The anti CAA protests across the country have already emerged as a great movement with the support of pluralistic Indian Diaspora who really cherish and care for Indian constitution. In Kerala, people, irrespective of their religious and political affiliations, have thronged and joined together in their protest, which has almost been able to undo the relevance of BJP in the state. No wonder, why even the very vocal leaders of BJP in the state are found clueless to tackle the situation and hiding their head in the sand when their counterparts of North India are busy chanting Incendiary ‘Goli maros’. Wait! The Malayalam Sanghees are not to worry- here comes the messiah. He is ready to do the whitewashing for you. The CAA for him is as ‘good’ an item as the caste reservation. Yes, He hates Muslims more than the Sangh Parivar. He thinks every Muslim is a potential Aboobacker Baghdadi. He is a fan of Savarkar; the biggest ideologue of Sangh Parivar. He spits goebbelsian canards on Muslims. However, he masquerades as a man of science who promotes scientific temper in the country. Yes, He is C Ravichandran,the flag bearer of New Atheism in Kerala, which has at the moment become the factory that gushes out intellectual ‘Goli maros’ into the Malayalam milieu,that could well be more harmful than those foul-mouthed outbursts of the north. His recent talks, on various issues from Gandhi to Citizenship, are ‘forewords’ to those who are warming up for a Muslim genocide, and it might sound similar to the foreword written by his idol Savarkar to a book by the Nazi sympathizer, Savitri Devi in 1939.

​In February 2015, three Muslim American students were shot dead in an apartment near the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, each with a single bullet on the head. Craig Stephen Hicks was behind this ‘execution-style’ heinous act. In the days prior to carrying out this crime, in his facebook he wrote: “When it comes to insults, your religion started this, not me. If your religion kept its big mouth shut, so would I”. His FB page listed Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion as one of his favourite books and he has littered his timeline with several antagonistic, anti-religious meme infopics.

Craig Stephen Hicks was a new atheist; a sample piece of such many irreligious bigots across the world who don’t mind venting their hatred towards Islam, with an act of violence. They read the same books, listen to the same podcasts and in their minds it echoes – “religion is evil; Islam is eviler”.

Emergence of new atheism

The millennial crop of atheism was first called new atheism in a pejorative sense by American journalist Gary Wolf in an article he wrote in 2006[1].The publication of Sam Harris’ The end of Faith is supposed to be the inaugural stuff of what we call now New atheism. New atheism or Militant atheism is distinct from its older stuff for its strident tone, uncompromising extremism, and hatred towards Islam. As CJ Werleman, an Australian journalist, and once a popular figure within the atheist movement, himself puts it, in his book The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists, “The new atheists have divided the world into two: good and evil. Those who champion science and decry religion are the enlightened and righteous. Those who do not, are to be ignored and dismissed as evil. They share the binary world view of ISIS& Christian right; that’s what makes them dangerous”. Recently, many intellectuals within the secular world have come up and come down heavily on new atheism. Paul Kurtz, ‘the father of secular humanism’ termed new atheism as Militant atheism and said they no longer care about human values.[2]

New Atheists- New Islamophobes

As the rationalist movements across the globe were clutching at its straws owing to its intellectual poverty and philosophical irrelevance, new atheism found a new way out -the relentless discharge of Islamophobia- to survive, with the support of imperialism and white supremacism. The stage was perfectly set for them to make their inroads quite easily after 9/11, thanks to the media, the missionary, and the market.

Four Horsemen, -Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennet- became popular names in the west and their works and podcasts that contained invectives against Islam whipped up anti Muslim racism all around America & Europe. Their works were all written as a blind reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks blaming Islam and Muslims for the root cause of terrorism. The four charlatans of new atheism went on to make vicious attack on 1.5 billion community without ever engaging in a serious study of the religion, without ever bothering to learn Arabic-the language of Quran or at least reading its translations.

Sam Harris in his book, ‘The end of faith’, dedicates his whole chapter to “the problem of islam” which contains horrendous attack on Islam. We see his hatred towards Muslims reaches its zenith, once he expresses his earnest desire (supplication?) for the development of alternative energy technologies, through these lines “If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun’[3] implying that as a result, Middle east Muslim societies would perish for want of money and food. Richard Dawkins’ tweet that linked famous ‘clock boy’ Ahmed Mohammed to ISIS, was another example of his extreme hatred towards Muslims that is filthier enough not to spare even a boy of Ahmed’s age.

Kerala’s Harmonious Fabric Under Threat

Kerala have successfully kept the communal fascists, Sangh Parivar at bay in the political milieu of Kerala, and secured its social fabric intact in spite of their concerted efforts for several decades. But off late, new atheism, seems to have been on the rise which has all the ‘repertoire’ to harm the harmonious social fabric of Kerala. Taking a leaf out of four horse men’s book, new atheist in Kerala began excreting all the islamophobic inanities without ever engaging a genuine intellectual analysis of the religion. Though the islamophobic rants have been humming in the socio political scenario for decades, if not centuries, it seems to have reached a crescendo with the emergence of new atheism.

The new atheism in Kerala is thought to have come to the fore when a Malayalam study on Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion published in 2007. Following the footsteps of the rabid islamophobe Richard Dawkins, the author of the Malayalam version and his supporters were never short of ‘posting’ vitriolic diatribes against Islam. Without an iota of shame, the new atheist crusaders of Kerala went on to vomit all the islamophobic jargons they gulped from their pro-imperialist counter parts of The West. Sam Harris’ unabashed racism has also been literally ‘copy-pasted’ to the power point presentation of new atheist crusaders in Kerala. Unlike their older version, who were always against imperialism and Zionism that kill the innocent Muslims in Palestine and in the Middle East, these so called intellectuals are seen vehemently supporting the invasions and brutal mass murders of imperial forces. It’s obvious that the white supremacism is interminably intertwined with new atheism in the west , as we have seen in Sam Harris’ talk[4]supporting controversial ‘bell curve’ writer Charles Murrays ‘long debunked’ racist assumptions that whites are more intelligent than others.

Similarly, new atheist here in Kerala somehow reaches to a visibly incongruous rapport with Hindutva supremacists. In fact, they give fascists enough intellectual legitimacy to get on with the mob lynching and fascistic atrocities against Muslims under the this regime. We saw all the cheerleaders of new atheists in Kerala were pandering to RSS, for 11 months while Hadiya’s ‘freethink’ right was under house arrest. The fact that a recently concluded hi-fi conference of a particular group of new atheists hadn’t had any session on the contemporary fascistic India or Sangh parivar, will tell us the whole story. No wonder that question like “aren’t we doing the same as the Sanghees do” arose from the new atheistic dais itself. After all, V D Savarkar, the Hindutwa ideologue, was an atheist, wasn’t he?

Morality Is Being Ripped Apart

​A few years back, Mujahid Students Movement , the MSM, had warned the Kerala public about a Facebook group namely freethinkers forum handled by new atheists which envisage a ‘free sex Kerala’ in near future. The warning was made at the backdrop of an infamous campaign, “kiss of love” instigated by the same fringe group. In Kerala, with all the inherent fantasy they possess ,new atheist were all set, and dreaming about a world where one can have sex with anybody, at any age, at any place, at any time without any restrictions and obligations and thus making Kerala a potential Thailand. Years have passed since then, but the moral concept of new atheists seemed to have degenerated further. Believe it or not, number of Malayalam ‘freethinkers’ in social media who are not shy of speaking up for their ‘rights’ to incest, swap one’s wife, bestiality have increased alarmingly.

From Ubermensch fantasy of Nietzsche to Dawkins’ hand-waving about altruistic gene, atheists had always found it hard to deal with the morality conundrum. Even the very vocal new atheist luminaries had to squirm under the morality questions posed at them, forget the very recent pastafarian clones in Kerala. It’s always fun to watch the ‘know-it-all’ new atheists who entertain questions from the audience pathetically duck under the morality bouncers bowled at them. They are pretty sure that even the radical non-believers who are brought up in a theistic culture have an aversion to those who waffle on such obvious moral values .However, there are still people who open their mouth on morality and end up being tragically exposed. A video part [5] of debate session in which Lawrence M. Krauss finds no problem with consensual incest is an example of such embarrassment.

A 2016 news report on Swedish atheist group’s demand for making incest and necrophilia legal [6] had forced the Scandinavian-fans of Kerala to keep their mouth shut on morality. By trying to rebut the impeccable concept of Islamic morality, these ultracrepidarian proselytizers keep talking absurdities in the form of Islamophobia . A prominent new atheist leader in Kerala wrote not so long ago in his facebook page, “Suicide rates are higher in modern& civilized society, those who are uncivilized and live in the forest hardly commit suicide. So projecting the low suicidal rates among Muslims is something like they are likening them with animals, as animals don’t commit suicide.”. The social media retorted his remarks with the question, “so when are you gonna ‘get modern and civilized’?”

Now that new atheism have had its claws stretched towards social harmony, morality, equality, mutual respect and charity , it’s high time, the public took this as a matter of socio political menace to humanity ,and acted properly against it rather than leaving that task completely to those who have been refuting it ideologically.

References
1. www.wired.com/2006/11/atheism
2. Kurtaz, Paul. “The ‘True Unbeliever’”, Volume 30, No. 1(December 2009 / January 2010)Free Inquiry, Amherst.
3. Harris, Sam. The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. WW Norton & Company, 2005

4. Making sense podcast/Episode 73/forbidden knowledge
5. https://youtu.be/uSwJuOPG4FI
6. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/incest-and-necrophilia-should-be-legal-youth-swedish-liberal-peoples-party-a6891476.html

Muhammad INK