If you want to understand the social and political implications of the atheist/materialist worldview, you need look no further than the science blogsphere’s reaction to the appointments of Francis Collins to head the NIH and John Holdren as President Obama’s science advisor.
Collins is a superbly qualified scientist (a leading molecular geneticist) and administrator (former head of the Human Genome Project). He is also a Christian, and holds fairly traditional Christian beliefs. He is not a young earth creationist, and there is no evidence that his Christian faith has hampered his scientific work in any way.
The reaction in the scientific blogsphere to Collins’ appointment has been apoplectic. P.Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, and other atheists have excoriated the President for his appointment of Collins. They believe that Collins’ traditional Christian views either disqualify him or raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve in a high position in science administration.
The atheist science blogshpere has taken a very different view of John Holdren’s appointment. For example, P.Z. Myers
The “very very good” Dr. Holdren is an eco-fundamentalist and population control fanatic with a track record of junk science and advocacy of totalitarian methods to reduce human fertility. In the 1970’s, he (and colleagues such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford) predicted massive worldwide famine as a result of overpopulation by the year 2000. In The Population Bomb, Holdren’s colleague and future co-author Ehrlich predicted that

“”The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…

Ehrlich predicted that starvation would occur in the West as well as in the Third World; in 1969, Ehrlich wrote

“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The ecocatastrophe would not merely be limited to humanity; In 1970, Ehrlich wrote

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

In 1977, Holdren and Ehrlich (and Erlich’s wife) published the textbook Ecoscience, in which Holdren and his co-authors reiterated their delirious claims about the dangers of unchecked human fertility. In a chapter entitled “Human Predicament: Finding a Way Out”, Holdren and Ehrlich gave serious consideration to totalitarian methods for dealing with the Eugenics DDT nuclear winter global cooling global warming climate change overpopulation ‘crisis’:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women–particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth–could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of “involuntary birth control,” in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into public drinking water or in staple foods.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Each of these policy recommendations is a crime against humanity. Yet Holdren wrote that serious consideration should be given to these large-scale coercive measures to reduce population, and suggested that certain human populations were more of a burden on the ecosystem than others. Holdren’s justification of widespread systematic targeted forced sterilizations and abortions on undesirable human populations for the purpose of reducing their population is advocacy of genocide.
Yet P.Z. Myers offers no criticism of Holdren’s appointment, and no criticism of his population control views, while he has repeatedly criticized Collins’ appointment because of his Christian faith.
P.Z. Myers’ criticism of Collins’ appointment because of his Christianity is deplorable. The denial of government appointments based on religious belief is unconstitutional, as the Constitution prohibits the use of religious tests for public office (Article IV, section 3). Myers’ effusive endorsement of Holdren’s “very very good” appointment as science advisor to the President, and Myers’ silence (have the words ‘silence’ and ‘P.Z. Myers’ ever appeared in the same sentence before?) about Holdren’s record is ‘much much worse’. By enthusiastically endorsing Holdren’s appointment while remaining uncharacteristically silent about Holdren’s clearly expressed view that totalitarian methods of population control should be given serious consideration, P.Z. Myers tacitly endorses crimes against humanity.
New Atheists are silent about eco-genocide, because Holdren’s ecological fundamentalism is woven in the fabric of atheism, which is the indispensable philosophical ground for totalitarianism in the 20th century.