It's Time To Replace Religion | Opening For Richard Dawkins

On the need for a binding narrative grounded in reality.

Sep 16, 2024

On September 7th, my Black Sheep co-founder Salomé Sibonex gave the opening speech at the Austin, Texas stop on Richard Dawkins’ current international speaking tour—his final tour before retirement. On September 14th, I did the same in Washington, D.C., where Richard was interviewed by author and economist Steven Levitt.

My speech builds on my recent article here at The Black Sheep—where I explained the power our cultural narratives hold and the need to revise them—as well as two prior essays of mine published at Reality’s Last Stand on the need for more atheism within the political Right.

We’ll be releasing videos of both our speeches once we have them, but here’s a transcript of mine for our Black Sheep readers in the meantime.

— Joseph (Jake) Klein

Is everybody ready for Richard Dawkins and Steven Levitt!?

[Applause]

Come on, is that the best you can do for a mild-mannered 83-year-old academic!?

[Laughs & Applause]

Well unfortunately you’re stuck with me for 5 to 8 minutes first. But I’ll do my best to make it interesting.

My name is Jake Klein. I’m the DC-area chapter leader for the group Atheists for Liberty, and also the editor of a publication named The Black Sheep.

This is my copy of The God Delusion [holds up book].

I first read this book when I was 14 years old. I was raised Orthodox Jewish, and I knew already that I was being told things by my community that simply weren’t true. But reading this book helped me gain a deeper understanding of what exactly was being pushed upon me and countless others like me. That changed my life. I gained sufficient confidence in my convictions to break free and pursue my happiness, and I gained the knowledge that there was a better way society could be, one responsive to evidence and reason.

I’m not the only person who read this book and had a similar experience. I bet at least half of you in the crowd did. Thanks in large part to the inspiration we received from Dawkins, and Hitchens, and Harris, and Dennet, millions of us stood up to the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in schools, and all sorts of other anti-scientific ideas that were then mainstream.

And, for the most part, we won. You don’t hear much fundamentalist religious nonsense from mainstream institutions anymore, certainly not at the level of a few decades ago.

But our job is not done. The problem of anti-scientific dogmatic thinking has not yet been resolved. Filling the void of religion in cultural influence came wokeness, conspiracy theories, and so much more. This has led many popular influencers today, figures like Jordan Peterson, to declare that New Atheism has failed. They’ve argued a return to traditional faith is the only thing that can keep our society bound together and stave off the far-left authoritarian instincts that have attacked Western culture over the last few years.

That’s wrong, of course. They want to blame us for the fall of traditional religions but fail to take a look at their own responsibility. I don’t know about all of you, and clearly this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I’m not capable of believing in bullshit!

If I were born a thousand years ago I might be religious, but I was born in an era of scientific knowledge that has proven the fact claims made by religions either false or highly implausible. Dawkins and the New Atheists called attention to that problem, but they were only one chapter in a religious decline that had been steadily progressing since the Enlightenment.

The roots of traditional religions have been pulled out, and it doesn’t matter how much some people might want us to go back; it’s not possible anymore. Religion dominated the West for most of recorded history, but so too did travel by horse.

I think our critics today have been right about one very important thing though: human civilization is constructed around shared stories. These stories form the bedrock of what Dawkins would call a “memeplex,” units of cultural information that replicate together. Such stories bind a society by orienting us towards the same values and goals. The story of the divine ties between pharaohs and the gods inspired the building of the Pyramids, one of the greatest engineering and construction challenges in history. The story of Jesus enabled Christendom to cooperate in building a European civilization more technologically advanced than anywhere else on earth. And the story of Mohammed enabled a civilization to expand from even the harshest conditions of the Arabian desert.

There’s nothing fundamentally religious, as in supernatural, about sharing a binding powerful story. This is what the movements attacking Western civilization have also had. The Marxist story of the bourgeoisie stealing “surplus value” united a revolutionary movement into creating a murderous dictatorship of the proletariat, and the woke’s flawed “oppressor versus oppressed” culturally Marxist story is attempting the same.

In the scientific age, traditional religious stories have lost the power to stop these secular yet still false stories. Far from traditional religion posing a bulwark against them, they’ve led to our downfall. The data proves it. The last census conducted before the Russian Revolution showed 98% identifying as Christian, Muslim, or religiously Jewish. The Tsar was even the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly, before Castro took power in Cuba, well over 90% of Cubans were Christian. And of the seven African states that at one time declared themselves to be Marxist-Leninist, six were majority Christian, one majority Muslim, and the largest non-religious demographic in any was only 8% of the population.

So, for the same reason our critics think we need to return to traditional religions, I think we need to update our guiding story.

We need a new story that can compete with those that seek to undo our civilization. One that retains the values that made Western civilization great—including what was important and powerful from Christianity—but that’s in concert with what we now know to be true about reality. Only through this can we preserve the important utility of the culture our civilization has developed while retaining the ability to make cultural progress in the face of the future’s scientific breakthroughs.

Far from New Atheism’s cultural relevance being over, this need makes it more important than ever that we listen to Richard and start thinking about these questions. This is Richard’s last speaking tour, but it’s far from the end of his work and ideas. It’s up to all of us to develop upon them and carry them forward.

And with that, please give a round of applause for Richard Dawkins and Steven Levitt!