This is quite something: Richard Dawkins, undoubtedly the world's leading atheist, the author of The God Delusion, comes out as "cultural Christian" and calls for the UK to promote Christianity as opposed to Islam, which he calls "not a decent religion". xitter.cf/LBC/status/17745… He can thank god (pun intended) that irony isn't fatal... Beyond his words, I think this is something of a sign of a broader trend in the West: its renunciation of universalism and its retreat to a new form of conservatism. It's quite logical. When the West was expanding - culturally speaking - it had to adapt its culture in ways palatable to all. Dawkins's form of atheism was perfect for this: atheism per-se is universalist because anyone from any religion can doubt that god exists and become a non-believer. And it was in fact very impactful: over the past few decades atheism was undoubtedly one the fastest growing "religions" in the world. But what Dawkins now clarifies in a surprisingly frank way was that his brand of atheism wasn't truly universalist or even truly atheist, it came from a man who obviously believes in the superiority of Christianism (and probably British Protestantism) and its value-set. This remained unstated because, obviously, it would have been a huge turn-off to say it whilst the West had pretentions to dominate the world culturally. The fact he now doesn't hesitate to express it is both a sign that 1) these pretentions are over in the minds of Western cultural elites like him and 2) they feel so threatened by an inverse movement - that their own culture be at risk - that they now openly say "wait a minute, we have non-universal values and beliefs, we have a singular identity based on Christianity, and we want to preserve this". Which would be fine - nothing wrong with wanting to preserve one's identity - if Dawkins didn't pair that with an obvious form of Islamophobia, and probably broader xenophobia. Which is quite rich coming from the UK: they colonized the immense majority of the world's Muslim population, resulting in Muslims from all over the world coming to live in Britain and now that they're weak they're like "scratch that, this 'happy-merry let's all be one big family' was just pretense, we don't want that anymore, we actually really don't want to accommodate other cultures in our midst, we actually hate you guys"... A bit late for that I'm afraid. It reminds me of the story of China's Qing dynasty. Originally a Manchu dynasty that conquered the whole of China, they had to change their culture so much in order to govern the much-more-numerous Han Chinese that Manchus as a separate identity virtually disappeared. A lesson that in geopolitics when you have your eyes bigger than your belly, you might end up "winning" but in reality you actually lose. And conversely, you can also win by "losing".