... that many of the harshest critics of religion (which always seems to be Christianity and always "fundamentalist") don't really seem to know what they're talking about. Alan Jacobs rightly calls them The Know-Nothing Party.
Thus the opening line of Terry Eagleton's response, in the London Review of Books, to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteOh well, now. That's Eagleton's first line of the article. And here is his last, speaking of Dawkins:
"He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual."
How cool is Terry Eagleton?
TLS is undergoing some revamping, and I wish I could find Eagleton's latest installment of "How to read a poem," but I can't. I'm becoming a fan.
The Blogger Team has messed up my account miserably, and can't seem to figure it out, making shallow grasps at it, and e-mailing me saying how they have fixed the problem they have created. But, I can post again under "Rus Bowden".
Yours,
Rus
I'm pretty sure Terry Eagleton is a post-Marxist theorist - at least he was back in the eighties when I first read him. This makes his case more difficult to brush off than if he was a Christian defending his own beliefs.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, Rob, about Eagleton. I don't know if he's still a post-Marxist, and I don't believe he is a practicing Christian (I think he was raised Catholic). He does, however, have respect for and understanding of religion.
ReplyDelete