I could waste your time by pointing out that "new atheists" are not so different from old atheists....we still don't believe in God, for instance, and add that the charge of moral equivalence would be easier to substantiate if atheists planted bombs on the underground.
So said Nick Cohen who conflates the cause of atheism in Britain with the universal liberation of the globe from Britain to Afghanistan and Iraq.
The fact is 'atheists' have planted bombs and Marxist-Leninist terrorists have a long connection towards rationalising cataclysmic tranformations in History in order to blast them into Utopia. A characteristic inherent in Cohen's support for the Iraq War.
Ex-Trotskyists share the stress on apocalyptic violence inherent in atheist Communism but use it to advocate support now for the global power that can vanquish the 'forces of reaction' and pretend, as Hitchens does, that only Stalinism was the pseudo-religious distortion of Lenin's legacy.
Those like Dawkins who remain ignorant of history and culture outside the nerdy milieu of certain academics in 1970s social democratic Britain had better learn about the irrationalism inherent in human nature as something not covered merely by established religions but innate in the human animal.
The 'new atheism' is certainly not 'new' , though it repeats the same predictable Christianity in its view of a rigid monotheistic God and the cultural idea of one overarching framework for humanity into which all other belief systems must be subordinated. One Global Order presided over the USA, at its foundation a revolutionary Enlightenment superstate.
This form of secular atheist liberal belief is inherited from the very monotheistic concept of Christianity that Cohen, Dawkins, Hitchens et al are so sure they are rejecting whilst retaining the thought patterns on which the Protestant missionary creed are based and which can be used to posit the Anglo-American powers as salvationist ones.
The entire segment above was removed by Comment is Free Censorship for no good reason when I wrote it last year.
I continued on this thread
People need to distinguish between secularism and atheism as the two are not at all necessarily the same thing. Which is probably why some think Islam has a necessary propensity towards violence which is disproved by history. Think of tolerant forms of Sufi Islam.
The current 'clash' is not so much about religion but about politics or 'political religion', the apocalyptic myths that those who have positions of power must have people believe if certain instransigent worldviews are to be held and towards the aim of advancing specific political goals.
The clash is not one of civilisations.
It is more one about the real stuff of the Western over dependence upon oil and gas. Those who care about the the future of peace and non-violence ought to give far more consideration to that than they do. Because Al Qaida is a result of that and being bogged down in Middle Eastern politics.
It's futile arguing that "Islamist extremism' arises from some new 'totalitarian threat to Western civilisation. The line of Cohen, Hitchens et al, ex-Trotskists who follow the Trotsky's own idea that with the spread of Soviet power 'the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at a puff'.
The West has continually meddling in the affairs of states dominated by Muslim majorities in lands where the West needs stable and declining oil prices whereas those living there need higher ones because of the huge growth in population in the Middle East.So gloomy Malthusians in the 1970s were right after all in the long term.
It is better to recognise two things. Firstly, religion is not going to go away and secondly that the dangerous and apocalyptic interpretations of Islam ( or Christianity in the USA or Zionism in Israel) are part and parcel of the same conflicts over resources and the effects it has on poorer lands.
Unless these issues are addressed everything "we" can do will be a mess. No matter how sincere "liberal" protestations about wanting to save the women of Afghanistan or the people of Iraq are, they will fail because of the necessary strains between Western interests and the interests of those living there.
The notion of Enlightened self interest has become a form of systematically rationalised greed and Iraq proves that. Militant atheists who supported this war did so through faith and not through providing evidence about why Iraq would be better off after an "essentially" liberal secular state had done so.
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