Cultural Christianity?

Another Dish reader:

The first philosophy major is correct that atheists are very rare indeed if the atheist is defined as a person who has managed to step completely outside the cultural norms and values that have been expressed and codified by the many religions over the years.  But very few atheists try to make such a claim:  Richard Dawkins, for instance, is happy to call himself a "cultural Christian."

What assertive atheists like myself (and Dawkins, if I read him correctly) argue is that because religion can be understood as a product of human culture, human culture itself can be improved by denying the absolute, allegedly objective truth of the claims made by particular religions on our allegiance.

Rather than believing in the objective truth of the commands of a particular god named Yahweh, we can instead look at the human cultural universals that Yahweh's followers exhibit when compared to the followers of Allah, Shiva, Buddha, and so on.  Rather than evaluating the truth and goodness of our received values by referring to scripture, we can evaluate the effects of both universal and local values in terms of their results on human happiness and well-being, and we can make changes where our received values fail.  We can see if declining to believe in a particular god or its commandments causes people to erupt in spasms of self-indugence and violence (it doesn't); we can see if devout faith reliably prevents people from being cruel (it doesn't); and we can conclude that something besides religion's scriptural and bureaucratic authority is at work in the phenomena of human goodness and evil.

This makes a good point: there are many morals atheists can share which aren't particular to a single religion, and Western atheists can share even more with Christianity, partly because its commonality and partly because its relative success shows that it pragmatically "works" in the sense that some of its moral provisions are good ideas.

What confuses most Christians I've spoken with -- especially Biblical literalists -- is that few atheists accept all of Christian morals, much less all those of any particular flavor of Christianity. For them it's all or nothing.

Yet a nonbeliever is free to pick and choose on the merits, and may conclude that a blanket ban on things like fornication and homosexuality are anachronisms from an era before safe sex and scientific understanding of human nature.