Terry Eagleton
I’m interested in a new book by Terry Eagleton critiquing the so-called “new atheists” from a Marxist agnostic(?) perspective (I’m not exactly sure how his perspective should be described, which is why I’m interested). The book is called Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate and is based on lectures you can listen to online (here).
Here’s a bit of Eagleton from a recent article/interview:
Would Eagleton call himself a Christian? ‘I am a lapsed Catholic; the Church is cunning in that you can never really leave it. I have deep objections to the way it has screwed up people’s lives, though I have gone to Mass occasionally right through my life. It’s like keeping a foot in a culture that I value.’
He suggests that the question ‘do you believe in God?’ is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster. Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God ‘if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap’, whereas even in the simplest sense, ‘for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is… He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.’
Eagleton is not convinced this God exists, but believes that anyone who holds that He does is to be respected, while Dawkins and his acolytes, he argues, ‘consider that no religious belief, any time or anywhere is worthy of any respect whatsoever’.
