By ED WEST - DAILY TELEGRAPH
Added: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:10:24 UTC

Thanks to I.Kant for the link

Although Richard Dawkins and co would deny it, the New Atheist movement effectively began nine years ago tomorrow when a man called Mohammed flew a plane into the World Trade Centre.

The ultimate origins of the anti-religion movement go back further, to two events in 1989, the Rushdie affair and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a result of the latter, which coincided with the discrediting of democratic socialism in the West, the political Left scattered into different tribes.

The Trotskyite element, which had dominated local government and political activism since the early 1970s, adopted radical race politics and became the anti-racism movement, taking control of the social services, the quangocracy and having a huge influence on society, their high-water mark being the anti-racism witch-hunt following the Macpherson Report.

Another lot joined the growing green movement, which has been dominated by the far Left ever since. As I’ve written in a previous post, there’s no contradiction with being a conservative, and believing that burning fossil fuels alters the climate; if that’s the science, we just have to deal with it. Unfortunately most green activists see it in quasi-religious terms, as judgment against Western man’s rape of mother earth and exploitation of the developing world.

A third group would become the New Atheist movement.

Read on

TAGGED: ATHEISM, POLITICS, RELIGION