An atheist writer condemned the “current fashion” for anti-Catholicism before an audience of over 150 people at a meeting last night organised by The Iona Institute.

Brendan O’Neill, who is editor on the UK-based on-line magazine Spiked, said the driving forces behind the rise of anti-Catholicism were the emergence of the ‘New Atheism’, the scandals, moral relativism, and in Britain the notion that Catholics cannot be fully loyal to their State.

(Brendan was interviewed on The Right Hook ahead of the talk and his interview can be found here).

O’Neill, who also writes for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph among other publications, said that was widespread antagonism “towards strong belief or solid faith”.

He said: “In our relativistic era of ‘anything goes’, when we are expected to respect all cultures as equally valid, a religion that considers itself the ‘one, true faith’ and as ‘universal’, is looked upon as dictatorial if not fascistic.”

Speaking about the New Atheism, he said: “The New Atheism regards not only religious faith but any view which considers mankind as more than a monkey as suspect, strange, deluded.”

He continued: “New Atheists’ real problem with religion is its treatment of mankind as special and distinctive, as the governor of the Earth, as having ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth’.

“At a time when we are increasingly seen as mere bundles of genes, little more than DNA, sharing 90 per cent of our genes with bananas, religion’s sanctification of man is seen as perverse.”

Referring to the scandals, he acknowledged that much of the anger directed against the Catholic Church was directed at it because of the issue of child abuse by clerics.

O’Neill also cited the “return of old-fashioned anti-Catholicism, especially in Britain. This is in fact the LEAST important aspect, but it definitely informs the new Catholic-bashing. ‘Romans’ were often seen as a threat to the British state, as insufficiently loyal, as potentially more loyal to Rome than Whitehall.”

Concluding, he said: “The end result of the crashing together of these trends is a creeping and sometimes shrieking intolerance of Catholicism in particular, and religion in general. This has led even me – a lapsed Catholic and immoveable atheist – to worry about the illiberal streak to modern-day atheism, and to want to stand up for the absolute freedom of religion.

“Fighting for freedom of religion was, after all, the starting point of the Enlightenment. Today’s pseudo-Enlightened thinkers who simply spit bile at dumb religious people don’t understand history or liberty.”