Giles Fraser sees part of the mistake.

The problem with the person who drove a lorry into a crowded market of Christmas shoppers wasn’t that he was too religious, but that he wasn’t religious enough. It was the action of a half-believer, the sort of thing done by someone who doesn’t so much believe in God – but rather believes in the efficacy of human power exercised on God’s behalf, as if God needed his help.

Of course. Obviously. I’ve said it many times, and I’m sure so have most talkative atheists. It’s absurd that humans who profess to believe in an omnipotent omniscient god think that god needs their help.

It’s a very basic point. The truth of God’s existence does not depend on me. It does not depend on me filling my church with believers at midnight mass. Nor does it depend on me (or anyone else) winning or losing arguments about God’s existence on Twitter. God is not like a political party that lives or dies on its support or lack of it.

Well actually that’s exactly what “God” is like – but not in the terms of the God-belief itself. That’s the tricky part. In reality “God” is indeed dependent on humans and their beliefs and actions, but according to the believers, “God” is not dependent on anything. They would omit the scare-quotes, you see, and the scare-quoteless God is independent of humans. But the fly in the ointment is that there’s no reason to think there is any such god, or that we know anything about it if there is. The “truth” of that god’s existence does depend on the prowess of Giles Fraser and others at filling churches with humans.

“The great aim of all true religion,” wrote William Temple, “is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God.” Religious terrorists don’t get this because they still think it’s all about them, and what they can achieve. That’s the heresy.

It may be the heresy, but it’s not the real mistake. The real mistake is to transfer the center of interest from self to God instead of transferring it from self to others. “God” doesn’t need us; others do.

Indeed, what Allahu Akbar surely means (and Arabic speaking Christians use the phrase too) is that God needs nothing from me in order to be God. And when this is recognised, I can (sometimes with quite considerable relief) drop all my desperate schemes and arguments that try and keep him going in the face of opposition and disbelief. Indeed, in order to seek to transfer the centre of interest from self to God, to achieve other-centredness, you can’t make it all about you, your spiritual struggle, your religious heroism.

But achieving other-centeredness in the form of God-centeredness achieves nothing. It’s pointless. It’s pointless if “God” doesn’t exist and it’s pointless if it does. There are excellent, compelling reasons for not focusing all one’s care and concern on one’s precious self, but they’re to do with other people (and animals and the planet we depend on), not a speculated god.