Dawkins is not a right-winger. He was, for a
> long time, a member of the British Labour Party,
> at least until he got disgusted with Tony Blair
> over Iraq. (When he was a grad student
> in the US back in the 1960s, he was active
> in the antiwar movement).
Dawkins is a loyal participant in that most right-wing of intellectual projects, the attempted absolution of imperialism for its crimes. In *The God Delusion*, he urges his readers to "[i]magine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers ... no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars ... no Northern Ireland 'troubles.'" Elsewhere in his odious little book, he confidently asserts that "[i]n Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists' respectively" and informs us that "without religion, and religiously segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The warring tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved into each other." Trying to pin all the nastiness in the world on a single social force is always a fool's errand, but attempting to do so with religions seems to take one to particularly reactionary, not to mention, ridiculous, places. (We also witness Parenti take a halting stap in this general direction, with his ludicrous suggestion that occupied Afghanistan, whose constitution states that "[t]he sacred religion of Islam shall be the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" and "[n]o law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan," is something other than a theocracy.)
> Dan Dennett calls himself an
> old fashion ACLU-type of liberal. Hitchens,
> as we all know, went neocon after 911.
> Harris is a liberal in the same sense as his
> friends, Alan Dershowitz and Marty Peretz
> are "liberals," from which you can
> draw whatever conclusions that you wish.
>
I haven't read Dennett on religion, but have the vague impression that he belongs to a different class of thinkers altogether - that he makes a conscious effort to avoid absurd claims, as most of us do, but New Atheists, as a rule, do not. As for Harris, he's an apologist for torture and a nuclear first strike, and probably the biggest creep of the bunch, even more than Hitchens.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."