If you had any lingering support for the New Atheists...

...now is probably a good time to abandon it. I though Hitchens was the worst one of the bunch but Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb highlights a post Dawkins made in which he calls Islam unmitigated evil.

I've heard from time to time critics say atheism as an ideology is very much a first world thing and not something that can be applied globally. I still believe that is not universally the case but the New Atheism that has become very popular in the last few years does seem to have a strong first world and perhaps even a colonialist component.

And speaking of colonialism and religion in Africa I'll highlight this article by the war nerd (one of several he did on the subject in the space of a few days) which examines the situation of religious and ethnic tensions in Africa, especially West Africa. Makes it a bit clearer why Dawkins, a right winger, wants to protect Christianised Africans.

"Whats the deal with Transubstantiation?"

Turns out US Atheists and Agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than Theists. Smugness aside this isn't especially surprising and well explained in the article:

merican atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

People who just go with the flow and take comfort in their idea of what religion is have no need or reason to know much about their religion.

As the title suggests however what I did find interesting was the complete ignorance of both Catholics and Protestants to key facts about the reformation. Protestants not knowing who Martin Luther was is just sad really, I wonder why those people think Protestantism is different from Catholicism. The flip side is more interesting if you know the history, that 40% of Catholics think the bread and the wine in communion symbolisesChrist's body. This is Protestant thinking, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin et al put forward this interpretation of Communion as part of a general opposition to Catholicism's general claims to holy powers, as seen in things like Indulgences. However the Catholic and Orthodox view of Communion has always been God magics the wine and the bread into the actual blood and flesh of Christ, essentially holy cannibalism. Back during the reformation this was a big issue.

I just find it really funny through apathy and ignorance people have switched doctrine. At the same time I find it intriguing an issue that was of paramount importance in a disagreement that lead to centuries of very bloody warfare in Europe now doesn't matter at all to most people. Maybe in a future centuries time people wont go to war over who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman. That is the dream anyway.