One must speak to indolent and sleepy senses with thunder and heavenly fireworks.
But beauty’s voice speaks gently: it creeps only into the most awakened souls. (p. 82)

You love your virtue as the mother her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? (p. 83)

Ah, my friends! That your self be in your action, as the mother is in the child: let that be your word on virtue! (p.84)

Terry Eagleton writes a review of Dawkins’s The God Delusion dim-witted enough to be deserving of the shallow, desperate insults he throws Richard’s way. It’s not Richard’s best book; I wouldn’t even say it is a particularly good book. But Eagleton’s review is a satire of reason.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’…. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

So, Mr. Eagleton knows exactly what God is. Which is… the condition for possibility of existence? His brilliant argument here is: nothing could exist if there were no God; something exists, therefore God exists. But let’s not dwell on the premise… while all the greatest philosophers theologians in history have failed to prove the existence of God, it was simply a matter of setting up the right syllogism.

Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us.

This is where it gets really good. Not only has Eagleton proved the existence of God, he knows exactly why he created the universe and what he thinks and feels. Of course, suggesting anyone believes in a personal God is preposterous… He’s just some sort of condition that wants to be allowed to love, and is always referred to with a male personal pronoun.

Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego.

Um, thats not “Dawkins’s God”… the guy is an atheist. That’s the God he quotes directly from the Old testement (which is of course, the Word of God).

Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?

So… Dawkins is supposed to supply a criticism of objectivity? Wow, tough crowd…

Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible.

So… according to Eagleton it’s perfectly reasonable to say religion should not be subject to scientific inquiry, thus it is not in competition with science. What? I’ve been trying to deconstruct his justification of this, but I can’t make any sense of it. Even after looking up what a “dole queue” is (an unemployment line). This guy wrote a book on how to read poetry? Perhaps he should read a book on how to write English.

It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

So,“to claim that science and religion pose different questions” is to say that faith involves more than factual knowledge. Well, faith is, by definition “belief that is not based on proof,” so I don’t see how any of this is related to the above claim regarding science, or how any of this addresses Dawkins’ statement that religion should be subject to scientific inquiry. Faith is not subject to scientific inquiry, but the claims of the faithful are.

Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right.

If Dawkin’s was attacking a straw man, then Eagleton had better start skipping down the yellow brick road to find a brain.

(CNN) — Republicans took a page from President Johnson’s Cold War-era presidential campaign with an advertisement set to air this weekend called “The Stakes,” which prominently features al Qaeda leaders threatening to kill Americans.

…Meanwhile, footage of terrorists engaged in martial arts and weapons training rolls in the background. One scene shows terrorists traversing monkey bars over fire.

All I want to know is, what is it with terrorists and monkey bars? How exactly does traversing monkey bars help with suicide bombing?

OMG

The Croft Institute

The admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore. (On the Origin of Species, 1st ed. p. 167)

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. (p. 56)

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes! (p. 57)

Thus spoke Tyler Durden.

Many brief follies–that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity. (p. 62)