The scientist and secular campaigner Professor Richard Dawkins yesterday said that Europe was a "haven of civilisation" trapped between the Islamic world and the US.
The writer of The God Delusion, speaking at a packed session of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said that in his view religious belief was not on the wane, even if attendance at churches in the UK was declining.
He said that organised religion in the US - in particular the "mega-churches" of the evangelical denominations - and the world of Islam are having increasing influence.
After saying there was an "increasing Islamic element in this society" in Britain, he added: "It is possible to see Europe as a haven of civilisation, with the pincer movement of Islam on one side and the US on the other."
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Source: The Herald (English)
See also: UK: Scientist accuses Muslims of bringing creationism into schools
The writer of The God Delusion, speaking at a packed session of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said that in his view religious belief was not on the wane, even if attendance at churches in the UK was declining.
He said that organised religion in the US - in particular the "mega-churches" of the evangelical denominations - and the world of Islam are having increasing influence.
After saying there was an "increasing Islamic element in this society" in Britain, he added: "It is possible to see Europe as a haven of civilisation, with the pincer movement of Islam on one side and the US on the other."
(more)
Source: The Herald (English)
See also: UK: Scientist accuses Muslims of bringing creationism into schools
2 comments:
Sounds like a bad place to be if one's only belief is to beleive in nothing. Every shift in the wind is gonna rock your world. That's not civilisation. That's chaos.
That's post-Christianity. Either way there's hope for Europe so long as Objectivism prevails: reason and egotism are not incompatible with Christianity, secularism, democracy, capitalism, or progress. “Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt. More precisely: reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; egoism does not permit man to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal.” -Leonard Peikoff
One cannot be Objectivist and fall prey to self-destruction or evil, parasitic, regressive, totalitarian ideologies because one cannot be conned or guilted into doing so. Islam is very anti-Objectivist, which is why it is a threat to democracy. That is why questioning Islam is forbidden - because it does not hold up to reason and the whole concept of Allah, as opposed to the Judeo-Christian or Buddhist conception of God, is anti-egotist since humans are Allah's playthings with no free will and with one's destiny pre-ordained.
That said, Christianity is alive and well in America, and evangelical Christians are not the snake-handling wackjobs you see on TV. Nonie Darwish is an evangelical Christian, but California evangelical Christianity is different from ALabama mega-church evangelical Christianity. But they are a minority anyway. Most Christians are more mainstream Protestants or Catholics, because Catholics have the most babies, so they will always be on the up and up demographically speaking. Christianity is also a very personal thing for many people an dthey don't feel the need to go o Church in order to reaffirm or prove their faith. Then there are people like me, who fall into the last category, and who have their own ideas about Christianity which simply don't fall in line with any denomination, so it has to be a personal thing, because I don't believe in Jdgement Day or an afterlife, etc.
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