You're listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast for a special series on free speech with the Oxford academic and author on the subject Timothy Garten Ash.

In the third of five essays he looks at the tricky balance between free speech and religion.

This is the music played of the funeral of one of the cartoonists of the French satirical

magazine Charley Hebdo who were murdered by Islamist extremists in Paris last year. They were killed simply because they'd

published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Here's an example of what I call

the assassin's veto, published that and we will kill you.

As these assassins left the building, they shouted,

We've avenged the Prophet. The tension between religion and free speech is one of the most acute in our time.

Of course it's quite wrong to identify all Muslims with such violence.

One of the most moving scenes I saw on the days after the Shalie Hebdo attacks

was a group of French imams on a street corner in Paris singing the Marseille.

But it's equally absurd to say that all this has nothing to do with religion.

Even if we put aside such extremes of terror perpetrated in the name of faith,

there's still a palpable tension.

Christians complain that their views are not fully respected in secular Britain.

Some even say the BBC is infused with a kind of metropolitan atheism.

Meanwhile, atheists feel they're not fully accepted in the famously religious United States.

How can we reconcile people's deep... famously religious United States.

How can we reconcile people's deeply held belief in absolute revealed truths with a vital post-enlight

freedom to question all beliefs. After debating this at length with believers

in many faiths and none, the principle I propose is this. We respect the believer, but not necessarily the content of the belief.

The vital distinction here is between two different kinds of respect.

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