The Knott End Militant Atheist Tendency will be having their annual excursion to the Blackpool Illuminations on Friday 28th of September, meeting at 7.30pm at Fleetwood Lower Light on a specially chartered 'Heritage Tram' to take them to North Shore where they will be met by Dr Bill 'Awkins who will deliver the first of several talks on The Destiny of Divinity in a Post-Religious Society.

'Awkins argues that the post-religious age dawned with the Victorian Enlightenment and ever since then humanity has been in technological ascendency with respect of industry, science and medicine, entirely negating the need for religion which has been relegated to :

'...a reactionary superstition lacking any real dynamic or authority. To the so-called religious this Neo-Religion is an entirely elective romanticism at odds with societal reality, which is now Godless by default. Even the would-be religious know this - their craving is thus for comfort and certainty. They crave what Marx once called The Opiate of the Proletariat in full knowledge that what they are getting is, in fact, a placebo.

'Once humanity has attained Atheism, Science and Technology, there can be no going back into the dark for our innocence is lost. Those who claim to believe in God are being nostalgic for a religious age they have no understanding of. Even the Victorians knew this, couching their imagery in terms of a Gothic revivalism which was every bit as anachronistic then as it is now. In the Middle Ages, everything was depicted in contemporary terms but there is no place for Jesus in modern clothes, bust as there is no place for Jesus in the modern world. No one knows God is dead more than Christians; they mourn his death in a faux-faith which isn't even worthy of being seen in terms of folklore.'

Afterwards, there will be a choice of fish 'n' chips, Holland's pies and home-made hot-pot in the Bispham village hall before the return journey to Fleetwood and a nocturnal river crossing on the Wyre Rose to the headquarters of KEMAT where such atheist classics as 'They Can't all be Right but They Can all be Wrong' and 'Religion is to Spirituality What Pornography is to Sexuality' will be given a through dressing down to the accompaniment of Miss Harper on her VCS3.