Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

Terry Eagleton has at least one fan anyway.

Eagleton…is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed “Ditchkins” by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great.”)

He gets it right by saying Eagleton ascribes these elementary errors, but then he promptly labels Dawkins and Hitchens ‘foes’ – why are they foes? Because Eagleton doesn’t like what they’ve written. That doesn’t really make them his foes, it just makes them people he is quarreling with. ‘Foes’ is more ascribing. And then, what is that ‘self-appointed leaders of public atheism’ doing there? They’re not self-appointed leaders of anything; they wrote books about something. Eagleton writes books about things; now he is busy ascribing things to ‘foes’; does that make him a self-appointed leader of public anti-Ditchkinsism? Not particularly. We’re all allowed to write books without being labeled self-appointed leaders of something or other. (And this ‘Ditchkins’ thing…that’s just childish.)

[Eagleton] freely admits that what Christian doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may not be true, or even plausible. But as he then puts it, “Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.”

That’s just populist bullying. Why do they? Why can’t critics of any form of popular culture – no matter how enduring, how popular, how ‘authentic,’ how anything you like – just criticize whatever they think is bad about it? In argument it’s better to argue with the strongest case, but in criticism, you can go after the worst stuff, because that’s your point. There’s no ‘moral obligation’ to be deferential to the most enduring form of popular culture in human history; how pompous to say there is.

Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes – he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist – lends his book considerable entertainment value.

Hilarious? That’s hilarious? Oookay, if that’s the taste level, I won’t bother reading any more.

There’s no sensitivity like the sensitivity of Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman. It makes the sensitivity of that princess who slept on the pea look like a longshoreman’s glove.

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Oh right, so they do! Therefore it’s a hell of a good idea to name a scary lethal disease after a set of people instead of after an animal that one isn’t allowed to eat by one’s whimsical deity. Yes indeedy. Sure you don’t want to name it Perez flu? Juan and Maria flu? Spic flu? Funny little brown people on the far side of the world flu? They don’t wash their hands in Mexico flu? In deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork and everything?