Richard Dawkins

And that is certainly one of those folks who said that they're a cultural Christian.

But you know who else said they were a cultural Christian? Richard Dawkins.

One of the four horsemen of the atheist movement said, I am a cultural Christian.

So whatever weight that carries.

I went through my edgy atheist phase when I was 13, and I saw George Carlin do a stand-up bit, and I thought it was super funny.

And I read Richard Dawkins, and I was like, dude, this guy's so freaking smart.

All of that was motivated by me being upset at what God expected of me, which is to say getting up and going to church on Sunday.

That's all that was.

I have no experience with it at all, but I feel that this is somehow plagued by this also lack of granular understanding of, for example, the famous war against religion as it's been still fought on.

descendants of Richard Dawkins and the four riders of this anti-religion movement.

They have a super dated Understanding of it.

So they are they are fighting their own Idea of I don't know someone believing in in a bearded man in the cloud Yeah, and and and this is so the futility of this of this exercise is terrific and I I recently had a conversation with a friend and she asked me whether I was, she called it a skeptic.

I would argue that it went, in modern terminology, it was viral.

I would argue that it was a meme, not in the sense of, the modern meme, which is a rubbish photograph and a silly slogan, but the original Richard Dawkins term of a meme, which is an idea that's so unbelievably powerful that no matter what iteration it has, people are going to want to take that idea, make it their own and move on and pass it on.

So the idea grows.

It's like a gene of an idea, was Dawkins' thought.

So it's not just that.

I mean, good old Sir Richard Dawkins coined the term meme.

Thank you.

So the study of genes is genetics.

No, it's more like when you're saying something, it's like, well, that's wrong.

Some radical rationalist who fucking loves Richard Dawkins is all like, appeal to emotion.

Ad hominem.

Yep.

I obviously don't think that's true on the-- Uh, I don't think it's, it's fair to see that, uh, particular issue, but that would be the, the debate.

And this is a huge part of the debate that people like Tom Holland and Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are grappling w-with right now, is Christ the engine that fueled classical liberalism and the most moral political order for all of its faults, which are many and serious and systemic in some cases.

But because he-- man has fallen from a Christian perspective, but is Christ that engine? And when you take that away, what are you left with? Are you left with classical Rome, ancient Greece, or are you...

Which, by the way, still had religion, of course, pagan religion, but different than what we saw take o-take off after Christ.

So it's important to keep doing it because people watch and many people get converted even years later.

I get letters from people who converted through watching my debate with Richard Dawkins that started it all

off.

Yeah, at one point Dawkins, during that debate, after you described the fact that God came into this universe, the logos took on flesh, AND TOOK OUR SINS UPON HIMSELF, HE CALLED THAT TRIVIAL.