This is from PZMyers' infamous
Pharyngula blog and is one of the funniest things I've seen for a while.
I'll put some excerpts here but do yourself a favour and read the whole thing when you get the time. He really does rip it up.
The Eagleton Delusion"The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O'Hehir of Terry Eagleton's new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I've read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words "brisk, funny and challenging" or "witty" never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O'Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn't read Eagleton's book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and plainly.
So I was in New York the other day, and was offered a copy of Eagleton's book, and took the first step in my imminent doom by accepting it. Then I tried to fly home on Saturday, one of those flights that was plagued with mechanical errors that caused delays and long stretches locked in a tin can, and also flights that were packed tightly with travelers?so crammed with people that they actually took my computer and book bag away from me to pack in the cargo hold, and I had to quickly snatch something to read before the baggage handlers took it away. I grabbed the Eagleton book. Thus was my fate sealed.
I was trapped in a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but Eagleton and the Sky Mall catalog.
This is an account of my day of misery."
"Most importantly, he is completely oblivious to the actual criticisms the atheists have made of religion. We all know that religion inspires great towering erections of byzantine logic, and all kinds of twisted rationalizations for just about anything, from the torture-murder of a Jewish rabble-rouser on a Roman cross to his manifestation in the brown marks on a piece of pita bread. We are also aware that all the ambiguities and contradictions in the stories do a wonderful job of spawning weird associations in the minds of literary theorists, sending them into raptures of babblement. But so what? We are addressing the premises. What is the evidence for the existence of any god? What is the source for your information about the nature of this god, as well as all the specifics about what he wants right now? Why have the prophets and priests of your god, who apparently have a communications line to an omniscient being, done such a poor job of describing the world and how it works? If god's will is the fundamental arbiter of moral behavior, how do we determine god's will? Why is it that when the defenders of this god-centric view sit down to write books that should answer these kinds of questions, they always, without fail, write such vapid tripe?"
"If we want a signifier for the human condition, imagine the culture we would live in now if, instead of a dead corpse on an instrument of torture, our signifier was a child staring in wonder at the stars. That's representative of the state of humanity, too; it's a symbol that touches us all as much as that of a representation of our final end, and we don't have to daub it with the cheap glow-in-the-dark paint of supernatural fol-de-rol for it to have deeper meaning. We atheists, contra Eagleton, have aspirations, too; aspirations for humanity in all the meanings of that word. But we also expect that those aspirations will be built on reality.
That was my frustrating, horrible, awful day on a plane with Terry Eagleton, and that's enough of my wallowing in that miserable and interminable experience, so I'll stop there. I'm thinking I ought to turn it into a screenplay, though, but only if I get a guarantee that Samuel L. Jackson will play me."
Topic: Awesome book review.