Sunday, August 12, 2018

Terry Eagleton - The God Debate


My summer allergies have generated a really bad head cold and my eyes are swollen too much to read much right now, not even to look at my massive "Darwin Wars" files to fact check my memory.  So I'm posting Terry Eagleton's Gifford Lecture from the last decade, it's interesting the extent to which his addressing neo-atheism, "Ditchkins"seems a little bit quaint, now.  Perhaps that fad did peak and is now passé.  Maybe, as the Pew center notes atheists are among the groups least likely to pass on their faith to their next generation, it didn't really take in the general culture.

I will be agonistic (listen to Eagleton and you'll know why) enough to note that the things I learned from the new-atheism have fueled my entire blogging career.  Those are a. how many atheists are flaming assholes and, b. as a direct result of fact checking so much of the common received wisdom that I got from reading the intelligentsia and academic-pop culture under the hegemony of atheism (a reaction to reading so many "Ditchkins" online) to conclude that so many atheists are huge liars.  That probably would never have happened if the new atheism hadn't forced me to re-look at those things and to write about them. 

As I've noted before, I started out blogging trying to figure out why the American left had declined into total (and continuing*) impotence after its high point in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare, Medicaid, things like Title 9.   My first naive address of neo-atheism was something I took as a distraction from that important effort** even as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in their 5th year of depravity - something that so many stupidly look back on as some kind of golden age. 

But even fact checking that naive post, I started finding out just what a blight atheism had been on the left, even before the death of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. the most successful American leftist in modern history.  The succeeding twelve years of intensive study of these issues have convinced me that materialism is fatal to all legitimate American style liberalism, the liberalism of The Reverend MLK jr. the abolitionists and all of the best things that happened in the history of the United States, and that atheism is almost always and almost inevitably as bad for it.  All of that effort started in what I was reading atheists say in the period I've been online, including forcing me to question and fact check things I'd been reading my entire adult life.   Atheists aren't inevitably fatal to American style liberalism but I've come to conclude that atheism is fatally damaging to it.

And here I thought I wasn't going to be writing a post today.

* I am getting worried that even as I am thrilled with the prospect of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being elected and having a long and effective career in American politics, that the atheist-left using her as a promotion of the Democratic Socialists of America will prove both wildly optimistic and will provide the Republican-fascists with a means of discrediting the Democratic Party.   While I like a lot of their ideas, I think the DSA and, even more so, some of those who are trying to ride her coattails are more a manifestation of the "real left" that drove American liberalism into impotence than anything like something that has any prospect of gaining control of the Congress, not to mention winning the popular vote and the goddamned Electoral College.  It's far too New York City lefty - college campus based to do that.   The Civil Rights movement was definitively neither of those and as those "secular" (for which you can read "atheist") left pushed the effective liberals aside the fascists gained from it, not least of which by using the "real left" to discredit American liberalism.  I have gone into the idiocy of real liberals wanting to "be fair" to the play-left as part of that American tragedy, I don't want to witness a replay of that history or for my nieces and nephews to see it in their lifetimes.

**  If you want to know how naive I was, here are the first words I ever posted on the topic as the lefty blogs were swamped with the faddish new atheism.

It would suit me if this blog didn't have to deal with the divisive, complex and extremely personal topic of religion but the fact is most Americans believe in a God and belief has a profound impact on our politics. Religion can't be ignored or dismissed. The participation of both non-believers and believers is essential for the left to succeed politically in the United States.

I don't think that the left would come out the loser in an honest religious fight. Make that an HONEST fight, not one assuming that the imperial religion the Republican right promotes is the alpha and omega of "faith". It's not even the alpha, they, themselves, don't believe most of it but that's for later. Before going on I'm going to let you know where I'm coming from on the issue.

About religion, nothing can be objectively known. Science deals with the physical world as observable and measurable phenomena. No measurements, no science. Science is plainly the most successful way of knowing about the universe. Religion doesn't deal with what is knowable in an objective way. [I've come to see that there really is no such thing as objective knowledge in the naive scientistic claim about such things and that politics never was and never is a result of such mythic "objectivity" , also as a result of this research.] Religion is belief of something beside what can be physically known. Real religious belief can't be objectively passed on by reason or repeatable observations, it has to be experienced personally. Remember, I'm talking about authentic religious beliefs, not about fundamentalism or organized, dogmatic religion. This isn't an encyclopedic survey of asserted beliefs.

Geesh, does that ever sound naive to me now even as I'm farther to the American liberal left, far more radical  than I ever have been in my lifetime.

No comments:

Post a Comment