Should the Church Apologise to Atheists?

National apologies have become a feature of political life around the world. Believing that they have a positive therapeutic effect on those who have been wronged, and claiming that the national conscience (if one can be said to exist) will be cleansed only when the sins of the past are confessed and contrition expressed, an array of apologies have been offered. On behalf of the United States, President Bill Clinton said sorry to the Afro-American community for the slave trade. Speaking for the English people, Prime Minister Tony Blair said sorry to the Irish for failing to relieve the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine. More recently, France and Turkey have been engaged in a bitter feud over the unwillingness of Paris to concede that French forces committed crimes against humanity in its former colony of Algeria in the 1950s while Turkey has been condemned for failing to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915 when as many as a…