Yes,

I completely agree with you. Um, you'll, you'll mention of the new atheism, a new atheist is interesting because you were talking earlier about the, the political disconnection that you faced in the early 2000s. Um, I had very similar experience. One of the things I was looking forward to about university was I can, I can get into some politics and I went to university in the mid to late 1990s where politics really wasn't happening. Certainly not in the university I went to. Um, I, you know, there were, there were meetings of political groups, but they were mini skill. There were like three people there and I couldn't get anybody that I was in seminar groups with or, or lecture groups with to, to be interested in the sorts of things I was interested in. So it was an incredibly, um, politically, uh, null point in time. And I feel like one of the things about new atheism when it came along was it, it almost was a kind of attempt to supply a kind of spirituality via a kind of anti spirituality. It was trying to provide people with, because there's something about the new atheism of the early 2000s where it presents itself as this, um, coherent unified worldview and will be, albeit that it's negative in the sense that it's a critique of religion and it's a promotion of, of atheism and so on. Um, it never, nevertheless promotes a kind of worldview, which has politics in it and also a kind of spirituality, um, a materialist spirituality as it were complete with its own, you know, group of, of holy men, you know, Dawkins and Hichins and dentists and so on.

Right, there's a, there's a delight in the discourse in the process of disillusionment, which I think is, was very, very, um, captivating to, uh, a number of, a number of people who wound up, uh, following, you know, uh, I remember just a certain kind of as a, as somebody who grew up Catholic, uh, a kind of thrill in listening to how, how self-certain Hichins was in his appraisal of somebody like Mother Teresa, um, how incredibly, uh, just transgressive it felt to listen to somebody just, just not have any, any, any, any, any compunction at all about, uh, about, about talking, you know, about the, the hypocrisy that he had grown up with in, in his own Christianity. There was something thrilling about it and I didn't recognize at the time, um, its, um, totalizing effect. I didn't recognize the, um, lack of sociological nuance. I didn't recognize at the time that, uh, somebody like Hichins was willing to make lots of blanket statements about huge populations like Catholics, uh, you know, um, billion, a billion or more people, uh, and, and, um, and to do that so freely, to do that, uh, without recognizing the diversity of people's beliefs or how they manage themselves within complex systems. There was something, but there was something thrilling about the transgressive totality of the discourse and that did have a kind of religious impact, I think, for, for me for a while. And I know for a lot of other people too.