The Daily Telegraph: Which of us hasn’t groaned when the Rev Giles Fraser, former canon of St Paul’s, pops up with his Thought for the Day on Radio 4? Dr Fraser is the archetypal 21st-century vicar, as predictably Lefty as he is drearily on-trend. That “former” prefix is because, you’ll recall, he resigned after welcoming the Occupy protesters to his cathedral. And since leaving St Paul’s he has, in a form of caricature made flesh, become a Guardian leader writer. But I take it all back. Giles Fraser, you are now my hero.
In a discussion on the Today programme yesterday, Dr Fraser skewered the atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins so fabulously, so stylishly, and so thoroughly that anti-religion’s high priest was reduced to incoherent mumbling and spluttering.
The two men were debating some new figures produced by Prof Dawkins’s think tank, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. (A typical Dawkins touch: not just any old Foundation for Reason and Science but the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.) The statistics purport to show that most people who identify themselves as Christian turn out, when questioned on what they actually think, to be “overwhelmingly secular in their attitudes on issues ranging from gay rights to religion in public life”. Dawkins’s conclusion is that these self-identified Christians are “not really Christian at all”.
Categories: Atheism, CHRISTIANITY, Europe, Judaism, Religion & Science, UK