People seem offended that I treat the new atheists as a social movement rather than an intellectual one. But the reason is that the arguments against god are all very old and so are even the sentiments. So here's some poetry to cheer all atheists up, both old and new.

It's 160 years since Arthur Hugh Clough wrote this:

The foul engendered worm

Feeds on the flesh of the life-giving form

Of our most Holy and Anointed One.

He is not risen, no,

He lies and moulders low;

Christ is not risen.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

As of the unjust, also of the just –

Christ is not risen.

...

Is He not risen, and shall we not rise?

Oh, we unwise!

What did we dream, what wake we to discover? Ye hills, fall on us, and ye mountains, cover!

In darkness and great gloom

Come ere we thought it is our day of doom,

From the cursed world which is one tomb,

Christ is not risen!

Eat, drink, and die, for we are men deceived,

Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope

We are most hopeless who had once most hope,

We are most wretched that had most believed.

Christ is not risen.

Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss!

There is no Heaven but this!

Darwin had nothing to do with these sentiments – Easter Day was written 10 years before the publication of the Origin.

As for being rude about the pope and Catholics generally – nothing even that the moderators have deleted here comes close to the robustly Protestant sentiments of John Oldham's (d 1683) Satires upon the Jesuits, from which comes this wonderfully abusive accusation of abuse:

And here I might (if I but durst) reveal

What Pranks are play'd in the Confessional:

How haunted Virgins have been dispossest,

And Devils were cast out to let in Priest:

What Fathers act with Novices alone,

And what to Punks in shriving Seats is done;

Who thither flock to Ghostly Confessor,

To clear old Debts, and tick with Heav'n for more.

Oft have I seen these hallow'd Altars stain'd

With Rapes, those Pews with Buggeries profan'd :

Those of you who want to know the poet's robustly materialist dismissal of transubstantiation will have to click through to the decent obscurity of Google Books. In any case, the the point is that all of these arguments are very old and have been better put before. What's new is the belief that they are something we in this generation have discovered.

About 50 years after Arthur Hugh Clough's poem, and decades before the first world war, atheism was already self-evident to the avant-garde, Anatole France could write:

Those who have rejected the dogmas of theological morality, as almost all of us have done in this age of science and intellectual freedom, have no means left of knowing why they are in the world and what they are come there to do. Fate envelops us entirely in the mysterious processes of her mighty alchemy, and really our one and only resource is to give up thinking altogether, if we are not to feel too cruelly the tragic absurdity of living. It is here, in our absolute ignorance of the why and wherefore of our existence, lies the root of our melancholy and sick disgust of life. Physical evil, moral evil, the miseries of the soul and the senses, the prosperity of the wicked, the humiliation of the just man, all this would still be endurable, if we could grasp the system and economy of it all, if we could divine a providence directing the chaos. The believer finds a perverse pleasure in his sores ; his enemies supply him with the agreeable spectacle of their acts of violence and injustice; even his misdeeds and crimes do not rob him of hope. But in a society where all faith is blotted out in darkness, sin and sorrow lose all their meaning, and only strike us as odious jests, ill omened farcical impertinences.

The only development since then is the assertion that it is meaningless to ask what we are in the world for, and perhaps the belief that now sin and sorrow have been robbed of all their meaning, technological progress can one day abolish them. That really does seem to me "an odious jest, an ill-omened farcical impertinence".