Richard Dawkins is doing the rounds now after going full boomer on live TV calling himself a “cultural christian” and looking outraged at Islam inroads in Britain
Many on our scene are making fun of him and rightly so. While his science writing has been top-notch (The Selfish Gene is a great, magnificent book), he was also renown, perhaps mostly so, as an Atheist, and fighting Christianity was quite obviously his biggest motivating force.
He coined the concept of a “meme”, a cultural unit which replicates on its own, unrelated to whoever happens to be his hosts (again, close analogy to his idea of the selfish gene which wants to replicate individually and doesn't care about the organism he belongs to). Which was quite insightful. But it's obviously a dunk on religion itself. He's basically saying religious believers are deluded hosts which are being colonized by a cognitive parasite.
It's funny how the concept of meme developed into funny right-wing satire pictures on the internet. Wonder what he thinks about it.
Had this discussion elsewhere but late-life conversions are just cringe. At this rate he'll confess and convert to Catholicism in his deathbed. He undermined the religion of his native country, Christianity, with all his intellectual might, and now he's scared that a (to his mind) even worse “meme” is taking over the vacuum he helped create.
Not that I think he's to blame for the decline of Christianity in Europe but he must think so himself, and I'm sure he was proud of it for most of his life.