Oxford, September 2 – A growing number of prominent atheists have observed that the speed and piety with which much of the educated world adopted the claim of a Gaza “genocide” now force a grim revision of their old thesis that humanity was shedding superstition.

“We spent years explaining that faith is belief without evidence,” said evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. “Then a legal term with a specific meaning was chanted like a creed, the contrary data were treated as blasphemy, and the same people who mock young-Earth creationists demanded we genuflect. I am prepared to concede the experiment did not go as advertised.”

Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris put it more bluntly. “I can sit with uncertainty. What I cannot sit with is a moral panic that treats casualty ratios, urban warfare, and a charter that calls for Jewish death as optional footnotes. That is not skepticism. That is a church. A satanic one, at that.”

The late Daniel Dennett, who died in 2024, spent a career describing religion as a natural phenomenon that survives because it hijacks ordinary cognitive machinery. Colleagues now cite him with uneasy recognition. “Dan said people believe in belief,” one philosopher remarked. “He did not live to watch university departments, NGOs, and newsrooms treat a contested battlefield narrative as revealed truth. He would have recognized the liturgy.”

Christopher Hitchens, dead since 2011, was invoked more often than anyone still breathing. “Chris used to say religion poisons everything,” Dawkins noted. “He meant the supernatural kind. He would have had a marvelous time with a secular version that still has saints, heretics, relics, and an original sin that only one people can never expiate. The man is unavailable for comment, which is a pity, because this was his subject.”

Several of the remaining New Atheists stressed they were not offering a brief for any government. They described a method. “If your conclusion is fixed before the facts, if dissent is a moral crime, and if the sacred text is a press release,” Harris said, “you have not outgrown religion. You have merely changed the hymnal. And the ones we’re seeing now are all translated from Arabic.”

Dawkins, who still calls himself a cultural Christian while believing “not a word” of the doctrine, said the last three years have been clarifying. “I used to think the danger was priests. It turns out the more stubborn priesthood is the one that insists it has no priests. Only ‘journalists’ and ‘human rights organizations.’”

A junior fellow at a secular institute, speaking on condition of anonymity because the topic has become “professionally expensive,” phrased it more simply. “We told everyone to grow up. Then we watched the grown-ups recite the catechism of ‘Jewish supremacist settler-colonialism Apartheid genocide’ and take communion.”

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