What Richard Dawkins Gets Wrong
Hello, Nick here just letting you know I have an epic new podcast out with the legendary Rev Dr Jamie Franklin.
We discuss:
-Richard Dawkins’ odd recent comments on 'cultural Christianity’
-What Toby Young and David Starkey get wrong about Christianity
-The failures of liberalism
-Whether Christianity leads to wokeness
-Christian vs atheist arguments for the beginning of the universe
-The questionable foundations of the 'New Atheism' movement
-Whether Michael Jackson was innocent
And loads more!
Watch here:
Listen here or wherever you like.
And by the way, if you become a paid subscriber to this Substack, soon you will be able to ask questions of future guests, then watch exclusive videos with their answers.
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I will be doing Current Thing episodes in studio soon, rather than just remote, so your help is much appreciated.
But for now enjoy this almost two hour free podcast (that someone has still managed to complain about on YouTube).
See you soon,
Nick
Brilliant. Thank you - listening again. It would be hard for Richard Dawkins to swallow any humble pie at all, let alone the whole thing at once, but I'd bet that privately he does see that Christianity is the only truth.
Excited to hear about your new feature - when is Ben Habib coming on?
Great discussion, as always, but rather hard on Tobes, who wasn’t there to stand up for himself. He was, I think, echoing Tom Holland’s thesis, that wokery is an outgrowth of Christianity. It is universalist, transnational, idealistic and champions the weak and the oppressed. The problem is that this is only one side of a balanced set of values - Chesterton’s excess of values come to mind: ‘The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.’
The point that Starkey was making, I expect, was that Western civilization was a fusion of the Christian and Roman cultures. We can argue about the relative weight of the two, if nothing else, our post-Roman world is the old Roman world transformed by Christianity. Constantine, Augustine, Justinian for instance saw themselves as Romans as well as Christians. We still have Roman Catholics, after all. Starkey would go on and argue that the classical (pre-Christian) world also influences our culture. Partly this is myth, although with merits all the same, with a nice aesthetic if you like baroque architecture. He also takes issue with the Christian victim narrative (despite being a cultural Christian and in his words, High Church Atheist) - which is, or was, improved by the Roman heroic ideal. A sort of merger of Christ and Aeneas producing the quintessential English gentleman. Before we go off piste too far, the point is that Roman and Christian cultures enriched one another. Pull them apart now, and we have ‘just’ the Roman bit of superficial civilization masking a world of power, lust, depravity and misery for the lot at the bottom.