Richard Dawkins – one of the world’s most famous atheists – has declared himself to be a “cultural Christian”.
The author of The God Delusion, a 2006 best-selling attack on the existence of God, made his remarks in an interview with Rachel Johnson for LBC radio in which they discussed how the Muslim season of Ramadan was being celebrated in Oxford Street, London, instead of the Christian feast of Easter.
Mr Dawkins, 83, said: “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.”
He said: “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian
He added: “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.”
The author, an evolutionary biologist and ethologist who also wrote the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, also said he “would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches”.
He continued: “So I call myself a cultural Christian and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion.”
The decline in church attendance coupled with plans to build about 6,000 new mosques in Britain was a problem for the UK, Mr Dawkins said in the interview.
He said: “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time.
“It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
He added: “The way women are treated in Christianity is not great about that, it has had its problems with female vicars and female bishops, but there is an active hostility to women which is promoted I think by the holy books of Islam.”
Mr Dawkins clarified that books such as “the Hadith and the Koran” are “fundamentally hostile to women and hostile to gays”.
He said however that although he recognised its benefits of Christian culture and enjoyed “living in a culturally Christian country” at the same time he did “not believe a word of the Christian faith”.
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