ACI Prensa Staff, Apr 3, 2024 / 16:30 pm (CNA).
The famous British atheist Richard Dawkins, author of the book “The God Delusion,” said in a recent interview that he identifies as a “cultural Christian” and prefers Christianity to Islam, although he clarified that he does not believe “a word” of the Christian faith.
In the interview with Rachel Johnson broadcast on March 31 on LBC, Dawkins said he was “slightly horrified” to learn that Oxford Street in London was promoting Ramadan, the Muslim month for fasting, instead of Easter.
Dawkins went on to explain: “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.”
After expressing his satisfaction at what he perceives as a decline in the number of Christians, the famous atheist noted that he “would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”
“So I call myself a cultural Christian and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion.”
‘I’d choose Christianity every time’
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.
When questioned about that statement, Dawkins said: “The way women are treated in Christianity is not great about that, it has had its problems with female vicars and female bishops, but there is an active hostility to women which is promoted I think by the holy books of Islam.”
After clarifying that he was not referring to individual Muslims but to the doctrine contained in books such as “the Hadith and the Koran, which is fundamentally hostile to women and hostile to gays,” the famous atheist stressed that he likes “living in a culturally Christian country although I do not believe a word of the Christian faith.”
Who is Richard Dawkins?
Dawkins, 83, was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 26, 1941. He is a British biologist and researcher who held the Charles Simonyi Professorship Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University until 2008.
He is the author of books such as “The Selfish Gene” (1976) and “The Extended Phenotype” as well as “The God Delusion,” his best-selling book in which he claims that the nonexistence of a supernatural creator is almost a certainty and that the belief in a personal God could be described as delirium.
In 2018 he notably said that we should not celebrate that Europe is less Christian, as we should hold onto it “for fear of finding something worse.”
“Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme: ‘Always keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse,’” he noted at the time.
Dawkins hasn’t been exempt from controversy. In August 2014, for example, he responded on then-Twitter, now X, to a subscriber who confessed: “I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a Down syndrome baby,” to which he replied: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Dawkins reminds this writer of Prof Paul Kurtz of Buffalo U, former president of The Council on Secular Humanism, an atheist who wrote in his Manifesto that the Catholic Church was a menace to individual freedom, yet praised Catholicism for its institution of hospital care and its charitable works. Prayers may well convert his mind.
The psychologist Paul Vitz researches such nihilists or atheists as Friedrich Nietzsche and our modernday atheist Richard Dawkins (and many others). He finds that in neither case “do we find a strong, beloved father with a close relationship with his son or daughter.” Even the atheist Sigmund Freud said that psychoanalysis “daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down” (Paul Vitz, “Faith of our Fathers,” Ignatius, 1999).
Consequently (?), too, in his “The God Delusion” (2006), Dawkins counsels moral indifference: “Enjoy your sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which is none of your business.”
So, let’s lift a glass with yet another “cultural Christian,” to the meaningless universe of random “inclinations,” and gender theory or whatever…bottoms up!
“It would be immoral to bring it (a baby with Down syndrome) into the world if you have the choice.”
Dawkins thinks Islam does not treat women as well as the Christian west treats women; he apparently doesn’t know that Islam generally prohibits aborting disabled infants in the womb. That Islamic prohibition demonstrates a more Christian practice than most ‘Christian’ western nations find acceptable.
Most Christian nations allow atheists with contradictory and idiotic views to live and to speak because we believe that EVERY human being inherently bears some mark of his creator’s dignity.
Dawkins is still an atheist no matter how much or how often he may say he admires the Christian religion. His atheism rejects basic tenets of Christianity. Why do we give him print? What makes this news?
Well Richard, I might consider myself to be a Stegosaurus, but that doesn’t make it true.
People like Dawkins have been so consumed with their hatred of all things Christian that they didn’t notice that, by erasing the Christian presence in the West, they were opening the door for Islam & other unpleasant religions to take its place. He now sees what the future looks like and he’s horrified.
Maybe he really believed that he was helping to create a secular utopia where everyone, freed from the superstition of religion, would be kind to each other. He’s a fool as much as he is a villain. When he admits his part of the responsibility for this disaster, I’ll begin to have some respect for him.
I think as people age and grow closer to inevitable death, many experience a change of heart and mind when it comes to “religion.” I think God increases his “wooing” of us in those last days and years, because He doesn’t want anyone to perish, but all to have eternal life with Him. Perhaps this is happening with Richard Dawkins. I hope and pray so. I’ve seen it happen with other people I have known.