Cultural Christianity without Christ?
Why Richard Dawkins cannot sustain his cultural Christianity without faith in Christ.
There has been a lot of commentary on Richard Dawkins’ coming out as a “cultural Christian.”
The problem is that Dawkins wants Christianity to sustain his culture and civilization even as he mocks it and berates it for its alleged superstitious absurdities.
But ethics based on biology, evolutionary biology no less, will not give you the love command of Jesus, nor attribute value to the vulnerable and oppressed. This was Nietzsche’s insight, Christianity is a putrid religion because it glories in shame, it worships the victim not the victor, it lifts up the weak instead of putting them down, and it desires compassion rather than oppression.
Writing for The Sunday Times, Glenn Scrivener hits the nail on the head when he writes:
Dawkins speaks with assurance about “decency” and “ethos”. Press in. These values are not biological but they are no less real for that. There is reality, perhaps the deepest reality, to the super-natural — to that which is above nature, that which inverts the survival of the fittest. There is compassion for “the weak, the low, the botched” and the Christian claim is that following this love to its source brings us face to face with a person — not an idea, a feeling or an energy. Jesus transcends biological necessity. On the Cross he transcends it morally, in the resurrection he transcends it physically. It’s Easter that heals the Split.
My question for Dawkins is “What are the symbols for ‘Mercy’ and ‘Compassion’ on the periodic table?”
The ethics he cherishes cannot be derived from the natural world, he thus needs something extra-natural or super-natural to sustain it, precisely what he does not possess!
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