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The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion - from Chapter Eight - p. 114: There is a widespread belief that the Enlightenment represented the triumph of reason over faith and set Western societies on the road to progress by liberating scientific rationalism from religious ignorance. The new atheists represent the culmination of this point of view, in their battle against religion in the name of reason. For example, A C Grayling, a British professor of philosophy and an ardent new atheist, writes that 'Most of what was achieved in the history of the West from the 16th century onwards ... was wrested from the bitter reactionary grip of religion inch by painful and frequently bloody inch.' This creates the impression that we Westerners owe our cherished freedoms and values to a fragile secular ethos which must be constantly defended against the dangerous power of religion. Such ideas need to be challenged, for they represent a superficial and distorted understanding of the history of ideas in the West.

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