that, whilst we have religion and in particular the Church of England fundamentally entwined in our State, we are nonetheless a peculiarly irreligious bunch. Yet in America, which has a separation of Church and State as a fundamental facet of their nation, is nonetheless a far more religious/spiritual country.

I would be interested to know if there is a country in existence in which science is given that much influence/power, or in which the scientific community is treated with as much inherent and legally sanctioned respect as is a religious body. I have yet to hear someone like Dawkins sound anywhere near as aggressive and shrill as some of the religious lobby. The two are not comparable: Christians who live in a country that is peculiarly theirs adopt the guise of a beleaguered and downtrodden people. Atheists who live in a country that is fundamentally hostile to their views are painted as extremists if they so much as raise their voice.