a pretty rabid bunch of the new breed of atheist preacher men to join the hitchens dogmatic neo-camel train.

Isn’t that exactly what Hitchens did in banding together with George W. on his ‘crusade’ against Muslims?

To accuse Dawkins of Social Darwinism is, I’m sorry, idiotic and incredibly ignorant. Read _The Selfish Gene_. Hedges has a very poor understanding of evolution himself, as evidenced by his essay. To attribute that understanding to a leading evolutionary biologist is a rather ignorant lie. Hedges clearly has no understanding of atheists, new or otherwise, and has worked himself into a bizarre, frenzied lather over people he’s invented in his own twisted, nihilistic, depressed imagination.

the relevence they have to todays debate is that the social justice movements in South America and the Islamic world have a different , more mature, attitude to what constitutes secularism.To them Humans are a 4 dimensional being with spiritual values and secularism means a government that expresses the religion of the region but never allows minority religions to be persecuted or discriminated against.A genuinely representative South American government will always have a decent relationship with the religion of the People as it is borne of the People.The case is also the same in the Islamic world where , for example Hamas are Muslim but without any doubt would also be called secular by the Palestinians that support them ( as in the case of Christians of the region).

This is the case because there has never been , for historical reasons , a conflict between social justice and religion ( if anything they have fueled each other) and so there is no tension between state and church as there was in Europe , some would even argue that the tension between state and church occured in a big way when colonialism and imperialism could do without “religious” values for it too function with the efficiency that it did , it is hard to wipe of the lower order races and yield to the 10 commandments at the same time.

This means we have , for the left in the west,a reverse process where the good practises of south America and the Islamic world that would give the western left the jump start the west from an old rejected dogma to a dynamic modern 21st century social justice movement is prevented by the very fact that these scientific materialist atheists make the western left reject the good practises to be learned and applied from South america and the Islamic world for the very reasons that these movements have a healthy religious component that gives then the missing dimension to be relevant to the western public needs.

In this manner the atheist fundamentalists form a double membrane more than the sum of their numbers in 3 ways.

1) They make up scare stories about all conflicts in the world having religious rather than material political causes.

2) they kill off any rational exploration of the non-european social justice movements by declaring them null and void to the “superior” euro-left template by the virtue that they do have a religious component.

and worse 3) they support neo-con and colonial wars if they can be re-configurated as drives to rid Humanity of religion , whereby clearing the way for an Atheist utopia which needs to defeat Islam and South American justice movements to make its vision come true as much , if not more , than the neo-cons.

I agree with most of what Hedges says about New Atheists, although I think Hedges gives New Atheists far too much credit. New Atheism, to me, is just another name for Social Darwinism, sans the God element. It is an entertaining theory with a convenient and dogmatic creed. It is just as violent and hypocritical as the fundamentalists it so concerns itself with. Its harms clearly outweigh its benefits.

As far as “western civilization” is concerned, the New Atheists and their ilk feign blissful ignorance about history. They ignore clear examples that war is rooted in context, and rarely if ever in philosophy.

They forget the lessons of Northern Ireland. And Ancient Greece. And the Spanish Civil War. And Italy. None of these conflicts had anything to do with “foreign civilizations” whatever that word means. These were internal struggles among competing interests, their circumstances were scarcely related to spirituality.

They fail not only rhetorically and logically. By distorting the conventions of postmodern debate, they go beyond what even sophists – the worst debaters, ever did. They advocate that they are irrefutable and that any refutation should be banned from public speech.

A very shabby collect of atheist fundamentalist preacher men and zionist lefties and neo-colonialists (for non-western societies)that have clubbed together to form a left block that want freedom in the Muslim lands , but demand that the Muslims must reject Islam before they can get any such luxuries such as democracy ; the right of determination and the right to create societies that do not conform to the euro-left dogmatic atheist template that does not even conform to 20th century europe , yet alone the 21st century world social justice movements.

you can get a list of some signatories in the link below:

http://eustonmanifesto.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=36

One thing they seem to have in common is that they have no real objections to supporting wars conducted by the neo-cons if the zionist lefties are up for it.

There was also a time when the signatories consisted of a very high proportion of Spanish “socialists” that seemed to have a very Francoesque attitude to devolution of rights to Catalonia and the Basque region.