GIVEN THE CHOICE between the mature thinking of Jurgen Habermas and two lower-mid-brow Eschaton eejits, I'll take JH's word for it. And then there's what old Noam Chomsky said, "The Gospel is radical." To that point, it was what I'm sure will be the feast day of Dorothy Day last week, as RMJ noted.
Eschaton, Duncan just barely bothers with it so why should anyone else give it even that little attention?
As a bonus, here's a little passage that is apropos from The Guardian.
For today's militant atheists it must be inexplicable and frustrating that religion continues to engage men and women of the highest intelligence. If the grounds for faith are so easy to demolish, how is it that all the most brilliant minds have not recognised this long ago? That they haven't is attested by the continuing recruitment of fine intellects into the ordained ministry of all the mainstream denominations of the church and by the flourishing of religion in our ancient universities.
And yet there is absolutely no doubt that adherence to all the main Christian churches in western Europe has massively declined in recent decades, and religious communities seem to be waging a losing battle for hearts and minds - especially minds. At the same time there remain buoyancy and real numerical growth in the more simplistic, evangelical reaches of the church. How do we account for these two paradoxical factors - what we might call the eggheads and the sheep - spoiling the beautiful Dawkins vision of a religion-free future?
Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the early 20th-century Roman Catholic thinker, wrote of three elements of religion. In the institutional element, a child, for example, soaks up with delight and few questions all the customs and creeds of the religious institution. The second intellectual element most typically begins in adolescence, when individuals begin to pose questions to the inherited faith and attempt to make sense of it for themselves. If they fail in the quest of this second element, they may well abandon their childhood faith and its related institution. But if they succeed, they move on into the third or mystical element of religion, when - without in any way leaving behind the first and second elements - they are able to live with questions that no one can answer, exploring the connections of thought and feeling which help make belief not a groundless or fruitless activity, and living in an attitude of wonder and ultimate trust in the universe.
Now it seems to me that highly gifted people are often able to move naturally and with deep fascination into Von Hügel's third element of religion. They do not in the process leave behind the institutional and intellectual aspects of faith, and this gives them a rich multi-dimensional grasp on reality and meaning - something very different from certain and final knowledge. Many in our time have continued to be able to leap across to maturity of faith. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the simple (and the faux-simple), like the poor, we always have with us in the churches.
Which reminds me of once when my dear old Latin teacher, a Bertrand Russell style atheist, while showing off his erudition about the word "beatus" said that he thought it was ironic that the saints, by which he meant Catholic saints, didn't seem to him to be very happy. I suggested St. Francis as a well known contradiction to his assertion and he said, rather condescendingly that he thought Francis was a simpleton. I didn't at the time but I could have pointed out that that simpleton had had an enormous effect for the good on countless People in his time and after, not to mention animals and had stimulated some of the most significant works of art and literature and inspired any number of brilliant thinkers, such as William of Occam, for one. So I don't discount the importance of such "simple" People, knowing it's far, far more important to be good than it is to be intelligent. Not that so many of the pop-atheists such as inspired this piece are much in danger of displaying either.
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