¹ Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar; see specifically, Chp. 8, §,2 ‘The Dark Side of Absolutism’, pp. 323–325, and generally Chps. 8 & 9. Although recently some of these New Atheists have openly expressed support for using violence as a means of combating militant Islam, some of them also call for rescinding the tolerance of religious belief formerly characteristic of Western liberal democracies.

² Pullman, Phillip, His Dark Materials, consisting of Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995)Google Scholar, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic, 1997)Google Scholar and The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000)Google Scholar.

³ Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), p. 5 and, Chp. 4 ‘Why There Almost Certainly is no God’ pp. 137–189, see specifically, pp. 157–158.

⁴ Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), pp. 31–50.

⁵ Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), pp. 32.

⁶ Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), pp. 34.

⁷ Haught, John F. (Senior Fellow of Science and Religion at the Woodstock Theological Centre, Georgetown University), God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), pp. xiii–ixGoogle Scholar. A characteristic here is that the religio-cultural belief system of the so-called New Atheists is typically Postmodern in that not all subscribe to all the unwritten clauses in this anti-theistic proto-creed. Therefore some or all of what Haught asserts applies to the various New Atheists as individuals.

⁸ Revd Malcolm Guite, Chaplain of Girton College Cambridge, speaking on the BBC1 documentary, The Narnia Code, (broadcast on Thursday 16 April 2009, 23:35). This can be viewed at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jz2qp#broadcasts.

⁹ Guite, The Narnia Code (2009).

¹⁰ Beattie, Tina, The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹¹ ‘Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not’. See, Sextus Empiricus (c. 2nd-3rd C. BC) in Adversus Mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians), §7.60.

¹² Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the gods (trans and intro, Patrick Gerard Walsh; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 2.3.8; and Cicero, Marcus Tullius, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume IV: The Fourteen Orations Against Marcus Antonius; The Treatise on Rhetorical Invention; The Orator; Topics; On Rhetorical Partitions, Etc (trans. C.D. Yonge; Dodo Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 2.53.161.

¹³ Cicero, The Nature of the gods, 1.4.2.

¹⁴ See, Barth, Karl, The Church Dogmatics (14 Vols; eds. Bromiley, G.W. and Torrance, T.F.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–77)Google Scholar. See: §17 The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion I/2, p. 280; §25 The Fulfilment of the Knowledge of God II/1, p. 3; §26 The Knowability of God II/1, p. 63; §. 27, ‘The Limits to the Knowledge of God’, II/1, The Doctrine of God, specifically, pp. 179–256. Specific reference is made to, I.2, p. 299 and IV.1, p. 45.

¹⁵ Barth, The Church Dogmatics I/2, §17 The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion I/2, p. 280.

¹⁶ Thomas Aikenhead (1676–1697), a student from Edinburgh, was indicted in December 1696 and executed on 8 January 1697 for blasphemy; Aikenhead is recorded as having pleaded for mercy during the trial and attempted to recant his views but was sentenced to death by hanging.

¹⁷ In contradiction to Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), which granted the right of taking the ‘natives’ of newly discovered lands as perpetual slaves, because according to the Aristotelian derived anthropology humans were in three groups, Asian, Africans and Europeans, and therefore the ‘Indians’ of the New World were to be classified as ‘dumb brutes’ outside of and different from humanity, Sublimis Dei (1537) accepted them as fully and equally human because it was found that they could hear the Gospel and be converted to Christ. Sublimis Dei stated, ‘The enemy of the human race … invented a means … by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people … that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom we have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service … the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved.’ Extracts from, Sublimis Dei, encyclical on ‘The Enslavement and Evangelization of Indians’, issued by Pope Paul III, 29 May 1537, accessed at, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm.

¹⁸ Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:8 (37a). The Talmud is considered an authoritative record of rabbinic discussions on Jewish law, Jewish ethics, customs, legends and stories. It consists of the Mishnah, a record of oral traditions, and the Gemara, which comments upon, interprets and applies these oral traditions.

¹⁹ Given that in Britain the last publically issued figure was 193,500 (2007), rising through 180,000 year on year since the mid-1990s, and given that the most recent statistic for the USA was 1.3 million (2005), given that these levels per head of population are similar across all countries in the Western world, then we may assume a figure of 2 million abortions per year. Assuming a base line in 1967 of zero (statistics are not available for the late 1960s but many women were queuing up to receive the new state sanctioned abortions), then given the exponential growth it is reasonable to propose a figure of 50 million children in the last 40 years.

²⁰ Richard Dawkins argues in the context of the stem-cell debate, that it is right to dissect, analyze and harvest stem-cells from people in their embryonic state because there is no innate value to life, and yet his web site and forum constantly beseech us to value adult and intellectual life: again, the selective dehumanization principle.

²¹ The Letter to Philemon. See: specifically 1:15–16.

²² On the question of the moment at which soul and body are united, Maximus wrote in the Second Ambigua to contradict earlier teachings (for example, the Origenist teaching that the soul exists before the body, also, the Aristotelian teaching that the body exist before the soul) and to deal with certain ambiguities in Gregory of Nazianzus’ writings. Maximus rejected both, asserting, Christologically, that soul is created by God and infused into the body in the very instant of conception. See: Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, 2, in, Migne, J.P., ed., Patrologia Graeca (161 Vols.; Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–1666)Google Scholar. See Ambigua 2.42, in, Vol. 91, 1324C. See also, 2.7, in, Vol. 91, 1101A; also, references to Maximus in Vol. 3 & 4. For a modern translation see, Berthold, George C. (ed.) Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For modern scholarship on Maximus and these issues see, Balthasar, Hans Urs Von, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and, Cooper, Adam G., The Body in St Maximus Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (Series, Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An excellent summary of these body-soul, conception, questions can be found in, Saward, John, Redeemer in the Womb (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 3–21Google Scholar.

²³ An Aristotelian proposition endorsed by Aquinas, was that the humanity and personhood was not there from the moment of conception, some other animal life was. Aquinas takes this further and asserts delayed ensoulment, or postponed animation (that the soul is only given to the human after several weeks of development in the womb). See: Saward, Redeemer in the Womb (1993), p. 13–21.

²⁴ Saward, Redeemer in the Womb (1993), p. 8.

²⁵ In terms of twentieth century philosophy, a holon is simultaneously a whole and a part and refers to phenomena that are whole in themselves, but are also part of a larger system, a Holon is embedded in larger holons, which influence it whilst it influences the greater. A model of this is sub-atomic particles, molecules, matter and objects, and the universe.

²⁶ Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 2.42, in, Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 91, 1337B-1340B. In Postmodern secular liberal humanist terms this repugnance is translated into a refusal to accept that sexual intercourse is, in many ways, primarily about creating a new person, a new life: secular liberal humanists divorce pregnancy from the act of copulation.

²⁷ Psalm 51:6.

²⁸ Psalm 139:13, & 15–16.

²⁹ Jeremiah 1:5.

³⁰ ‘Even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit’ Luke 1:15. ‘He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb.’ Luke 1:15–16.

³¹ ‘But when He who had set me apart, even from my mother's womb, and called me through His grace …’ Galatians 1:15.

³² Inca child sacrifice probably amounted to know more that 3 to 5 children per year. Evidence about Capacacha, the sacred Inca ceremony of human sacrifice, is essentially from two sources: the accounts written by Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from each newly discovered mummy. The ritual sacrifices were intricate and of great importance. The sacrifice had to be of a child – for purity (including physical perfection). The worship of mountains as ‘gods’, and the elaborate burial procedures involved, elevated the status and ontology of the sacrificed child to that of a deity, at one with the ‘gods’. The sacrifice was usually that of a chieftain's child or even the off-spring of the Inca Emperor – these people were considered to be descendants of the Sun ‘god’. The child to be sacrificed would be fed a maize alcohol (chicha) to numb pain from exposure and the altitude. Liturgical ritual at the place of the cairn on the mountain top led to the child being enveloped in ceremonial clothing and incarcerated in the cairn-tomb, guarded by sacred artefacts, and left to die of exposure. According to the Jesuitical records-accounts this was done to appease the ‘gods’, and to prevent the world collapsing into chaos.

³³ I have suffered from Ménières disease (tinnitus, vertigo and deafness) all my life. This is a disease which is supposed to come on in adults (usually in their twenties), it is not known in children. Because I was born at the end of January 1954, my conception would have been, for arguments sake, on 1 May 1953. If the chemist was on his summer holiday between my father's first purchase and the subsequent second dose of the aborting medicine, this would point to some time between mid July and the end of August (this was the traditional time for the English middle class professionals to take their single annual holiday) in the 1950s. An unborn child's brain-nervous system is highly sensitive and susceptible to environmental damage – especially from chemicals – during the period two-and-a-half months to four months into development in the womb: was this Ménières type disease inflicted on me by the aborting medicine?

³⁴ Pro-choice abortionists, particularly in the USA, call for plurality – the idea that different views should live alongside each other without attempting to contradict each other. Is the question of the third Enlightenment mega-holocaust, as with the first two (The Slave Trade and the Holocaust), simply a question of opinion? No. The measure is the level of death subscribed to – the level of protectionist killing. The Slave Trade and the Holocaust of the Jews demanded a level of death rarely seen before; the same is true with abortion since state sanctioning. The resulting delusion inverts the truth. The abolitionists – for example William Wilberforce - opposed the enslavement and death of Africans from an Evangelical perspective; the pro-life lobby often oppose abortion from a Roman Catholic-Evangelical perspective: in both cases abolitionists and anti-abortionists oppose death, oppose protectionist killing, arguing for equality before God. The measure of right or wrong is in the level of death subscribed to. Pluralism, in this instance, merely endorses death.

³⁵ Cf, Matthew 7:3–5 & Luke 6:41–42.

³⁶ Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans(trans. SirHoskyns, Edwyn, 1933), Oxford: OUP, 1968, p. 480Google Scholar. (German edition, Der Römerbrief (1919) p. 505.

³⁷ John 18:31 and Matthew 2:16–18.