It's a Little Late for Regrets, Richard

British biologist and uber-atheist Richard Dawkins has reiterated a claim that he's made in the past which I find interesting. He asserts that he's a cultural Christian but that he disbelieves every doctrine of the Christian faith.

From an article at The Daily Caller:

"I do think that we are culturally a Christian country, and I call myself a cultural Christian,” Dawkins said. “I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols. I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

“It’s true that statistically, the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I’m happy with that,” he continued. “But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So, I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful."

What Dawkins doesn't seem to realize is that we can't have all those wonderful fruits of the Christian worldview while simultaneously killing the tree that produces them. Destroy the tree, which Dawkins has spent much of his adult life trying to do, and the fruit eventually withers and dies on the branches.

Dawkins is also alarmed that Islam is growing in his native England with 6000 mosques currently active in Britain and more in the planning stages:

“If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time," he says. "It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Set aside the puzzling reference by an atheistic evolutionist to "fundamental decency" (What criteria does he base "decency" upon?). Having done his best over the last thirty years to create a religious vacuum in the English-speaking world, he's now dismayed that Islam is rushing in to fill the void he's helped create, but what did he expect?

There are really only four live religious options in the contemporary Western world:

1. State atheism, such as we see in communist North Korea, China, and the old Soviet Union with all the attendant horrors that those nations inflict on their people,
2. Islam, with its repressive treatment of women and its long-term goal of world conquest,
3. Paganism, a religious syncretism rooted in superstition and sensuality,
4. Christianity, with its heritage of beautiful art, music, hospitals, universities, science, human dignity and equal rights, and a morality based on compassion and justice rather than power.

Dawkins has devoted himself to eradicating #4, but to the extent he's had success, he's mostly succeeded in opening the door wide for the other three.

There's more on Dawkins' regrets at the link.