Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
9/11 was the start of the New Atheist movement, Lefties too scared to admit that they fear Islam
By Ed West Religion Last updated: September 10th, 2010
Professor Richard Dawkins on a bus displaying an atheist message in Kensington Gardens in 2009 (Photo: PA)
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. Starting with the Rushdie Fatwa in 1989, many Left-wing intellectuals, among them Christopher Hitchens, turned against multiculturalism. Anti-theism was the logical Left-wing response to the growing realisation that Europe's immigration policies had brought with it a religion that seriously threatened established freedoms; and that contrary to assumed thinking, newcomers would not just drop their religion once they crossed the Black Sea.
Rather than face the unbearable truth that Islam alone was generally incompatible with free speech, was too easily interpreted to inspire violence, and had little history of secular democracy (outside of Turkey), the New Atheists instead created the comforting fiction that it was religion per se that threatened their freedom. With the alternative being a confrontational line with the religion of several million new Europeans that would inevitably develop a racial overtone, as the English Defence League illustrate, New Atheism is the line of least resistance.
But what's odd is that this movement has attracted so many conservatives and especially libertarians. Odd for two reasons: one, because the essential utopianism behind the anti-religious movement follows the tradition of Rousseau, Marx and Lenin in believing that human beings are perfectable. Professor Richard Dawkins recently said in his television documentary that in a world without religion, "good people would not do bad things".
How can a man who knows such a vast amount about human biology understand so little of the human heart? Good people will always do bad things, because humans are often weak, selfish and stupid, and they certainly don't need religion to make them do that, as the 20th century showed.
Secondly, what sort of place do libertarians think a world without God would be? Would it be a low-tax, high-freedom society where the state runs the post office, secures the borders and pretty much leaves you to get on with your life? Or would it be one where an enormous state takes on the roll of church, spending vast amounts of taxpayer's money on trying to artificially recreate civil society, including vast amounts on its pet "charities"; one where every aspect of human interaction is dictated by government, which controls even the moral order of society, increasingly infringing on the rights of parents? One does not need to be a believer to see that the church – or any body vested with moral authority – is an essential counterweight to the power of the state.
Whatever their use of the word, the only logical conclusion of the religion-free society advocated by groups which claim to call themselves "secular" is authoritarian socialism. Libertarians and conservatives who support them are simply useful idiots carrying out Karl Marx's Plan B - good people doing bad things, as always.
Tags: 9/11, Christopher Hitchens, Islam, libertarians, New Atheists,Richard Dawkins, World Trade Center
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