God doesn't want Noah to invite my 9 year old son to his birthday party

I stopped believing in God when I was 18. It wasn't a sudden revelation, more a gradual drifting away, although I do remember sitting in the chapel of my public school one day and questioning the authority of the text. It was the Gospel yes, but was it gospel? And as I asked questions and actually read the New Testament it seemed so obvious that it was a bit of a fable that my faith waxed, waned and then slipped away. I didn't feel angry with my parents for taking me along to church, I'd actually quite enjoyed it. Nor was I cross with my boarding school which had made me attend services three times a week for all my teenage years. Most of these people seemed to believe it. It gave them comfort. I felt neither a rebel nor especially cheated when I left it. In fact I never really did leave it. I still went along to the odd church service but if asked my faith I now declared myself an atheist, which is a bit of an ugly word, isn't it. Bald and resonant with negativity.

Later on in life when my father died I found some solace in the fact that I was not religious. I didn't have to rail against the dying of the light or some God in his heaven who had stolen my Dad away. It was just something that had happened. And with the subsequent brickbats that life throws at us as we get older I never felt a need to fall back on faith. I found other things to love and console me. Real things. Like people.

When my first child was born it didn't occur to us to have him baptised. It wasn't a statement. I wasn't being a 'militant atheist' or anything like that. I think we had a conversation along the lines of "if he wants to get baptised later in life let it be his choice" but my mother and probably even certain of my more traditionally minded friends were not impressed. We had one of those 'naming ceremonies' but there wasn't a Celtic drummer in sight. We just got drunk and had a party.

When he was four the question of schools raised its ugly head. I live in inner city London. I filled in the form and put down our choices 1,2,3,4 - which were the nearest primary schools geographically to our house. Choice 1 was a 'normal' primary rated Good by Ofsted. Choice 2 happened to be a C of E school  also rated Good. We got choice 2. I would have preferred option 1 but never mind. One third of all state schools in Britain are Faith Schools and the proportion in primaries is higher in London.

It is a good school. The mix of race, class, education, backgrounds is a complete cross section of our local community and the place is friendly, well ordered and the kids (I have two) are being well educated. Bit too much God, but it's a faith school isn't it - so what would you expect?

My son is a sociable, happy, smart little boy. He is doing well and is both fun and popular. He has a close knit group of friends and one of these - Noah - is probably his best friend of all. It's Noah's birthday on Friday and most of the class are invited. My son isn't. The reason is the same reason my boy was given last year and the year before. Noah's parents are very fervent Christians. As his mother told my wife when they first met "it is important for us that our children's friends are Christians -  are you a Christian?"

So - as Noah explained to my son - it's fine for them to be friends and play at school but he can't be friends outside of school because my 9 year old doesn't go to church.

My boy is upset that he isn't invited to the party. He feels properly hurt. I know this because we had a man to man on the sofa last night. So what do I do? Do I tell him his friend's parents are mad? Do I tell him that it doesn't matter? It does matter. Do I harangue these people in the playground? Do I point out the irony of a faith that purports to be all about love and kindness, encouraging such cruelty and division in children of 9? Or do I just ignore it and tell my son "that's life and put up with it" - yes 'put up with this stupid all enveloping religion that seems to creep by stealth into every corner of our society'. Well I don't want to do that, because as a dumbass liberal I want my kids to make their own decisions about what they believe in and not drum me into them. A naive hope perhaps but it's what I believe and if you disagree with me your kids can't come to my kids' birthday parties - OK?

The problem is of course that his whole learning environment is overwhelmingly Christian. From his Head teacher down. It is the bread and butter of his school life. He - by dint of his parents lack of religiosity is an outsider.

In the last census 59% of the British population described themselves as Christians. I don't believe that statistic, I think they were mostly being polite or unimaginative. I suspect the true figure is much, much lower. Indeed even the church itself admits that less than 15% of the population are regular church goers - and yet this odd state of affairs continues. We put up with it. We allow its adherents to sit in judgement in our Upper Chamber, to run one third of our schools, to take the moral high ground over any number of issues.

Dawkins is often lambasted for being rude or arrogant when he points out the idiocy of faith. Given the way my son feels at the moment I wonder if we atheists aren't being rude enough.

Norma Major Ate My Cheese

It all began with the historian Andrew Roberts and an appearance he made on a debate some weeks before the start of the Gulf War. Roberts was on fiery, fulsome, idiotic form defending the case for invasion, the case for the existence of WMDs and the case - the ludicrous, witless, brainless, call it what you will case - that Saddam had the means to attack Britain with chemical weapons in 45 minutes. Now I am no Sun Tzu. The closest I ever came to military experience was a short stint in a cub pack in Essex that involved a lot of stick whittling and staring out of windows, but even I knew that the Iraqi Army was incapable of such a feat. You need missiles to do that sort of thing and Saddam didn't have the missiles. How was he planning to deploy the warheads? By taxi? Roberts went on to suggest that the Ba'athists were as dangerous as the Nazi party in 1939 and that Saddam was potentially more of a threat to world peace than Hitler had been, thus invoking Godwin's Law and looking very silly in the process.

It seemed to me then that Roberts was either lying to support the case for invasion or being spectacularly stupid. At that time I gave him the benefit of the doubt. With hindsight I think he was lying.

I wrote the historian a letter suggesting with all the politeness I could muster that a serious academic would never make such a ludicrous comparison and to my astonishment he wrote back. It wasn't pretty. He seemed to take my critique personally and lambasted my naivety, my impudence and my general ignorance in all matters historical. Bloody cheek. I got a B at A level.

And there it lay. The war came and didn't go. The WMDs were not found. Twitter was invented: "You should open a twitter account" a friend said to me one day "you'd be good at it, you like showing off."

I have long loved pranks. I mean truly great pranks. They are the ultimate subversion. The Dreadnought hoax , Nat Tate  and of course Peter Cook's Sven From Norway are akin to great art and as the social networking age blossomed it seemed that the possibility for subversive pranking was opening up on a global scale.

In the early months of 2011 I opened a fake twitter account in the name of Norma Major and started tweeting about cheese and life as a retired PM's wife. I thought it was an obvious spoof, but as the weeks went by, to my astonishment, quite a few serious journalists followed . I had stumbled across an odd quirk of twitter. The micro-blogging website is effectively a collection of different inter-linked villages and if word spreads through a particular neighbourhood that a 'big name' has arrived, the people in it believe what their friends and followers say without taking the time to make the necessary checks. Word rapidly spreads from one village to the next - like a plague - and in no time at all everyone starts to accept "Wendi Murdoch" or "IDS" as the real deal.  Odder still, the very worst offenders and very best spreaders are often journalists. The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed. 

Soon 'Norma' had taken on a life of her own. Her Pooterish adventures as she 'wrote' a book about the various amateur poets who had inhabited Downing Street, including a policeman called Bill and some early works by Alec Douglas-Home led to several serialisation offers arriving as DMs from big name broadsheets. Weirder still she talked frequently of John's attempts to write a book about the history of music hall, only for the 'real one' to subsequently do just that.

Then one day, quite unexpectedly, I got an email from Andrew Roberts in which he had copied in all of his quite impressive contact list. I decided that I would cherry-pick a few - and see if I could carry out an April Fool. Norma began to tweet excitedly about her new book "Hard Cheese" and then on the day itself I sent out an email from a Fake PR

Unfortunately, I sent it out to everyone with a rather smug justification on the auto-reply. I am always rather irritated with myself for that smug reply. It should have just been a big smiley face with "April Fool" on it but never mind. It was partly a joke, partly a political act, partly a situationalist prank, part revenge and yes I confess quite a big part "look at me". I am a writer and performer, "look at me" is what I have been doing since I tied a teacher's shoe-laces together at school.

The phoney PR got a really very angry email from Mr Roberts but 'she' also got an overwhelming inbox of mails from people who had taken it in good cheer. In fact most of the 'great and good' congratulated her on a cunning stunt. 

A week or two later "Norma" died in a dalek attack, but I had found a new way to write and reach an audience. For nearly twenty years I had been churning out plays and film scripts, poems and novels - here finally was a ready made audience, a new and untried 'art' and a world of endless possibility.