This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
One of the world's most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, has delivered a stunning announcement to the world: He identifies as a "cultural Christian."
Not as a matter of faith, but as a matter of seeing the influences of religion on society.
Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, has taught at multiple United Kingdom schools including Oxford.
He's written books and has a well-established reputation for criticism of creationism and intelligent design.
One of his projects was "The God Delusion" in which he claims a supernatural Creator doesn't exist.
But now comes his new statement.
A report at Fox News explains his comment about being a "cultural Christian" came after he learned that in London, city officials hung "Ramadan lights" on a street, but nothing for Easter.
Ramadan, of course, is a holiday in Islam, and Easter in Christianity.
In fact, London Mayor Sadiq Khan ordered an illuminated 30,000 lights for Ramadan.
"I must say I'm slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead," Dawkins said in an interview over the weekend. "I feel that we are a Christian country."
He explained, "It's true that statistically, the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down and I'm happy with that, but I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So, I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we... substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful."
If Christianity and Islam were his only choices, he said, he would go for Christianity "every single time," the report said.
"It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not."
He pointed out that Christianity is "not great" in its treatment of women in some ways, but the "holy books" of Islam actively demand "hostility to women."
He said, "I'm not talking about individual Muslims, who, of course, are all quite different, but the doctrines of Islam, the Hadith, and the Quran, it's fundamentally hostile to women, hostile to gays and, I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith."
The Fox report noted in 2006 in "The God Delusion," Dawkins took a strikingly different tone.
There, he said, "To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird. Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?"
