[D66] What scares the new atheists

[J.N.]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists

 What scares the new atheists
The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that
religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing

 John Gray

Tuesday 3 March 2015 06.00 GMT

In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the Rationalist
Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter the influence
of religion in Britain, published an English translation of the German
biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe.
Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most
influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies
in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages.
Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel devised his own
“religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated an anthropology
that divided the human species into a hierarchy of racial groups. Though
he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been founded, his ideas, and
widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably helped to create an
intellectual climate in which policies of racial slavery and genocide
were able to claim a basis in science.