The Freeloading Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Republicans

A parasitic atheism is taking root, promising what it can never deliver.

When I was a teenager, notorious and proud atheist Richard Dawkins was funding a massive ad campaign on buses through the city. The text of the advertisement was, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

It seemed to cause him personal distress when someone proclaimed to have the Faith. With pomposity and condescension, he acted as if he were doing his duty to rid the lower classes of their ignorant, antiquated beliefs. After all, those beliefs were holding them and society back. That too is the message of his buses. It was the assertion that people would live better and in some way freer if they were not bound by the restrictions placed on them by Christianity.

Now, a decade later, the same man said that he wants to live in a Christian culture. That is to say, he wants to live in a culture in which people act like they believe, but actually don’t. He has come to recognize the benefits thereof.

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

I think that a lot of people feel as he does. They want the value system of the Faith and the civilization that it built, but not the personal responsibility or the actual worship of God. It’s nostalgic, comfortable, and considerably fewer people get beheaded than with other religious systems. Nevertheless, I don’t think what they seek is attainable, even if it were desirable.

Christian morality does not make sense within an atheistic worldview—for if there is no God, then there is no good. There is no standard by which we might discern good from evil. Therefore, any attempt to create an atheistic moral system will necessarily slip measurably with the perceived needs of the age. The collective desires of the masses will influence what is considered to be right and acceptable. There is neither anchor nor rudder.

In fact, that’s exactly what we have already. We live amongst the ruins of a Christian culture, in which the old pillars are gradually being replaced by those perceived to be more relevant to modern man, more ‘moral’ by an undefined standard. Consequently, these efforts are moving us further away from truth, justice, and goodness, because without God, objective realities become relativistic notions, redefinable and ambiguous.

Republican circles are permeated with this well-intentioned fallacy about “Christian values”, promoted by non-Christians, and that’s how we got half the Republican movement celebrating the purchase of children by gay men, as happened with Dave Rubin. Christian values become stretched, warped even, into something like “values we think are good.” That’s not how you build a culture, it’s how you destroy one. Christian values aren’t Christian without Christ, and there can be no Christian culture without Him either.