From here:
Religion should not be allowed to “hijack” the great cultural resource of the Bible, according to the atheist scientist Professor Richard Dawkins.
Asked by the Labour MP Frank Field, chairman of the King James Bible Trust, what the Bible meant to him, he said: “I think it is important to make the case that the Bible is part of our heritage and it doesn’t have to be tied to religion.
“It’s of historic interest, it’s of literary interest, and it’s important that religion should not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource.
“You can’t appreciate English literature unless you know something about the Greek gods. You can’t appreciate Wagner unless you know something about the Norse gods. You can’t appreciate English literature unless you are to some extent at least steeped in the King James Bible.”
This is extraordinarily absurd, even for Richard Dawkins. Without Christianity, which he so despises, there would have been no Bible; without the Church, which he so loathes, the Bible would not have been preserved and without faithful Christians, who Dawkins keeps calling idiots, no-one would have bothered to read the Bible.
Dawkins wants Christendom without Christianity, Western civilisation without the bedrock on which it was founded and morality without God. Well, he can’t have them.
If anyone is trying to hijack the Bible, it is Dawkins and his coterie of cockamamie atheists.
The bible isn’t an example of morality.
That’s a bit like saying that a book of instructions on how to fish isn’t an example of a fish.
The Bible is certainly filled with information on how to live a moral life.
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Professor Dawkins is correct in what he is saying. The argument highlighted here is flawed as for example how has any other famous piece of literature survived? The Greek myths and stories and so on? No-one still worships Zeus (in any great number anyway) but we know of his legends etc. The bedrock of any society has to be what came first i.e the foundation and as we all know that was not Christianity in any country…indeed it was not any religion.
Dawkins’ contention is that the Bible is a “cultural resource” independent of the meaning it was intended to convey.
Even though I am a Christian and believe that the Bible is primarily God’s propositional revelation to man, I don’t disagree that it, particularly in the authorised translation, is also art. The problem comes in detaching the aesthetics of the art from its meaning: that is what Dawkins wants to do.
When you do this, you end up with a sterile, impotent echo fit only to titillate society’s effete intellectuals. Its real power is in what it says, not how it says it: stripped of meaning, it isn’t much of a “cultural resource”, much less a force which shaped a civilisation.
Dawkins’ ideology deprives his existence of meaning; to compensate, he must grasp at the artistic fruit of the faith he derides for emotional survival. It is dishonest, hypocritical and plain stupid.