First, I have to say that this is the kind of article that used to make me enjoy reading Salon.

Of course we had to step around the insane ramblings of Paglia even then so I'm not saying that Salon was without problems, but it does seem that it used to be filled with interesting, adult, discussions far more often than it is now. "Ask the Wingnut" if you want to know more about what I'm referring to.

Second, I also love Terry Eagleton's work generally but I bet this one will be an exception, this is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. That is, the argument that some arcane, complicated system must be known and discussed at whatever level of complexity its practitioners do, otherwise it's not a valid criticism.

To me this is like climing that people can't reasonably say "I don't believe that Zeuss exists" without delving into a level of scholarship about the mythology he sprang from equal to those who have studied such things for their whole lives.

I don't actually believe that Zeus exists, for example, and most of the rest of you don't either, and yet few of us know the kind of detail about the subject that Eagleton is demanding here. Yet all of us, I would guess including Eagleton, feel perfectly comfortable not believing in Zeuss despite this.

I think that to some degree it's just so hard for entire huge swaths of theolgians and other academics to really grasp that all of the debates that consumed us for century upon century may really have been around 80% meaningless imaginary nonsense, something to keep us busy while the actual world moved on, pretty much independent of whether we ever resolved the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or not.

I guess it would feel like a lot of time was wasted to admit it. The expression "water under the bridge" comes to mind. When you finally wake up from primitive dreams, it's nice to study them as anthropology but to still be debating if the dream images are real or not just holds us back. And does considerably more, if you consider the hieghts that religion is taken to in our culture.

I think that's part of it, people like Eagleton, shuffling between England and Ireland, may be just a bit naive and more sheltered than Dawkins or Hitchens at least on the subject of what hieights of insanity the American version of religous belief is taken to. A bunch of Oxford dons having one of these civilized arcane debates about angels is one thing, but take a look at what's said in the name of "religion" in our country in some places and you can't help thinking that it's turned entire populations into pinheads.

Religion is software.

Nothing more, nothing less, no magick and no mumbo jumbo, just software and bs variable names.

Neither side will admit that.

The real magick is in the atoms and the molecules and the rules which make them move, work and live.

Neither side will admit that.

___

You've clearly never read Daniel Dennett then. Give him a try.

If there are any "sides", whatever side Dawkins is on, so is Dennett.

Richard Dawkins is a "pseudointellectual"?

I hardly know where to start. It would be nice for people to know at least something about the person they're slamming before being so arrogant.

You don't believe in Dawkins' world view, you think his famous and ground breaking work that created terms we now use without thinking are not so impressive, you think that the chair they created for him as a professor to educate the public on the subject of science was not merited-- fine. Just ridiculing someone without knowing the first thing about him however only makes you sound silly.

I personally think Dawkins chapter coining the word meme and the subsequent science of memeology it's now spawned decades later, that that alone is vastly more impressive than this looking bacwards into the marquetry and lace of arcane and ultimately meaningless discussion of whether "god" exists or not.