Where I left off
Oh all right – I quit too soon. It’s too annoying to leave.
[A]ttacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes…allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing. Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all.
Well exactly – a great many Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs to be mainstream at all. So in what sense is he justified in pitching a gigantic name-calling fit at the ‘new’ atheists for knowing nothing of his peculiar idiosyncratic personal version of what Christian belief is? His ‘terminology is deliberately provocative,’ which being interpreted, means he says his version of Christian belief is mainstream when it is no such thing and then screams bloody murder at people who don’t buy his version. ‘Provocative’ is a desperately polite way of describing such a way of proceeding.
I did a post on the same bait-and-switch a couple of years ago, the one in which he said God was no more a person than his left foot was – whatever he said; but I can’t find the post and don’t have time to keep looking. But this is familiar stuff – which doesn’t make it any less irritating.
Horrible man. Revisit this loathsome outburst on the occasion of Salman Rushdie’s K, if you want more evidence of that. He’s an intellectual thug.
I was just reading Dennett this weekend and he went to great lengths to argue that the question of god’s existence is superfluous precisely because of idiots like Eagleton – their god is never the god of the unwashed, and it can be defined away at will. What sets Eagleton apart is his willingness to pitch a fit in multiple print sources, where as most other people who perform this dodge seem to just be contented with their smugness. And it is rich Eagleton claiming to be more mainstream than mainstream Christians, considering his caricature of Dawkins as an insular elitist “sneering at the credulous nature of the common people.” If only Dawkins were condescending enough to consider himself above the vulgar masses!
I believe Bugs Bunny said it best: whatta maroon.
The original article you were referring to was here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
Reading it led me to coin the term “bait-and-switch deism” in which Eagleton introduces the merest wisp of a deistic God in order to justify all religion, before immediately substituting the very crude, personal God that he claims no one believes in. Eagleton is apparently in perfect telepathic contact with God, knowing his thoughts, desires, intentions, and motivations. He’s a close personal friend of the Almighty, you see.
Looks like a fundamentalist, walks like a fundamentalist, quacks like a fundamentalist…
The following, from Grayling’s Against All Gods is something that people like Eagleton and McGrath and others should take to heart:
This is something that too few of those who attack Dawkins et al. seem to recognise. They can redefine ‘god’ any way that they please, but to get a purchase in ordinary life, religion has to play the superstition card.
Eric Reitan, for instance, in his book Is God a Delusion? – yes, I bought it, since it seemed to be the most serious of Dawkins’ fleas – says that “God conceived of as a tyrant is not the God of religion but the god of superstition.” There are very deep problems here, not only with the popular conception of the Christian god, but with the Christian theological conception of god as well, and the central role that the Bible plays in the formulation of these conceptions.
But the truth is that, even if Reitan’s conclusions were able to be substantiated (and I don’t think the cosmological argument is enough to go on), his idea of god could not serve as the basis for a religion. Theologians (even philosophical theologians) can hide in their forests, but religions depend on capturing the popular mind. Speaking about God as love (the infinite personal spirit whose essence is love), or about the ‘ethico-religious hope’ is all very well, but people want God to love them. And here is where “the ideologies of exclusion that are only contingently linked to religion” (that’s a quote, p. 13) come in.
Reitan can do philosophical theology precisely because ideologies of exclusion exist. Otherwise, he would have no (apparent) constituency. He can play fast and loose with religious belief precisely because ordinary believers believe something else. The funny thing is that Eagleton doesn’t believe any of it. He just thinks that something so intellectually complex can’t be about nothing! He forgets that he’s playing the same game!
Thanks Mark – I knew about the LRB piece, but I thought there was an earlier Guardian piece, drawn from it, that I had posted about. But now I’m thinking maybe I manufactured that memory.
“religions depend on capturing the popular mind.”
Exactly. And it seems all but impossible that Eagleton doesn’t know that perfectly well. I mean, how could he not know that?
I don’t understand why these sophisticated-theology types think they have dodged an intellectual bullet. If they have to fall back into claiming that God is a metaphor – or whatever – then they are already atheists.
I think sometimes we can be too generous about letting people self-label. Maybe that’s why they get away with it.
That’s interesting…I’m not a bit generous about letting people self-label, at least not when the self-label is a flattering one. As you hint – ‘sophisticated’ is one of those. I would never in a million years call myself sophisticated – not even by implication. You’re right that Eagleton does, the chump.