tagged w/ Atheist Movement
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"The launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies – which the founders have agreed to shorten to the abbreviated AHS – is the latest in a series of pro-secular movements that have sprung up to oppose what they believe is a growing pandering towards religious groups.
There was once a time when those ideals were, of course, commonplace. Two centuries ago, progressive intellectuals of the post-Enlightenment age were all too happy to predict the end of religion, that the triumph of science and reason would win out and that man would turn away from God. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile, student atheist groups were a vibrant and influential part of university life. Thinking the battle had been won, they largely died out two decades ago .
But, as religious conflict spreads once again throughout the world, throwing the Western world into a so-called clash of civilisations with radical Islam, the time is ripe, according to secularists, for a new religion – a live-and-let-live brand of soft atheism.
Chloë Clifford-Frith, who recently graduated from St Hilda's in Oxford, said students today had a duty to promote atheist ideas: "We live in a world where religious governments execute adulterers and homosexuals, deny women and minority groups basic freedoms, circulate fraudulent claims about contraception and scientific research and create laws that protect them from criticism," she said. "We are privileged, in such a world, to live in a country where we can even have this debate. As such, we have a duty to bring it into our universities and beyond.""The launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student... more
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