Free Inquiry, Richard Dawkins, posted yesterday: ‘Cultural Christian’? So what?
Earlier this year Dawkins wrote about being a “cultural Christian,” i.e. a nonbeliever in the supernatural matters of the Christian faith, but raised in a culture permeated with Christian traditions. He likes Christmas carols, and so on. The press misunderstood what he meant — or rather, wanted him to appeal more to believers. Now he writes,
On Easter Day 2024, I agreed with Rachel Johnson on British TV that I am a cultural Christian: “Richard Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian.” Apparently, the author of The God Delusion, that three-million-copy bestseller attack on religion, had changed his mind and was now singing along with a Christian revival bandwagon. The truth, of course, is that I have always been a cultural Christian and have often said so. How could I not be? I attended Anglican boarding schools from age seven to eighteen. One of my recreations is to play tunes by ear on my electronic wind instrument (EWI). Hundreds of hymn tunes are inevitably lodged in my brain from childhood, and I regularly play them. Do I have Christian thoughts while doing so? Of course not. They are just nice easy tunes. Christianity itself is nonsensical wishful thinking. That has been my view all my adult life. Nothing has changed. Nor will it as long as I retain my sanity. I am a cultural Christian atheist.
He goes through some examples of why he finds Christianity nonsensical, even immoral. For example.
Given that we are all born in sin, how can we be forgiven? By the blood of Jesus. God, in the guise of his son, came “down” to earth, for the explicit purpose of having himself tortured and executed to redeem the sins of mankind. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). It is none other than the primitive, rather nasty doctrine of the scapegoat. God, the all-wise, all-knowing creator of the universe, God the sublime mathematician, the deviser of the Laws of Physics and determiner of its constants, mighty, all-powerful God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the Original Sin of humanity than to turn himself into a human and punish himself. Nothing less than capital punishment would suffice. Plus, a heavy dose of torture. That is what I meant when I said the founding myth of Christianity was deeply immoral.
I’m noting this piece not for the religious critique but for the final paragraph. This is where to go.
Let me offer something better. Be a cultural scientist. Rejoice in your membership of a species, Homo sapiens, that over four billion years evolved a brain capable of working out the true reason for its existence on this pale blue backwater of the Milky Way. As a cultural scientist, bravely inhabit the real world, the increasingly understood universe whose swelling grandeur puts all religions to shame.
As others have said: God gave you a brain and intelligence, why don’t you use them?
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Religions are parochial. Here’s an item from Facebook just seen, as a coincidence today with the above item.
Upworthy, Tod Perry, 26 Mar 2026: Philosophy expert reveals the character trait that shows someone is highly intelligent, subtitled “An intelligent person tries to be a realist.”
Who says so? According to Julian de Medeiros, “a philosophy expert who’s popular on TikTok and Substack, has built a reputation for sharing some of the world’s most important philosophical ideas about life, love, ethics, and intelligence“, Bertrand Russell.
Russell, a British philosopher and founding figure of the analytic movement in philosophy, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. His work in logic, epistemology, and mathematics made him one of the most important minds of the 20th century.
Quoting Russell:
“Here’s how you know that someone is intelligent, and this goes back to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote, ‘You see the world as it is, not as you would like it to be, is the beginning of all wisdom,’” de Medeiros shared on TikTok.
To put it simply, an intelligent person wants to get things right, while an unintelligent person wants to be right. Smart people look at the facts and form their opinions based on reality. Those who aren’t as bright tend to be more dogmatic, trying to see the world in ways that align with their beliefs.
Now, this is a basic understanding that some of us know and most do not. That the world is so saturated with misinformation and wishful thinking is why I cite this. The article goes on to discuss the “backfire effect” and mentions David McRaney.
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I continually to be fascinated by the claims of creationists and flat-earthers. Facebook keeps showing me their posts because I keep clicking on them. Here’s something “AMV” said about one of them, today.
Why are people so proud to show how little they learnt in middle school?
These people have these weird ideas about light and pressure and time and geometry that are completely unrelated to objective reality. Their ideas are intuitive physics, uninformed by anything learned by the generations before that have studied these things. Perhaps I should compile some.
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This is all about the low end of human nature, as I’ve said over and over.
As are some of these.
- JMG, today, from Raw Story: Sen. Mike Lee Accuses Talarico Of Child Sacrifice
- Again, conservatives have no understanding of the world beyond stories in their Bible.
- JMG, today: Watters: Does “Low T Talafreako” Even Own A Gun Or A Truck, Watch Football, Or “Wear Women’s Underwear?”
- Apparently JMG is distinguishing the last from the first three. Pure cave-man thinking. (I don’t do any of those things.)
- JMG, today: Donahue Compares Mamdani To “KKK Imperial Wizard”
- In this case it’s about plain black and white thinking. And it’s nonsense. He doesn’t understand that there are different kinds of people in the world.
- JMG, today, from NYT (gift link): NYT: Fatal Boat Strikes Have Failed To Curb Coke Supply
- Of course not. The boat strikes are performative: a big show for the MAGA base to make it look like Trump is taking action. Without any understanding of scale, or follow-through.
- NPR, today: Trump’s name must come off of the Kennedy Center, judge rules
- Because only Congress can order such a change.
- Trump will defy the court. Rules don’t apply to him.
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Once again, Dunning-Kruger.
The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, yesterday: Very Low-IQ Trump Too Stoopid to Win War, subtitled “There’s a revolution in military affairs and America is on the wrong side of it.”
I mentioned the part about Trump’s obsession with battleships, which are obsolete in this age of drones, a few posts ago.
But it’s not just that Trump didn’t understand the importance of drones in a war against Iran. He has spent his presidency pushing the U.S. military in the opposite direction.
He’s spending $20 billion on a sixth-gen fighter platform, the F-47, because it has his name on it. (Sort of. If you squint.)
He’s spending at least that much on a “Trump-class battleship” which will never touch water.
He’s spending $75 billion on a “Golden Dome” to counter ballistic missile threats to the continental United States. (The Congressional Budget Office says the real cost of the “Golden Dome” would be more like $1.2 trillion over 20 years.)
He spent time and resources putting tanks in Washington, D.C. for a “military parade” while his secretary of defense prioritizes physical fitness—physical fitness!—and tries to prevent officers from attending elite universities.
And early in the Iran war, when Ukraine offered to help the U.S. military defend against drone attacks, Trump brushed them aside. He thought it was unnecessary.
Trump is a moron, and it’s a serious issue that so many Americans don’t realize this. They’re stuck in tribalistic, fearless leader, thinking. Humanity may be doomed.
