We are here in Paris this week celebrating 100 years of the separation of religion and state in France. Against an individual's lifetime, 100 years is a long time - but in terms of the life of human kind, it is but a moment.

Yesterday the representative of UNESCO said it was dangerous to mix up religion and culture. But I am going to argue that religious belief is one element of culture and of many people's cultural identity. As Humanists, we have to understand the fact that change in beliefs and in culture takes a long time. I believe we should be working toward the vision of a world that is free of religious belief in gods or supernatural beings in the public sphere.

However, in order to achieve that goal we have to understand and acknowledge that religious beliefs have played an important role in human development. Religious belief has been a strong and important part of the culture of human society.

The word 'culture' means at least two different things. Firstly, it can mean high brow art and the manifestations of human intellectual achievement. This word came from the French Enlightenment meaning civilisation - a cosmopolitan measure of progress.

But the word 'culture' can also mean ritual and tradition and shared values or a way of life. This is the culture that is handed down from generation to generation. It is the last meaning about which I am speaking today. Culture is the way humans have passed on their understanding of the world - their world view - to future generations to understand how things are in the world.

The coming together of language and technology dramatically altered the fate of the human species. Once they came together, culture took off. The abundance of human life is owed to our collective, not our individual, brilliance.

But in ages past there was less contact between peoples and communities in the world. So culture developed in different ways in different places. Faced with snow, ice and a very particular range of animals who can survive in the environment, the Inuit people of North America developed a very different lifestyle, culture and belief system - a different religion - from people living in Africa - different again from those in Europe and those in the Middle East.

These different religions are part of the cumulative culture. Humans are social animals. The development of culture is a social activity. A solitary human mind does not create culture. It is our facility for language that allows us to develop ideas and to pass them on. A belief in an all powerful super being is one of those ideas that have been developed to explain the natural world and that belief has been passed on from generation to generation culturally.

And like language, which is a common ability in humans, but has developed differently into English, French, Spanish, and Chinese etc. So religious belief has developed differently in the different forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is all part of culture, and hence different parts of the world are predominantly of one religion. So whilst the Rules of Living of each religion are similar, for example the ban against killing other humans, the form is different.

Of course Humanists believe that these common rules, these ethical values, are derived from the need to live together for safety and company.

Hence the importance of women. Women are often seen as the guardians and are certainly the generational transmitters of culture. Because women care for children, women are the teachers of children.

So all religious fundamentalist seek to control women - control their actions, control their thoughts, curtail their freedoms and seek to ensure that they only pass on to the new generation the limited world view on the one True Religion, thereby maintaining the powerbase for those religious leaders.

Religious Fundamentalists seek to curtail women access to education. Why? Because education teaches people to think for themselves. It teaches people of other views, other beliefs, and other world views. It teaches science and an alternative explanation to the natural world. Education is a dangerous thing for women, if you need those women to ensure that your religion retains its power.

Religious Fundamentalism is conducting a war of terror against women worldwide. Fundamentalist politics constitute a threat to women's freedom and autonomy, and often their lives. Gender relations in general and women in particular are often used to symbolise the collectivity - its culture and tradition.

We women must be in the forefront of the fight against fundamentalism. But in order to be successful, we must try to understand it. We must realise that fundamentalists are fighting with their backs against the wall against our secularist approach. They are fighting against the idea that is so patently obvious now that we have access to so many religions: there isn't one True Way, one True God or one True Religion.

How could there be when people across the world have interpreted that world in different ways and developed different religions - just like they have different lifestyles and different languages. How can one be the only true and right one?

So when faced with this logic they are fighting a rear guard action to preserve their own 'rightness'. And this of course is why religious beliefs are so divisive. Once religious belief could bring a whole community together. Now the different beliefs divide human being from each other. These beliefs divide community from community, country from country and people from people.

But whilst fighting fundamentalism here and now, we also need to be patient, and see that various religions have been at the heart of culture. It will take a long time to develop a new culture of the belief in humankind.

Our weapons are the sciences; not just the hard sciences, but those of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Humanists have to use the development of human understanding of the human genome and neuroscience to explain why human society has developed a culture of religion and why some people hang on to it so fiercely in the face of all modern evidence. 100 years is a very short time in the development of culture.

As women we have an important role to play in the fight to spread the freedom of separation of religion and state, won in France 100 years ago. Women are the battle ground over which the cultural fight is being raged. We must stand up and take the lead in articulating the kind of world we want to live in - a world in which all humans live free from the tyranny of others, free from the imposition of their beliefs, and free from organised religion's abuse of power.