Is Islam the most evil religion in the world? Richard Dawkins said so at the Cheltenham Science Festival yesterday. But was he right?

Erm, Richard Dawkins? On religion?

Your scepticism is justified. The arch-atheist's views on religion are not particularly compelling; for someone who has devoted so much of his career to rubbishing the whole thing, he's notoriously ill-informed about the subject.

However, he's not the only person to say this kind of thing. It's a narrative particularly beloved in the right-wing press on both sides of the Atlantic and has driven populist movements all over the Western world. Its poster boy is Donald Trump, who wants to ban them from travelling the US altogether.

I know some very nice Muslims.

Quite, and Dawkins was clear was talking about Islam rather than Muslims; in fact he said, 'Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else.'

On the other hand, some Muslims do terrible things in the name of Islam.

Yes, and some people would argue that there are verses in the Quran that lend themselves to justifying that sort of behaviour. There's also plenty in Islam that lends itself to misogyny and homophobia, too.

I hate to say it, but I'm finding Dawkins strangely convincing.

Strange indeed, but I don't think you've really thought it through.

Really? What about Islamic State and Al-Qaeda? They've done dreadful things.

And are still doing them. But that doesn't mean Islam itself is worse than other religions. It means that the context within which those particular Muslims are living provides particularly fertile ground for wickedness to flourish – poverty, oppression, injustice, the breakdown of law and order etc. It's a toxic mix and Islam is part of it, but to damn a whole religion because of how it looks in a particular place is not really sensible. Oh, and as well as Muslims behaving appallingly, Muslims also behave heroically.

So is it possible to rank religions on a scale, so good = 1 and evil = 10?

It's tempting to think so; GK Chesterton did. 'I tell you some of them are so different that the best man of one creed will be callous, where the worst man of another will be sensitive', he wrote in one of his stories. But there are problems with that, too. There are pretty dark parts of Islam, but what about the caste system in Hinduism? That's been responsible for monstrous injustices. Dig down into most faiths and you'll find some nasties.

So are you saying all religions are the same?

Not at all, and not just because I believe one of them is actually true. I'm saying you can't demonise a whole religion just because some people who claim to represent it do terrible things, or because you can find things in its holy books that are pretty appalling. Futhermore, if you're going to rank them from 1-10 you have, in fairness, to take into account all sorts of data about the context in which the religions actually work in different places. Islam in Somalia looks very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia, for instance, and what would horrify a person in one context might seem quite acceptable to someone in another.

So what can you do?

For a start, anyone who doesn't belong to a particular religion needs to be very careful about making blanket statements about it because they will probably be wrong. However, that doesn't mean any religion is above criticism. If anyone's justifying violence or oppression in the name of any faith, they should be called out. But in terms of changing people's minds, an internal critique – by fellow-Muslims, for instance – is going to be far more effective than an external one, which will just solidify the opposition.

You haven't said anything about Christianity, have you?

No. But we do need to admit that Christians have found justifications for violence within the Bible, whether they were right or not, and that Christians have done terrible things in the name of Christianity. And if we throw up our hands in horror and say, 'But of course they weren't real Christians!' we ought to extend the same privilege to people of other faiths too.

It all seems very complicated.

Not at all. We are all sinners who need a saviour.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods