The "New Atheists" are responding to provocation

AC Grayling blasts back at Theodore Dalrymple in this New Humanist article.

I wonder if today’s liberal Western democracies would exist, and with them the rule of law, freedom of speech, liberty of the individual, the enfranchisement of women in political, economic and social respects, saner attitudes to sex and sexuality, and some of the other characteristic goods of contemporary secular society, if all the efforts to overturn the hegemony of religion and the Divine Right of Kings had failed in the mighty endeavour to break free of both during the centuries including and since the sixteenth? Not that either the church or crown gave up easily; what a lot of blood was spilled, lives lost, torture suffered, in the struggle to break their oppressive grip; and this is to say nothing of the blood and suffering endured in the long centuries beforehand, when priests and kings had that grip firmly on the throats of the people who toiled in superstitious fear, illiteracy and poverty.