Famous anti-theist Richard Dawkins in a recent interview declared: “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.”
“I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian,” Dawkins noted, adding: “I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
Asked whether he sees the decline in church attendance and the construction of some 6,000 mosques, with many more planned, as a problem, Dawkins responded: “Yes, I do, really. I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time.”
“It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not,” he commented.
In an interview evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein said something I thought was quite accurate:
“I think there was a terrible misstep with atheism, and what it did was it unhooked a set of protections, some of which really were no longer necessary, many of which were still essential, but for reasons that were not literally explained in the documents in question and I know because for a while I was pretty close to the only evolutionary biologist trying to bridge this gap, and speaking to religious people and saying look, my colleagues are telling you you’re sick with a mind virus I know that’s not right. Doesn’t mean that what you think took place literally happened and we have to have that conversation. What if what you believe is important but not literal? Right, getting there from an evolutionary perspective, if we could’ve done that earlier and not temporarily flirted with the idea that you know, simple atheism was somehow as sophisticated way of navigating through life, then maybe we could have, maybe those people who had long-standing traditions that contained wisdom that might’ve prevented this would’ve had more power when it mattered.”
Dawkins spent much of his career accusing the faithful of having that mind-virus, and now that he feels threatened by a worse one, well, “Cultural Christianity” isn’t so bad after all!