New Atheist Funk in the UK.

New Atheism' as expounded by Richard Dawkins et al is a belief that if people dropped God their lives would be filled with more potential to live life to the full before death extinguishes them for ever.

This fantastical creed has no evidence to back it up: it is a faith position that has many different consequences. For Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen it is the necessity of using military force to destroy 'Islamofascism'.

For Dawkins it is is a call to try and remove the influence of organised religion from interfering in politics in a way that is mean minded and nasty or protecting its privileges. But he really does want to deconvert the world.

Now the disestablishment of the Church of England is also worked for by Tony Benn with whom Dawkins sat on Breakfast with David Frost show recently when he admitted cheerfully to being a 'cultural Christian'.

The intricacies of theology and the role of science in explaining the creation and evolution of the world are less important that the progressive myths that underpin Dawkin's creed. As John Gray points out Dawkind claims only humans can defy the imperatives of their own genes.

Gray asks pertinently, that if this is so, then where could that freedom of the will come from ? Answer, it derives from Christianity and is not found in Atheist religions of the Orient like Taoism.

If religion poisons everything as Hitchens claims it does, Gray poses the devastating but simple counter argument that where could this poison come from? The Devil ? The simple fact is that religion is an enduring human need for a frail and often insecure species of animal.

John Gray is right to state that these are myths that the New Atheists never interrogate because their militant faith is based on a Protestant culture of Christianity minus God. It gets rid of God but retains the "thought patterns" of Christianity.

Nothing could be more in the proselytising tradition of Protestant Christianity than holding that deconvertion will cause one to cast off the 'mind forg'd manacles' of religion and make themselves more loving, more sane and more reasonable.

Dawkins emphasis upon 'consciousness raising' is what Protestants have emphasised throughout history-it's a low key form of the direct encounter between Man and God for the soul.

Dawkins line is similar to that of Bertrand Russell: the scientific evidence down here on earth is conclusive enough not to believe in God and if 'He' asked 'Why ?' it would be on that basis. "Not enough evidence, God"

That has little to do though with the idea that by getting rid of 'Him' that the world would necessarily be made a nicer place. The theology of protest is still there only without God who does not matter anyway.

If so, there is no need to bang on about it. Most people hold some kind of belief that is irrational; that if they meet the right person they will be happy for ever or that one day all diseases will be cured or they will be remembered.

Much of the passivity of Britain in the post-war epoch was due to the rise of consumerism, TV and pop music, as well as football. When this prosperity and complacency collapses people look for rationalisations for a more stressful existence.

And the woolly old Church of England is better for people to join than people adopting US style fundamentalism, so that Dawkins ought to distinguish between harmful religion and harmless creeds that really do not do that much damage

At least far less than messianic tub thumpering Protestant Atheists like Hitchens ( yes, he terms himself that ) did in supporting the Iraq War and strongly insinuating "extraordinary interrogation " methods were one way of getting barbarian Islamofascists to confess to secrets.

Now proving the non-existence of God or the absurdity of believing in God as a set of logical propositions is very different from making vast assumptions about how his accepted non-existence would affect life on earth.

People have an innate drive to believe in something beyond death to make sense of life: with the progressive myth of Dawkins, Grayling etc something akin to heaven is something we can more readily create on earth through material abundance and living like Men as Gods.

After all, for people living in seventeenth century England, the twenty first century would be some kind of heaven compared to the suffering and poverty and early death people lived with on an everyday basis.

Yet then as now the myth is that the truth is considered something that can set people free forever once accepted by all thinking people. There is a continuity deep within English protestant culture here.

For Protestant Christianity has the idea that doing things, striving to change the world and by going direct to the people free from the sterile worship in ornate Churches and discussion about dogmas.

That's why Joyce Cary once wrote in the 1950's 'The less the British go to Church, the more preoccupied they become they become with religious problems and moral conflicts'. Think of CND, Bruce Kent or the Quakers ( what harm do they really do ! )

The decline of Church worship is a logical consequence of the belief in England that right belief leads to righteous actions and not merely sitting about saying things and not doing anything. That's progressive activism.

Protestantism has been watered down to a vague religiosity that life just must have a purpose and that the main thing about being a Christian is behaving decently to others.Now that just means the bland but decent desire to be "nice". Like a certain Mr Tony Blair seemed.

This is little different from what the boring and monomaniacal AC Grayling puts forward; though an atheist, his general outlook is pure Church of England minus God who is to be rejected for being too mean and nasty to people.

Yet it has nothing to offer those who see the world being pushed towards destruction by global heating, nuclear proliferation, and so on with its smug little milk and water humanist certainties.

Grayling and Dawkins get squeamish about religious inspired wars without seeing that the invasion of Iraq was a resource war for the oil that underpins the consumer comfort of Western nations like Britain.

The only criticism Grayling made of the Iraq War was that Britain's General Dennett proclaimed himself a Christian soldier: that and not 1 million dead Iraqis got this sententious waffling man into a strident polemical mood.

When most people are satiated materially they need not think too hard about religious problems and moral conflicts. Yet the decline of organised religion has not got rid of the 'need to believe'.

That can be seen with the shallow cult of progress, the career of Blair, the projection of messianic fantasies on to Iraq as a war of liberation, New Atheism, Islamist political theology and other consequences of evading facts and agonistic choices that present themselves.

That is outside the privileged ivory tower that Dawkins and Grayling inhabit: if Dawkins was against the Iraq War because Bush was a Christian fundamentalists, he might have at least looked at the resource war angle.

Religious struggles have always been motivated by political manipulation, greed for resources and "up the ante" as Malise Ruthven puts it in his A Fury for God, a highly sophisticated analysis of Islamism as a political phenemenon.