The Catholic Church teaches that bread and wine can become flesh and blood. The religion of progressivism teaches that a man can become a woman, and a woman can become a man, and a man can get pregnant.
The first teaching is called transubstantiation. The second is called gender theory. Professional atheist Richard Dawkins recently stated he rejects both teachings, but it’s for denying gender theory that he has been excommunicated and branded a heretic.
The American Humanist Association announced in April that it was retroactively stripping Dawkins of his honor as the 1996 Humanist of the Year.
Dawkins in 1996 had just written two books, River out of Eden and Climbing Mount Improbable, that were immensely satisfying to devout atheists. In his beautiful prose, Dawkins at once mocked or belittled a traditional belief in God while stealthily introducing a new god to provide comfort to his readers.
What more could you want? A sense that you serve some purpose in this world, plus the gratification that you’re so much more rational than the small-minded Christians!
That was back when “humanists” (left-wing atheists with a conceit of being rationalists) settled for subtle gods and thin creeds. Nowadays, the Church of the Woke demands a much more robust confession of faith.
One needs to believe that “biological sex” is a fiction, and what’s more, that it is bigoted to speak about it. Needless to say, this bit of dogma is a difficult one for an evolutionary biologist to buy into.
And then, there’s the woke teaching on inquiry and debate. Dawkins is a white male, yet he believes he has the standing to critique gender ideology (“erase the experience of trans people”) and separately to comment on how black identity is used these days. The old “humanist” approach of open inquiry that is happy to take on dogmas has been abandoned for a new approach, which places identity and oppressed status in prime places.
So, Dawkins is now the latest apostate from the church of progressive humanism. We hear they don’t even offer the sacrament of penance.
