Dawkins’ Staggering Hypocrisy
Richard Dawkins has long been the world’s most famous atheist. He is not a passive live and let live atheist. His atheism is militant, and he has attacked religion relentlessly for decades with books like The God Delusion. And now that he is seeing his labors bearing fruit he is not at all pleased. The United Kingdom, it is fair to say, is a post-Christian country. Only about 5% of the country attends church on any given Sunday.
This has consequences, of course. The progressive/fascist rot is well advanced in the UK. To cite one example of many, yesterday a law went into effect that makes it a criminal offense to “misgender” someone. You read that correctly. A person can literally go to jail for insisting that a man is not a woman.
Dawkins should have seen this coming. In 2021, Dawkins posted the following Tweet: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.” For the offense of making this observation, the American Humanist Association stripped Dawkins of the “Humanist of the Year” award it had previously bestowed on him.
Dawkins has sown the wind and now he is reaping the whirlwind. And he still doesn’t get it. Recently, he said this (go to time 14:20 at this link):
I do think that we are culturally a Christian country, and I call myself a cultural Chrisian. I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense. It is true that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down and I am happy with that, but I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all of our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we . . . certainly if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful.
The staggering hypocrisy of these sentiments beggars belief. Dawkins spent decades attacking Christianity. Now that the church in England has been utterly defeated, he laments aspects of the loss and in particular the loss of the “Christian ethos” at which he has always felt at home.
In my prior post I discussed the “cut flowers” metaphor. Cultural Christianity severed from its roots in actual Christianity withers and dies. In England the flowers have withered to a far greater extent than they have in the United States, but we are on the same path.
What is at the end of that path? It is hard to say exactly except we can now that it will be very ugly indeed and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. And I fear England has not seen the worst yet. Dr. Dawkins, if you don’t like what is happening, all I can say is that you ain’t seen nothing yet.