"I'm a cultural Christian" says Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist
catholicherald.co.uk
catholicherald.co.uk
On the topic, I believe it's a yikes from me. It's not saying something new and not educative, and not helping anyone. It's one of those things that's not worth it to say. Regardless even if it's miraculously as simple as stated.
It's just such a weirdly ignorant thing to say about Islam. Like he's getting everything he knows about Islam off of Facebook.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) can be pretty oppressive, if you read their scriptures at face value. They all record Bronze Age attitudes.
He happens to live in a country surrounded by people with a much more progressive take on Christianity; the Anglicans just aren't much of a threat. And good for them. But I live in America, where fundamentalist Christians are a far bigger threat to me Muslims. The Muslims here aren't especially progressive, but we have a significant fundamentalist Christian terrorism problem.
I'm a nonbeliever myself I don't want to be part of any of those religions. But all of them have healthy, modern interpretations, and Dawkins really ought to at least put in some effort to look into it. As it is, he makes atheists look uneducated about the religions around them.
The earliest of those was compiled long into the Iron Age, though some of them refer to events which would, based on the timeline in the narrative, have occurred in the Bronze Age (or the Copper Age, or the neolithic) through that Iron Age lens. And, even insofar as, e.g., the Mosaic law may be said to “reflect Bronze Age values”, its also basically declared mostly-irrelevant to non-Jewish Christians in the Christian scriptures when taken at face value (in Acts of the Apostles.)
Which is not to say that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism can’t be oppressive, and some of that doesn’t come from their Scriptures, but to the extent either of those is true, “Bronze Age values” in the scriptures “at face value” are mostly beside the point.
I understand the human tendency to belong in a group, or want to belong in a group. I don’t think any group that encourages religiosity in any way is conducive to modern civilization. I don’t think being “culturally” anything is acceptable either since part of the culture is regressive attitudes towards the “other”, and often times blind devotion to authority figures.