Terry Eagleton Vs. Doc Dawkins

Wow did Marxist Critic Eagleton ever tear Dawkins a new one! His review of Dawkins God Delusion, begins:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Eagleton isn't that bad a theologian either:

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

Find the debate here. The Wiki article on TE also has a link to the above article and a response by someone. Sorry I'm too lazy to find out who. Also, Wikipedia - I still love you man. Those idiots who actually want to you be THE source of truth, are just bone heads anyway. I know that you are in the connection business, not the prophet/profit business. Hugs and kisses.

Quotes of the Morning

"The more devastation and instability an unbridled marked creates, the more illiberal a state you need to contain it." (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 220)

"Capitalism has always pitched diverse forms of life promiscuously together - a fact which should give pause to those unwary postmodernists for whom diversity, astonishingly, is somehow a virtue in itself. Those for whom 'dynamic' is always a positive term might also care to reconsider their opinion, in the light of the most dynamically destructive system of production which humanity has ever seen. But we are now witnessing a brutally quickened version of this melt-down, with the tearing up of traditional communities, the breaking down of national barriers, the generating of great tidal waves of migration. Culture in the form of fundamentalism has reared its head in reaction to these shattering upheavals. Everywhere you look, people are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to be themselves. This is partially because other people have abandoned the notion of being themselves as an undue restriction on their activities" (Eagleton 49 - 50)

"[There is a] fundamental paradox located at the center of the rule of law in a democratic society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, Franz Kafka, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Jacques Derrida, Alan Keenan, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, while disagreeing on numerous issues, concur in asserting that a democratic state seeking to honor the rule of law is also one in which a sovereign power operating both inside and outside the law is brought into play. Since the paradox expresses the lawlessness upon which the rule of law depends it is often hidden from public view. ...[G]aps and fissures open up periodically between positional sovereignty as the highest authority to interpret the law and sovereignty as the effective power to decide what it will be. ...[F]or a government of self-rule to come into being out of a nondemocratic condition, the public ethos needed for democratic governance would have to be preceded by the kind of laws that nourish it; but those good laws, in turn, would need to be preceded by that very ethos if they were to emerge. The laws and the ethos must precede each other." (William E. Connolly, Pluralism, 134-5)

"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 5)

"The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries" (Schmitt, 36)