Now what is Atheism 2.0?

Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0?

Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism.

Socrates was accused of atheism because he did not believe in Zeus.

And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0.

Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism

Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, ripe for it.

Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do.

And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non citizen.

But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia.

And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, What here could we use?

People like Kenneth Miller could be called a godsend to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism.

Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling.