B
Bubba_Switzler
Guest
This looks like an interesting book to add to my reading list. See the review in NYTimes:
fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.
In response to the Hitchenses of the world:
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “**elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”
And, later:
The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier…The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.**
fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.
In response to the Hitchenses of the world:
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “**elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”
And, later:
The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier…The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.**