WTC as an anti-religion slogan is ill-advised

The "official Richard Dawkins MySpace presence" is running a campaign (at the bottom of the page) to change people's icons into this thing.

This is a foolish move for a site claiming to be a "clear-thinking oasis." Now, normally I'd be all in favor of hammering the important point home that belief in immortality can make people do horrible things. But just slapping the towers of the World Trade Center on a flyer like this mostly exposes how little you know about their history.

Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr's The Mosque to Commerce, published in Slate on the 28th of December 2001, lays out the history of how the WTC's architect Minoru Yamasaki was heavily influenced not only by modernism and Japanese design but also by Islamic architecture:

Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

The fact of the matter is, the towers probably symbolized minarets.

So. With "no religion," Yamasaki would probably never have imagined the WTC the way it turned out in the first place. Employing the WTC for a slogan against religion like this requires an act of forgetting, of sweeping inconvenient details under the rug. But apparently we desperately need slogans these days. Because it's the information age, or something like that.

(Mosque architecture? In turn inspired by Byzantine.)