Richard Dawkins' "Come to (Cultural) Jesus" Moment
Many people are gobsmacked that New Atheist apostle, Richard Dawkins, was on a British TV show calling himself a “cultural Christian.”
Dawkins, author of many ranty anti-religious books like The God Delusion, may not have had a Damascus Road conversion, but he certainly has had an epiphany, namely, that a post-Christian world is not quite the utopia of reason he thought it was going to be.
Dawkins look around the country, seeing the religious and cultural revolution playing out before him, and just like that, Christmas hymns, and Christ College suddenly don’t seem so bad after all!
Alas, Dawkins is learning that the alternatives to Christian Britain are either a HR Caliphate or Rainbow Orwellianism, and it scares him.
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So what has changed the mind of Richard Dawkins, the celebrated scientist, celebration skeptic, proud blasphemer, and God-hater?
Well, Dawkins looks around Britain and sees Islam being given deferential treatment and the anti-science antics of transgender activists, and it suddenly dawns on him that a Christian nation, even with a few million people who take it a tad too literally, is far better than the alternatives.
Critics have hissed at Dawkins for being Islamophobic and transphobic, for failing to embrace the new religions of diversity and his refusal denounce the heresy of sexual dimorphism, yet the fact is that Dawkin’s blasphemy on these points is far safer in a Christian world than a progressive European one!
I think Tom Holland has the best take on Dawkins in a tweet:
“Dawkins’ own brand of evangelical atheism are both expressions of a specifically Christian culture - as Dawkins himself, sitting on the branch he’s been sawing through and gazing nervously at the ground far below, seems to have begun to realise.”
A world shaped by Christianity is still infinitely better than Communism or a Caliphate.
Yet many political leaders and cultural influencers continue to treat Christianity as public enemy # 1 and lead their cities and nations into a Nietzchean abyss, thinking they are just one good purge away from paradise, only to learn soon after the horrors that they have manufactured for us all.
His realization is oh so right. The question is: Is branch already cut through too far?
I wonder how many people will be spitting tacks because they feel that Dawkins has betrayed them.