Perhaps the New Atheists attacking Christianity so relentlessly wasn't a brilliant idea, actually. Join the crusade: https://lotuseaters.com/common-sense-crusade-or-28-03-2024 The Politics of Warhammer 40,000: https://www.lotuseaters.com/the-politics-of-warhammer-40-000-or-deep-think-v-21-04-22 Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/sargon
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| There's a very interesting Warhammer story called The Last Church in which the Emperor of mankind visits the last remaining church on earth to try and deconvert the last believer and tear it down. | |
| For anyone who hasn't read or listened to the audio track of my epic The Politics of Warhammer 40,000, you might not know that there is a theological contradiction at the heart of 40k which gives the setting more depth than one might expect at first glance. | |
| The Emperor of mankind is some kind of ubermensch who is clearly simply superior to other humans in both mind and body. | |
| He was also a militant new atheist who wanted to extirpate the concept of religion from the galaxy. | |
| The irony of the setting, aside from the fact that in any other universe the emperor would have been regarded as some kind of demigod, is that when mankind spreads out across the galaxy, they do so under the rubric of the imperial truth, which is an official creed set by the emperor of atheism, rationalism and science. | |
| However, it is discovered that there are in fact gods. | |
| Evil gods, evil gods of chaos that use magic to pervert and corrupt mankind, and these evil gods managed to bewitch Horus, the emperor's favourite son, and cause half the emperor's legions to defect to chaos. | |
| The ensuing civil war sees Horus slain by the emperor himself, who is mortally wounded, King Arthur-style, and then placed on a life support device called the Golden Throne. | |
| The reason that this springs to mind is because recently Richard Dawkins, one of the famous four horsemen of the new atheist movement, was interviewed on a radio station called LBC and admitted to being a cultural Christian. | |
| This made some waves online, even though this wasn't actually the first time Dawkins has said as much. | |
| However, one may remember that the new atheists were very active in the late 1990s and early 2000s, vigorously debating Christians and doing whatever they were able in order to impose the imperial truth on a society in which Christianity had already begun to slowly die. | |
| It isn't that the new atheists killed Christianity, instead they spent a great deal of energy beating a dying horse. | |
| New Atheism itself fizzled out when it turned out that there was no great Christian dragon left to slay, and out of its ashes rose the phoenix of social justice. | |
| The new atheists, with their dogmatic insistence on reason and science, cleared the path for the rational restructuring of society along gender, sex and racial lines. | |
| What we now call woke ideology. | |
| After learning that Ramadan was being celebrated publicly in London, Dawkins expressed his horror that a religion other than Christianity was being promoted in Britain and explained his affinity for the Christian religion, which he describes as a fundamentally decent religion. | |
| Well, I must say I was slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead. | |
| I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. | |
| I call myself a cultural Christian. | |
| 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's truth that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I'm happy with that. | |
| 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, certainly if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful. | |
| Well, which brings me to my supplementary point, which is that, as we know, church attendance is plummeting, but the building, the erection of mosques across Europe, I think 6,000 are under construction, and there are many more, I mean, are being planned. | |
| So, do you think you regard that as a problem? | |
| Do you think that matters? | |
| Yes, I do, really. | |
| I mean, I don't I might choose my words carefully. | |
| I mean, I if I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I'd choose Christianity every single time. | |
| I mean, it seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, um, in a way that I think Islam is not. | |
| I would also not be happy if we lost our beautiful cathedrals and parish churches to be converted into mosques. | |
| But why is it that this is the dynamic that we are presented with? | |
| The answer, of course, is a fundamental imbalance in belief. | |
| Muslims believe in Islam and believe it is their duty to pay to have mosques constructed, and they actually take the time to attend them. | |
| In Britain, at least, church attendance has never been lower, and we do not spend the time and money on our religion in the same way because we don't really have one anymore. | |
| If a church cannot be maintained, it will be sold, mostly converted into housing, but also converted into a mosque. | |
| What Dawkins is asking for is to have the consequences of religion without the mechanism of it, to have the believers without the belief. | |
| Naturally, this contradiction cannot hold, and without sincere belief, there will be no believers. | |
| This fact seems to have become apparent in the years after the new atheists, where the consequences of killing Christianity are bearing their poisoned fruit. | |
| Social breakdown, a failure of personal ethics, a lack of moral authority, the death of the desire to build things which are beautiful, and the creation of a vacuum which foreign religions will happily fill with their true believers. | |
| I wonder if Dawkins ever wonders if, in fact, he did the right thing. | |
| He may not believe that Christianity is true, whatever that is supposed to mean when dealing with matters of faith, but perhaps the pleasant untruth had virtues that were not immediately obvious, and killing off the ailing religion was perhaps a mistake. | |
| Dawkins objected to the proliferation and promotion of Islam across London, which he obviously abhors, not just as an atheist, but as he said, as a cultural Christian. | |
| That is, as someone who grew up in the warm embrace of a people maintained by this loving religion that provided him with the emotional security he viciously attacked later in his life. | |
| As he explained in the interview, Dawkins doesn't feel the nostalgia for Islam that he feels for Christianity. | |
| He references the pleasant cultural activities of hymns and carols which made his civilization feel homely and safe, kind and welcoming, and thinks that we should continue these for the intrinsic good that they provide. | |
| However, we can't have belief without believers. | |
| People don't do these things for their own sake. | |
| They do them for the sake of something external to the activity itself, and in the case of religion, something transcendent. | |
| If one spends their life attacking the belief that underpins these practices and eventually succeeds in basically killing them off, it does seem rather strange to then lament the death of the good things which they carried with them in their pleasant untruths. | |
| Surely you must have expected to lose those as well as the beliefs, wouldn't you? | |
| Moreover, it seems like a decidedly selfish thing to have done, in retrospect. | |
| Dawkins grew up in a heavily Christian culture and inherited the benefits of such, which is why he is nostalgic for Christian song and ceremony. | |
| They remind him of a better time. | |
| An unfortunate consequence of his life's work to discredit Christian teachings is to encourage people to deprive future generations of the same opportunity to develop those feelings towards their own civilization. | |
| There is a particular anecdote that Christopher Hitchens, a fellow horseman of the New Atheist Apocalypse, told while riding in a car some years back. | |
| If he could convince the last believer to deconvert from religion, he wouldn't do it. | |
| If I could convert everyone in the world, not convert, if I could convince a non-believer. | |
| And I've really done brilliantly and there's only one left. | |
| One more. | |
| And then it'd be done. | |
| And there'll be no more religion in the world. | |
| No more dears. | |
| I wouldn't do it. | |
| And Dawkins said, really you wouldn't do it. | |
| I said, I don't quite know why I wouldn't do it. | |
| And it's not just because there would be nothing left to argue with and no one left to argue with. | |
| It's not just that. | |
| There would be that. | |
| Somehow, if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn't. | |
| And the incredulity with which he looked stays with me still. | |
| Unlike the Emperor of Mankind, Hitchens might have felt that there was something spiritually wrong with the death of a religion, some kind of irreversible loss, and perhaps thought that there were some boundaries that, for whatever reason, just shouldn't be crossed, even for the dogmatic materialist. | |
| Ayan Hirsi Ali, another member of the Church of New Atheism, in the early 2000s after escaping Islam, last year announced her conversion to Christianity for precisely the reason that Dawkins is now lamenting its decline. | |
| She says, quote, I have come to realize that Bertrand Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. | |
| The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition. | |
| It is the story of the West, warts and all. | |
| Russell's critique of those contradictions in the Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope. | |
| To me, though, this feels slightly too consequentialist to be of any real use. | |
| Ali explains that without religion, she felt that her life had lost purpose, and so to give herself guidance and help bolster the West, she has embraced Christianity. | |
| But can we actually say that this is indicative of sincere belief? | |
| I'm afraid that I think it's not, even if it's a step in the right direction. | |
| At the end of the Warhammer story of the last church, the Emperor doesn't feel any kind of Hitchin-esque moment of hesitation, or suffer a pang of regret. | |
| He brings out the last priest as the church is burned down. | |
| Watching the flames engulf the last religion of the human race, the priest, with tears in his eyes, throws himself on the pyre. | |
| If you're wondering, I am myself still an atheist, but maybe somewhat regretfully. | |
| I think that any religious profession should be underpinned by a sincere conviction and not a utilitarian calculus. | |
| I am not a Christian, but I am a supporter of Christianity, which is why we host Calvin Robinson's Common Sense Crusade on lotuses.com. | |
| If you'd like to support our work, please do go over and sign up, check out our content, and if you'd like to come and hang out with me on Discord, you can access that through my subscribestar. |