DIE HEILIGE ZEITGEIST | 2013-10-01
I have been reading "The God Delusion," a best-seller by Richard Dawkins written about 2006.
It turns out that Dawkins founded the biggest and most successful Christian revivalist organization in Australia some years back.
Reading between the lines, he seems to have had a change of heart.
My own sympathy with Dawkins is that he is not just an atheist, he is anti-religion.
You will probably understand that that is related to my own decision to become Catholic, though almost nobody besides a BUGSER would see the connection.
My decision to leave the Methodist Church was because my grandfather was a circuit rider. The sermons he wrote down are full of "The Devil" and "Hell."
Like our first ancestor in America, my grandfather was a RELIGIOUS preacher. God or Heaven or Hell or NOTHING.
No respectable upper class Episcopal compromises.
Religion is absolutely right or it is RIDICULOUS.
The closest Biblical quote to my attitude would be, "They were lukewarm, and he spit them out."
Catholicism is a CHURCH. Mainline Protestantism is not.
By the same token religion is either true or it is a horror.
I like the fact that Dawkins, having become an atheist, CONDEMNS religion.
Except maybe one, which he doesn't see he might be promoting.
But in his book, Dawkins advoctes the Zeitgeist, the "spirit of the times." He would never suspect it, but he is attacking the Old Religion by speaking very suspiciously in the terms of the new religion.
If you are used to German, it is ironic that "Zetigeist" is suspiciously close to "die Heilige Geist," which means "The Holy Spirit."
A suspicious mind will always pick up a suspicious similarity where denouncing the Old Religion uses language that is so close to new one.