Bushbasher, Yes, the sun example was Dan's and you criticised it - quite fairly I thought. I think Dan was quite objective and correct in his critique to Ubique - atheism is, after all, a modern term, probably quite incoherent if somehow presented to the medieval mind.

Though science is anti- mythical in its study of objects, it is myth-creative in its conceptual theorizing. Science can make sense of its world of things only by making use of concepts (such as "evolution”) that are transcendent to things. By its nature, myth (like science) seeks to unify — or to at least make it intelligible - under a single conceptuality

Communism a form of atheism? Wrong, wrong, wrong! In theory, yes. As practised by Mao or Stalin etc it had nothing to do with atheism. To believe your beloved leader has super-human powers (as people did in 1930s Russia) is not atheism but a belief. As I said, atheists put Stalinism and other mystical beliefs in the same bucket as Christianity.

Marxism is a form of belief. It is a variant of Christianity. It proposes a primitive Eden in an economy of scarcity with property in common. There is no evidence for a primitive Eden. Marx appealed to Morgan's description of the Iroquois and extrapolated it to all tribal societies. Tribal people such as the Kwakiutl can be quite acquisitive. Then there is original sin in the advent of private property. The class struggle is a battle of good (the proletariat) against evil (the capitalist exploiters). The realisation of the messianic vision is the eventual classlesss society. Religious myths are powerful and get absorbed by secular ideologies. The enemy of critical thinking is belief in unprovable propositions. Such belief is no more valid when given to a secular ideology than when it is given to a religion.

DavidJS and david f,
I do not know what are your experiences with communists (I lived through their system, both the Stalinist and post-Stalinist forms) but I can assure you, they would object to having their atheist ideology called religion (even "a variant of Christianity") the same as many contributors here object to calling the dawkinsian world view a religion and his convictions a faith. Nonetheless it is true that the communists copied many bad things from the two millennia old history of the Church without wanting to acknowledge it, the same as many secular humanists (not all, of course) do not wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to the Christian heritage. This is the big difference between the two, but they both, the communists and the dawkinsians, call themselves atheist - whatever that means, I often think many dawkinsians are rather agnostics - and I think one should respect that.

Dear George,

My uncle was a Bolshevik in Czarist Russia and was arrested by the Czarist police. In 1921 he left the Soviet after having lived under Lenin and was completely cured of Bolshevik.

Millennialism was not restricted to the Soviets. Joachim of Fiore an 11th century Calabrian abbot proposed a three stage theory of history: Father - peace in Paradise, Son - conflict on earth, Holy Ghost - the millennium. He was an influence on Hegel whose followers split into left Hegelians headed by Marx and right Hegelians who were German nationalists. For Marxists - primitive communism, class struggle and a classless millennium. For Nazis primitive Germanic tribal nobility, decadent democratic capitalism and a racially pure millennium called the Thousand Year Reich, a term coined by the Nazi Manfred von der Drucke in 1923. Nazis and Marxists both believed in unprovable millennial speculations.

Dear david f,
being knowledgeable about an ideology or oppressive political system, and having experienced them on your own skin are two very different things; otherwise I can only agree with what you wrote. Thank you for the info about Joachim of Fiore that I was not awr of.

It only illustrates the obvious fact that neither the communist nor nazi ideologies nor the dawkinsian naive scientism, like many other ideas and ideologies of the last centuries including the less evil and less naive ones, fell from heaven but evolved within the Western cultural tradition that on the abstract level derives from Christianity which in its turn builds on Judaism and the Hellenic heritage.