For many years the members of the high church of atheism denied and mocked all faiths. They saw Christians as stopping progress. They told us to get with the narrative. They mocked discipline, faith, honour and decency. But that was in times when being a fool was not a fatal disorder.
We are not in those times. There is a clear danger to the tolerance that allows the freethinker to survive, and that is Islam. They call such pagans, and consider it their duty to kill them.
And so the freethinker needs a religion, but not one that says this.
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 6 For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
II Timothy 3:1-7
Nor one that has parades and confession and a public face. In Poland they have religious festivals and keep those who are not of the faith out. In Poland, they have fewer social problems. In Poland they do not have terrorists. In Poland the freethinker can live with his skin intact.
But what we are seeing instead is a form of weasel logic.
Religious education is crucial in schools for British children to understand their history and culture, Richard Dawkins has said.
The evolutionary biologist and confirmed atheist warned that it was virtually impossible to study English literature without knowing the background of Christianity.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, he was asked whether religious studies should be abolished in schools, over fears that schoolchildren were being brainwashed.
“I don’t think religious education should be abolished,” he said,
“I think that it is an important part of our culture to know about the Bible after all so much of English literature has allusions to the Bible, if you look up the Oxford English Dictionary you find something like the same number of quotations from the Bible as from Shakespeare.
“It’s an important part of our history. So much of European history is dominated by disputes against rival religions and you can’t understand history unless you know about the history of the Christian religion and the Crusades and so on.
“I would not abolish religions education, I think I would substitute it for comparative religion and Biblical history and religious history.
“Comparative religion is very valuable partly because the child learns that there are lots of different religions not just the one they were brought up with. They learn they are all different and they can’t all be right, so maybe none of the are right. Critical thinking is what we need.”
What Dawkins does not comprehend is that there is but one true religion. That is Christ: all others are false. The study of comparative religion is to be confined to the microbiologists. He is subverting the need to teach the catechism we are given with the new, progressive one: all religions are one and all morality is relative.
He wants us to put away our guns and knives in the middle of a fight involving automatic weapons. He wants the form of religion. He does not accept the power of it.
For that would mean he has to leave the high church of Atheism and repent. He should.
For we don’t have cookies. We have wine.