It looks like New Atheism has gone past its "sell by" date.

Mocking and attacking Christianity is one thing, but do that to Islam and you are exiled from the Bonum Gens of Right Thinking Secularity.

//On Friday, it became official: The New Atheists are no longer welcome on the left. Battered, condemned, and disinvited, these godless and once-favored “public intellectuals” are now homeless, spurned by their erstwhile progressive allies.

Richard Dawkins, the famously skeptical evolutionary biologist, was the last shoe to drop. He was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Berkeley because his “comments about Islam” had “offended and hurt . . . so many people,” according to the event’s organizers.

Dawkins is in good company. His New Atheist compatriots, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, had already been expelled from the party. In both cases, insufficient deference to Islam was the proximate cause. Hitchens remained a committed socialist, but felt a war on Islamic terror and autocracy was needed. For this, he was denounced as a “neocon.” Harris is a liberal, straight and true, but drew the ire of Reza Aslan for refusing to except Islam from his broad critique of religion. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” Harris often says. In fact, he thinks it’s just the opposite. For that, everyone from Glen Greenwald to Ben Affleck has cast him as an Islamophobe and a bigot.//

File under "Atheists never kill in the name of atheism."

This is a tragedy, but it catches the eye because of the habit of New Atheists to delight in the evil committed by individual Christians - as if the lasting capacity for such evil was not proof, and a core teaching, of Christianity.

Killer of 3 UNC-Chapel Hill Muslim Students Was Hardcore Anti-Religion Atheist Progressive

A horrific triple homicide was committed yesterday in Chapel Hill, NC, as three Muslim students were apparently targeted by a deranged anti-religion progressive.

The News & Observer reports:

Police charged a Chapel Hill man Wednesday with first-degree murder in the deaths of three Muslim students in a quiet neighborhood near Meadowmont just south of N.C. 54.Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, is being held in the Durham County Jail on three counts of first-degree murder.

Hicks is accused of shooting his Finley Forest neighbors, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Abu-Salha’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh.

Barakat was a doctoral student in UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Dentistry. The sisters were N.C. State University students. Chapel Hill police found all three victims dead at the scene, after responding to a report of gunshots on Summerwalk Circle at 5:11 p.m. Tuesday.

The neighborhood, adjacent to the Friday Center, is mostly rental apartments and modest condominiums. It rarely appears in reports of crime in Chapel Hill. Police worked early into the morning trying to piece together what happened. Police have not offered a motive for the shootings.

[UPDATE: Chapel Hill police are now saying the shooting may be related to a parking dispute. Thanks to tarheelkate in the comments.]

According to other reports, Barakat and Abu-Salha were just married a few weeks ago. She had recently graduated from NC State, and he was a UNC dental student.

A review of the Facebook page of the man charged in these murders, Craig Hicks, shows a consistent theme of anti-religion and progressive causes. Included in his many Facebook “likes” are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, gay marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.

Remarkably, one of the four Facebook groups he had joined was “Religious Tolerance.”

Just a few weeks ago he had posted this to his Facebook page:

On the Unbelievable? Facebook page that I participate in, there are New Atheists who are claiming that since the atheist is from North Carolina, he must be a racist, not an atheist.

As if the two were mutually exclusive.

As if that kind of reasoning wasn't as bad as racism.

ABC manages to ignore the ethical/political background of the killer.

Yay!!!  Atheists!!!

It's not just anyone these days who can be successful censor and book banner!

High-Fives All Around!!!

And, yet, they wonder why they are as popular as a incontinent, flatulent, rabid Chihuahua.

Now get back to work....those books won't ban themselves!!!

Famous Gay Anti-Bullying Figure says "Too many of you...

...just enough of us."

His cultural power lends significance to comments he made during a debate this week in Australia. As part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, he went head-to-head with Britain's Peter Hitchens on marriage, Christianity and sex – and got progressively filthier and angrier as the evening wore on. Then, at the end, he made a statement that everyone should hear and that you can witness in the video above. Asked to provide a truly "dangerous idea", he said:

Population control: there's too many Goddam people on the planet. [Audience applauds like lunatics]. You know, I'm pro-choice, I believe that women should have a right to control their bodies. Sometimes in my darker moments, I'm anti-choice. I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years.

Yeah, he actually said that.

In retrospect, Savage might try to insist that he was only joking but there's no smile on his face and the point seems quite seriously made. It's also not funny. Had he said that old people should be exterminated to bring the numbers down, his career might be over. Because he said something similar about abortion, he'll probably be defended by radical pro-choicers. But what he's basically saying here is that women should be compelled to abort their children so that there are less people around to annoy Dan Savage. Of course, they already do this in China.

The irony is that prior to this comment Savage and Hitchens were arguing about who was the more authoritarian: religious conservatives or free-loving liberals. With this statement on abortion, Savage answers his own question. In a way that should make both Left and Right shudder.

Civil War in the Leper Colony.

New Atheism is going through schism. Apparently, the left leaning doyens of New Atheism - P.Z. Myers and Richard Carrier and others - have decided that it is not enough to be merely socially autistic; now they've decided that they have to be politically correct and socially autistic.

Will their quest for acceptance spurred by being given "swirlies" in high school gymn class never end?

Here's the article:

In the passionate world of American atheism, the venom usually directed at believers has now been turned against the wrong kind of atheists.

The cause of this freethinking furore? A new movement called Atheism+. According to its website, "Atheism+ is a safe space for people to discuss how religion affects everyone and to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty, and crime."

A+ was born when Freethought blogger Jen McCreight (the mind behind Boobquake) made a passionate call for a "third wave" of atheism, one that extends atheist activism into progressive politics and calls for a part of the movement to be one where women can exist free from the harassment that has plagued women publicly involved in the atheist movement.

The founders of Atheism+ say clearly that "divisiveness" is not their aim, but looking through the blogs and voluminous comments in the two weeks since A+ was mooted, trenches have been dug, beliefs stated, positions staked out and abuse thrown. A dissenting tweeter is "full of shit", while, according to one supporter, daring to disagree with Atheism+'s definition of progressive issues and not picking their side makes you an "asshole and a douchebag".

It took 700 years from Constantine renaming Byzantium in his own honour to papal legates circulating letters of anathema that split the Roman and Orthodox churches. Atheism, in its public, online life, has started exchanging internet anathemas – perhaps we should call them inathemas – in little more than a decade.

People are being told to wipe the spittle off their chins, take their heads out of their asses. The Life of Brian's lines about the various fronts for the liberation of Judea are being oft-recycled. 140 character brickbats are being thrown on Twitter under #atheismplus.

PZ Myers, soft-spoken in person but trenchant in print, said of A+ critics:

"It really isn't a movement about exclusion, but about recognising the impact of the real nature of the universe on human affairs. And if you don't agree with any of that – and this is the only 'divisive' part – then you're an asshole. I suggest you form your own label, 'Asshole Atheists", and own it, proudly. I promise not to resent it or cry about joining it. I just had a thought: maybe the anti-Atheist+ people are sad because they don't have a cool logo. So I made one for the Asshole Atheists:
A*"

Fellow Freethought blogger Richard Carrier goes further. When one commentator suggests "atheism does not have the luxury of kicking people out of its movement", Carrier gives him a rare old quilting in most splendid prose:

"Yes, it does. Atheism+ is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as the irrational or immoral scum you are (if such you are). If you reject these values, then you are no longer one of us. And we will now say so, publicly and repeatedly. You are hereby disowned."

How like Pope Leo's letter to the patriarch of Constaninople in 1053 accusing him of "many and intolerable presumptions, in which if – as heaven forbid – he persist, he will in no way retain our peaceful regard". Even at this most serious moment for the future of Christianity, the pope managed to resist the urge to call the patriarch immoral scum, an asshole and a douchebag.

Here is the "safe space" for these people.

It's weird that they think they need a safe space. Usually, when they are on other people's blogs, they act like a group of Visigoths with OCPD.

Let's have a conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics...

...unless you actually believe that crap.

The USA Today offers a warm and friendly report on the "Reason Rally."

Apparently Richard Dawkins was in typical form:

Dawkins didn't appear until five hours into the event, but few seemed discouraged by the near-constant rain or drizzle. They whistled and cheered for his familiar lines such as:

I don't despise religious people. I despise what they stand for ...

Evolution is not just true, it's beautiful ...

Then Dawkins got to the part where he calls on the crowd not only to challenge religious people but to "ridicule and show contempt" for their doctrines and sacraments, including the Eucharist, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during Mass.

So, even though the USA Today's columnist Cathy Lynn Grossman claims her column is about having a "conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics," she is willing to write a puff piece about people who don't want to have a conversation - they want to show contempt and yell and do anything that communicates their feelings. They certainly weren't willing to debate.

Notice also the anti-Catholic animus of Dawkins - he doesn't single out the Lutherans or the Anglicans, much less Jews or Muslims.

Why is that? Is it because he knows that it is rhetorically acceptable to pick on that one religion out of all the others.

Certainly, in light of the Obama administration's - along with the mainstream press's - jumping on the contraception issue, which can only have been designed to direct public antipathy against Catholics alone, as part of Obama's strategy of division, Dawkins must have gotten the message that it is permissible to target Catholics.

Tolerance is the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

New Atheists - just another fascist political program.