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talkpoliticsProfessor Richard Dawkins has said the he is ' A Cultural Christian'.
In a news story on the BBC website, he declared that he has no wish to see Christmas cancelled, or see Britain lose any part of it's Christian heritage. This may come as a surprise to some, but his website tends to direct its venom towards the more negative aspects of religious belief.
These include the Catholic Church's stance on child molesting priests, it's opposition to contraception, and its condemnation of gay people. Yet Protestant believers come in for criticism too. It isn't simply a belief in Adam and Eve that Dawkins criticises, it's the Old Testament's account of Joshua's conquests, the concept of Hell and the moral standards taught in the O.T. that also provoke his ire.
Well, my take on it is as follows -
the Jews didn't really do the conquest of Canaan like the Bible says,in fact they didn't conquer Canaan at all - Joshua's campaign was largely a propaganda exercise done in a later period;
the concept of Hell as a place of eternal torment rests upon misinterpretation and misunderstanding of certain Biblical passages, as well as a certain amount of Hellenistic influence;
the sexism, racism and homophobia are all there in the Torah, but the Jews themselves got over a lot of it before Jesus came along and finished the job.
If we were to teach History in school and pay more attention to events in the Levant around the Bronze Age, it would do a lot to dispel the negative influence that religious mythology still has on society. We can dump all that stuff and still have a version of Christianity that is different from Atheism. And, yes, I would be happy to explain the specifics in the comments - if I get any:)
In a news story on the BBC website, he declared that he has no wish to see Christmas cancelled, or see Britain lose any part of it's Christian heritage. This may come as a surprise to some, but his website tends to direct its venom towards the more negative aspects of religious belief.
These include the Catholic Church's stance on child molesting priests, it's opposition to contraception, and its condemnation of gay people. Yet Protestant believers come in for criticism too. It isn't simply a belief in Adam and Eve that Dawkins criticises, it's the Old Testament's account of Joshua's conquests, the concept of Hell and the moral standards taught in the O.T. that also provoke his ire.
Well, my take on it is as follows -
the Jews didn't really do the conquest of Canaan like the Bible says,in fact they didn't conquer Canaan at all - Joshua's campaign was largely a propaganda exercise done in a later period;
the concept of Hell as a place of eternal torment rests upon misinterpretation and misunderstanding of certain Biblical passages, as well as a certain amount of Hellenistic influence;
the sexism, racism and homophobia are all there in the Torah, but the Jews themselves got over a lot of it before Jesus came along and finished the job.
If we were to teach History in school and pay more attention to events in the Levant around the Bronze Age, it would do a lot to dispel the negative influence that religious mythology still has on society. We can dump all that stuff and still have a version of Christianity that is different from Atheism. And, yes, I would be happy to explain the specifics in the comments - if I get any:)
(no subject)
Date: 28/7/11 09:28 (UTC)Can't speak outside my own experience, but that doesn't hold for the indigenous people here. Although, they didn't "lose" their heritage so much as have it taken from them. When you're rounded up into a mission and not allowed to speak your language, sing your songlines, dance your dances and tell your stories, you forget these things pretty quickly. There are people alive here who spoke a language as a child; that language is now dead beyond the few words these people can dredge up from their memories, yet 60 years ago it was a vibrant living language (and the language is a metaphor for culture, or heritage). In the space of one lifetime, tens of thousands of years worth of heritage has been lost.