Richard Dawkins: I'm a Cultural Christian

[Stizzel]

I thought this was very interesting coming from Dawkins. He's very nearly making the same observation I made a very long time ago about the value of Christianity's effect on culture regardless of whether you believe in the supernatural aspect of it or not. Dawkins is primarily concerned about Islam replacing Christianity in England and that's where I think he's missing the bigger picture.

Christianity teaches a lot very good things, about logic and empiricism and morality. Those teachings, derived from discovering the Greek texts and implementing them into the faith, are fundamentally the source of the success of the west. When Christians discovered greek logic they accepted it to be true and essentially said well if this is the truth then we have to work it into our religion, and if our religion can't handle that then it's fake and stupid. I don't know of any other religion that would allow itself to be challenged like that; Islam certainly would not.

And neither would atheism, for that matter. I say that as an atheist myself.

What I think Dawkins misses here is the reason Christianity is so much better than Islam. He seems to attribute it to some kind of social preference; he grew up in a Christian culture so it's what he likes. He seems to think it's some kind of coincidence that a 'cultural christian' society results in more liberal (in the traditional sense) values.

The fundamental problem with removing Christianity is that you have to replace it with something first - something that teaches all of these good things that the Church has been the source of for so long. Otherwise you'll just have a void and that void will be filled with something. If not Islam then half cooked ideologies like socialism. You'll have people saying that if god isn't real then god isn't the source of truth and that means there is no truth at all - a ridiculous notion given the obvious success of empiricism and logical consistency that gave rise to the scientific method, but it's something we hear a lot these days.

I'm glad Dawkins brought this up because we seem to be rapidly approaching a precipice and he's right, if the choice is Islam (or marxist atheism) vs Christianity, put me on team Jesus any day.

[squanto]

Richard Dawkins is in a documentary talking about how radical and evil Christianity is, one of the passages he talks about is the 1 Samuel stuff about comitting genocide against Amalek.

Bibi Netanyahu recently cited the exact same passage to justify attacking Gaza. Dawkins sat back and talked about how anyone who's an anti-zionist is an anti-semite, this happened the same week, IIRC a matter of days between the events.

This tells me everything I need to know about Dawkins politically.

[TheFornicator1]

The Four Horsemen all lost. This is not surprising. Dawkins was a major advocate for something he didn't entirely understand, and now he feels bad about it.

I'd suggest Harris will be next, but he's also a secret Jew, so I doubt it.

Christianity positively shaped/shapes our world. There is no doubt about it.

Didn't Dennett recently die?

[gachase21]

Stizz this is the best post you've made in about 4 years - srs

[DDSF1]

“Christianity teaches a lot very good things, about logic and empiricism and morality. Those teachings, derived from discovering the Greek texts and implementing them into the faith, are fundamentally the source of the success of the west. When Christians discovered greek logic they accepted it to be true and essentially said well if this is the truth then we have to work it into our religion, and if our religion can't handle that then it's fake and stupid. I don't know of any other religion that would allow itself to be challenged like that; Islam certainly would not.”

I liked your post but I wanted to use this passage quoted to make some points that I think are important (in my opinion).

In Islam, Greek and non-Greek philosophy (Iranian, Indian, etc) including logic, are fundamentally part of Islamic theology, even more so than Christianity. Shia theologians in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon are the only political leaders (the ones who are politically active) that are trained as a matter of standard education in Greek and non-Greek Logic and generally speaking Metaphysics. Muslim theologians, especially the aforementioned Shia theologians, are literally trained in philosophy of math and philosophy of science.

Two things have to be remembered, in my opinion, 1) Political Islam is necessarily aggressive because it is the only force in the world fighting Zionism. The irony being that the Shia theologian is almost always better versed in Jewish philosophy than a zionist. And 2) there is a large amount of caricature of Islam and purposeful media and social manipulation in western audiences (the western bubble). The image of the head chopping or bomb detonating Muslim is more a creation, literally, of CIA, M16, and Mossad for their goals than an actual Islamic thing and the image of backward illiterate Muslims is a purposeful crafted image in the west by highlighting those types and making sure you and i have no clue about the education of the basic Ayatollah in Iran or Iraq or Lebanon.

The point is that Islam, especially Shia Islam, is constantly challenging itself theologically, philosophically, and logically (as in syllogistic logic and various forms of logic). I am absolutely shocked by what I have learned about this topic over the last couple of years and how resistant academics and the media are to this fact/s.

That being said, obviously Christianity is the cultural basis of the West but even the relatively recent concept of West and western civilization is starting to be shifting and it only existed truly for the last 200 years so in some sense Christianity can be the cultural basis of the west but that may not be the case as those terms are being replaced slowly but steadily by “North” and “South” or “Global North” and “Global South” and the West is being more and more used as an ideological belief (as in he or she is “western” regardless of racial or geographic background).

Again, interesting in this discussion, is that the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) are steadily distancing themselves from the “west” and both Catholicism and most especially Protestantism. This is part of the global level shifts taking place where Russia as focal point of Orthodoxy is aligned with China and Iran. That troika is the most important in the coming future whether you are for or against them. The political and the religious are becoming more and more intertwined along with culture and so the whole discourse is fundamentally different than what a buffoon like Dawkins can even understand at this point. He is stuck in a 20th century mentality that is really becoming out of date with a quickness.

[Bodhy]

The New Atheism has for all intents and purposes, petered out rather pathetically. I don't even really see anyone on the internet m'ladying these days, at all.

Hitchens is dead. Harris jumped ship to the intellectual dark web. Dennett refocused on his academic work( but died a few days ago, RIP). Dawkins basically retired to troll nuns on Twitter.

And well deserved. It was a stupid anti-intellectual fad and nothing more, which was premised in irreverence and bullying and belittling anyone you disagree with much like R/P Nazism. I think it caused a lot of damage to Gen Z/zoomers because, by feeding people the idea that religious is per se ridiculous, you kind of kick out the moral edifice of the West and leave people to dinulge in hedonism.


But, Dawkins is promoting here a kind of cucky Christian nominalism. There was a sociologist whose name I forget, who concluded that a weird kind of moral therapeutic deism has become the Gen Z religion. So you have religion sought for the moral structure that secularism leaves a vacuum, but only in so far as it is convenient (be nice to others, but indulge in whatever you like and have sex with whatever).

Basically, muh feels plus the shared community meaning it makes. But is that enough? How can you have a secular society but with the dessicated husk of Judeo-Christian ethics overlaying it, because you can't accept nihilsim?


How come modernity turned into a clown show of a meaning crisis? How come TEH SCIENCEZORS didn't save us? Do fruity Continental academics have the answers?

[georgeenoob]

I just got into a religious debate with some random guy who said he respects ny beliefs after saying I'm crazy then he ended up raging at me for no reason at all towards the end. Was weird.

We need less people like that in society.

[128]

The edgy atheist era is over and now some of them regret trying to erase Christianity seeing what it’s replaced with

[jtaylor2010]

The edgy atheist era is over and now some of them regret trying to erase Christianity seeing what it’s replaced with

A Christian culture raised the Western World out of the Dark Ages, and now as Christianity is being eroded out of the Western World we are increasingly entering another Dark Age.

[J.L.C.]

[Xtermin8fascist]

Good and evil are entirely subjective, and people often overlook a lot of the cruelty and injustice innate to Christianity. People obsessed with faith are inherently antithetical to science because they do not demand evidence or reason for their belief. To believe in something without evidence is absurd. There never was a Noah's Ark, Moses never parted the red sea, Jesus Christ never rose from the dead, and there is no such thing as a miracle. Period. Ethics and justice are forged by human hands, drenched in blood. People need to stop entertaining this bullshyt.

[Stizzel]

“Christianity teaches a lot very good things, about logic and empiricism and morality. Those teachings, derived from discovering the Greek texts and implementing them into the faith, are fundamentally the source of the success of the west. When Christians discovered greek logic they accepted it to be true and essentially said well if this is the truth then we have to work it into our religion, and if our religion can't handle that then it's fake and stupid. I don't know of any other religion that would allow itself to be challenged like that; Islam certainly would not.”

I liked your post but I wanted to use this passage quoted to make some points that I think are important (in my opinion).

In Islam, Greek and non-Greek philosophy (Iranian, Indian, etc) including logic, are fundamentally part of Islamic theology, even more so than Christianity. Shia theologians in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon are the only political leaders (the ones who are politically active) that are trained as a matter of standard education in Greek and non-Greek Logic and generally speaking Metaphysics. Muslim theologians, especially the aforementioned Shia theologians, are literally trained in philosophy of math and philosophy of science.

Two things have to be remembered, in my opinion, 1) Political Islam is necessarily aggressive because it is the only force in the world fighting Zionism. The irony being that the Shia theologian is almost always better versed in Jewish philosophy than a zionist. And 2) there is a large amount of caricature of Islam and purposeful media and social manipulation in western audiences (the western bubble). The image of the head chopping or bomb detonating Muslim is more a creation, literally, of CIA, M16, and Mossad for their goals than an actual Islamic thing and the image of backward illiterate Muslims is a purposeful crafted image in the west by highlighting those types and making sure you and i have no clue about the education of the basic Ayatollah in Iran or Iraq or Lebanon.

The point is that Islam, especially Shia Islam, is constantly challenging itself theologically, philosophically, and logically (as in syllogistic logic and various forms of logic). I am absolutely shocked by what I have learned about this topic over the last couple of years and how resistant academics and the media are to this fact/s.

That being said, obviously Christianity is the cultural basis of the West but even the relatively recent concept of West and western civilization is starting to be shifting and it only existed truly for the last 200 years so in some sense Christianity can be the cultural basis of the west but that may not be the case as those terms are being replaced slowly but steadily by “North” and “South” or “Global North” and “Global South” and the West is being more and more used as an ideological belief (as in he or she is “western” regardless of racial or geographic background).

Again, interesting in this discussion, is that the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) are steadily distancing themselves from the “west” and both Catholicism and most especially Protestantism. This is part of the global level shifts taking place where Russia as focal point of Orthodoxy is aligned with China and Iran. That troika is the most important in the coming future whether you are for or against them. The political and the religious are becoming more and more intertwined along with culture and so the whole discourse is fundamentally different than what a buffoon like Dawkins can even understand at this point. He is stuck in a 20th century mentality that is really becoming out of date with a quickness.

I'll admit I dont know much about islam. I just dont know of any islamic nations that are anywhere near the west in terms of classical liberalism even now, to say nothing of years ago before we began dismantling the church's role in society.

That said, i found it amusing that he was so scared of islam and not the cringey commie edgelords that make up the atheist community, but he is a british cuck so i get the fear of people that will toss you off a roof if you tell their kids they can pick a gender. In that regard islam is the better choice if you ask me

[Zelensky]

"Like many atheists, Dawkins is discovering too late that the religious beliefs he worked so hard to destroy were, in fact, the foundation on which his civilization rested."

https://archive.is/Bw5vJ

[128]

A Christian culture raised the Western World out of the Dark Ages, and now as Christianity is being eroded out of the Western World we are increasingly entering another Dark Age.

At least Islam taking over will mean a reckoning for self hating far left degens

[Stizzel]

At least Islam taking over will mean a reckoning for self hating far left degens

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

[Irezumi]

The west (ie civilized world) is based on the principles of Christianity...upheld by Christian law. I would venture to guess that we all are..some of us just don't put any stock in the Devine aspect of it but still follow the basic teachings for the most part. That's my take on it.