On Mar 24, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Chris Maisano wrote:
> I don't think one needs to go in for religious apologetics to
> recognize that there are some very deep flaws in the New Atheist
> intellectual project. Terry Eagleton seems to me to have struck the
> right balance between recognizing both the perniciousness of much
> organized religion and the limitations of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris,
> et. al.
>
> Here's a good precis of his perspective: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/culture-barbarism-0
> . I find it to be pretty convincing.
> If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and
> civilization, it is partly because its founder was both a Romantic
> humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about
> culture and civilization together-sensuous particularity and
> universality, worker and citizen of the world, local allegiances and
> international solidarity, the free self-realization of flesh-and-
> blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But
> Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and
> one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is-
> of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find some of
> the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou,
> Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely
> surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth
> claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an
> increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less
> than the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These
> are not issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political
> science. Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an
> advantage in this respect.
In other words, this interest in religion on the left is another symptom of defeat.
Doug