When he wasn’t busy lauding Bermuda as an earthly paradise, Mark Twain tended to take a highly sceptical view of organised religions, their tropes and their more gullible and fanatical adherents.

One of the greatest moral philosophers of his time and among the greatest students of human nature in all of recorded history, the old sage of the Mississippi was rightly dubious of those who attempted to spread — or impose — their beliefs by sword and fire rather than by virtuous example.

Man, as Twain said, is “the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them.

“He is the only animal that loves his neighbour as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and Heaven.”

In Twain’s day, as in ours, religious beliefs have routinely been invoked by followers to add spurious, supposedly divinely inspired rationalisations to the entirely irrational, to justify the manifestly unjust. The idea that a supreme being would actually require his trivial creations to settle scores on His behalf surely amounts to a type of arrogant blasphemy to anyone of genuine faith. But it’s a contradiction which has always entirely eluded religion’s self-appointed shock troops.

In a similar vein, remarking that the “devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs”, Twain called attention to the prickliness of those whose claims of unshakeable belief in a particular religious or political creed could actually be shaken by anything so trite as a joke.

His qualms on both counts were fully and horrifically realised in Paris this week.

Selectively citing scripture, devils in human form turned a magazine office into a war zone and slaughtered French satirists for having the temerity to poke fun at religious fanaticism.

Of course, nowhere in their holy book are followers of Islam actually urged to take up Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades against irreverent cartoonists. In fact, the Koran recommends when believers “hear the signs of God held in defiance and ridicule, ye are not to sit with them unless they turn to a different theme”.

Could there be a more peaceful injunction?

Muslims are not told to kill those who express views which contradict or even mock their beliefs. They are not told to shun even the most disrespectful unbelievers forever. Simply to express their polite disagreement by absenting themselves from their company until the subject has been changed.

There is no talk of fatwas nor of bloodshed. And certainly the Koran makes no mention of shooting down Parisian policewomen who happen to be on traffic duty in the wrong place at the wrong time, or executing early morning Jewish shoppers popping into the neighbourhood kosher grocery for their milk, baguette and newspaper.

Of course, the jihadists responsible for the Paris atrocities were to Islamic teaching what the Spanish Inquisition was to Jesus Christ’s injunction to love your neighbour as yourself (the second greatest of God’s commandments, according to the Gospels, and the one which goes most routinely ignored by the great mass of the faithful).

The reality is that so much blood continues to be spilled in the names of so many of our major faiths not because of what is contained in their teachings, but rather because of a single omission common to all of them. It’s one which has been summed up as follows: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbour’s religion is.”

Not merely tolerant or respectful but entirely indifferent. Because without such indifference, without such a live and let live approach to the various ways humankind find to express their spirituality, the extremists and fanatics who claim to have God on their side will continue to feel they must kill or be killed.

And poor God, as the sage of the Mississippi observed, is better than His reputation — and certainly far, far better than the reputation by association his more zealous followers create for Him.