[lbo-talk] Eagleton's take (was M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?)

Max Sawicky sawicky at verizon.net
Wed Mar 24 13:51:48 PDT 2010


In Under God, Gary Wills had an interesting argument defending Bryan from Darrow in re: the Scopes trial on progressive grounds. Don't remember the particulars though.

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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