For the last time, **Stay out of it Stanley Fish.** (This guy is scaring me, he's so stupid)
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Mort Zuckerman
May 4, 2009, 9:31:50 AM5/4/09
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Subject: For the last time, **Stay out of it Stanley Fish.** (This guy
is scaring me, he's so stupid)
Date: May 4, 2009 9:23 AM
NYT ARTICLE BELOW
=====================================
Stanley Fish- OMG. Now this idiot is trying to
talk science, when science is the last thing
a lawyer can do.
Who *says* religion does not explain what
science explains?
If E equals m*c(squared), and if Time is
removed from the equation, (c is a function
of time), or if Time goes to zero, what
does science predict?
We don't know because we can't test anything
in zero time. We could still have just
E, which is Light, which is that domain
claimed by the Creator. Therefore there
is no domain of religion that negates science.
If Judeochristianity discusses Creation in
allegorical terms, Adam and Eve could be the
first humans or first hominids who used deception
in speech. That is, “Original Sin” would be explained
as “Capacity to Bullshit.”
Any educated adult in America would have at
several points in their lives said, “What if no
one could ever lie? What if nobody ever lied?
What would the world be like?”
There would be NO TURMOIL.
Now take occult religions like Freemasonry
or nonsense religions like Psychiatry, which
is the worship of Sex and Me (note, Freemasons
worship the same idols, Sex and Me):
Freemasonry claims (Ayn Rand, remember, and
"The Fountainhead," which is the essential
dogma or religion of capitalism; Get Whatever
You Can/Every Man for Himself) to have secret
knowledge from the Kabbalah, which comes from
Babylon (idol worshippers, originally from
Egypt). The Kabbalah is secret text for summoning
demons and Lucifer is said to be extremely
knowledgeable, but requires sacrifices in
exchange for this knowledge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7HxZd7hESE&feature=related
^^^ The sacrifices being extremely diabolical
acts, like pedophilia. "There was a number
of gifts that you could choose from," says
Roger Morneau, when introduced to this
Freemasonry cult, the Montrealist Society.
Now, there is plenty of evidence of preternatural
and supernatural. Lorraine and Ed Warren are the
real thing and everybody knows it. There was
plenty of photographic evidence and thousands
of people reported a real solar event at Fatima:
http://www.actionlyme.org/IGNORANT_MASS.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/EXORCISMS.htm
The CIA had a program named MKULTRA in which they
performed diabolical atrocities upon young people
to get them to "dissociate," much like Freemasonic
Satanic Pedophilia, but what it all was, was
inadvertent (or maybe deliberate) summoning
of demons to possess the victims. A living
representative of these experiments, many people
think, is Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan has no recollection
of the performance over which he was convicted.
The CIA tried to recruit people who had psychic
abilities (and these shows are on TV, like
the History Channel) and studied telekinesis, etc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMj_bgzCUw8
The Russians were using it and the CIA was using it.
The CIA at first did not know they were moving
into the realm of the occult or the realm of
the preternatural. Here you see preternatual
gifts received by a Qi Gong Master:
http://www.actionlyme.org/KABBALAH_YING.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_E6sRQQAg&feature=related
(watch the whole thing to the end, and wonder
who it was who visited this Qi master??)
What one should do, is study psychiatry and drill
down into what is there scientifically. One will find
that there is nothing there. What you find is evil
masked in many disguises, but it is never discussed as
such.
Cross index these in your minds:
1) Psychiatry says evil acts are mental illness.
2) The courts say people know what they’re doing
when they do something wrong.
3) Psychiatry proves that people know it when do they
something wrong against others:
"But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic
as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto
you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your
heart you know you’re wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/science/01tier.html
So, if evil is a personality disorder or a personality
disorder is evil, where are the pills and the biomarkers
for evil? If lawyers and psychiatrists are left-brain
lying-brain dominant and have a mental block against
physical logic, like most women, what is the chemical
cure for their evil?
You *know* I am stating true physical facts about
brain hemisphere dominance and what are the functions
of those lobes. And if you don’t, then look it up.
Says NYT David Brooks et al:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html
“People are likely TRAINED in what they’re good at.”
Yep. I see it too:
Psychiatrists and lawyers are brainless liars and you can’t
explain the physical world to them, because they got
away with being liars as kids and then made a career out of
it. They’re stupid and to be avoided because they have a
Personality Disorder that disables their ability to
think and act like real men.
The psychiatrist Tom McGlashan was first a chemist
and was fascinated by psychiatry. Now he says
We Have No Clue What We're Talking About:
http://www.actionlyme.org/DIABOLICAL_PERVERSION_PSYCHOANALYSIS.htm
"HIDDEN AGENDAS:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qnXysb6HTA&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div
Okay, so you read Ayn Rand, and watch all that data
and read about what's in these Jewish texts and you
listen to Leo Zagami and John Todd, and you follow
Alex Jones into Bohomian Grove, and you read about
and watch the videos about UFOs and how some scientists
claim that these aliens are actually demons blah, blah...
Fascinating stuff to a real scientist. It looks as real as
Thermate in the WTC7 building.
It all comes together that Freemasonry is a diabolical
religion, but is the religion of capitalism. And a lot
of stuff is still unexplained, but the last thing
Capitalism or Science excludes is Religion.
For the last time, **Stay out of it, Stanley Fish!!**
If a lawyer wants to dabble in science,
by all means, they should get a degree in
chemistry and then join the fight. 'Explain to
other lawyers what is meant by the words "fact"
and "evidence," cuz among all the resources
this country is short on, it's TRUTH as the
catalyst for every other necessary reaction,
and especially ENERGY- that thing that is
inseparable from God (as far as anyone can
prove, according to Einstein's Equation).
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=============================================================
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/
May 3, 2009, 10:00 pm
God Talk
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason,
Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why
are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about
God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty,
scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance —
science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is
ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has
managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and
absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of
men and women?”
Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign —
many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least
religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for
its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity
itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of
life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it
generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical
transformation of what we say and do.”
The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and
pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the
perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A
society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized
politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth
where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there
anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually
intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation,
regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation
can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held
against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a
technology for explaining how the material world works should not be
held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When
Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the
telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an
explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But
Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the
first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric
toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often
when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched
attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched
attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical
act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions
one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else,
and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement.
Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after
something else.
After what? Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most
general terms: “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice,
fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might
normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-
heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.” Such a condition would not
be desirable in Oxford and Washington because, according to Eagleton,
the inhabitants of those places are complacently in bondage to the
false idols of wealth, power and progress. That is, they feel little
of the tragedy and pain of the human condition, but instead “adopt
some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human
progress” and put their baseless “trust in the efficacy of a spot of
social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there.”
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of
those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has
nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day?
Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise
of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval
superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns
the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of
progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically
related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) —
because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of
enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the
police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war
economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty
suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to
whether or not the things produced have true value.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery
wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and
imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring
all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of
history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of
credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a
few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its
center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death
for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous
amalgam of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong
glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not
both fall into the ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the
kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his
tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who
nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative
love.”
You won’t be interested in any such promise, you won’t see the point
of clinging to it, if you think that “apart from the odd, stubbornly
lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history on the whole is
still steadily on the up,” if you think that “not only is the
salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to all we
read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How,
Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well
self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?
“Self-sufficient” gets to the heart of what Eagleton sees as wrong
with the “brittle triumphalism” of liberal rationalism and its
ideology of science. From the perspective of a theistic religion, the
cardinal error is the claim of the creature to be “self-originating”:
“Self-authorship,” Eagleton proclaims, “is the bourgeois fantasy par
excellence,” and he could have cited in support the words of that
great bourgeois villain, Milton’s Satan, who, upon being reminded that
he was created by another, retorts , “[W]ho saw/ When this creation
was…?/ We know no time when we were not as now/Know none before us,
self-begot, self-raised” (Paradise Lost, V, 856-860).That is, we
created ourselves (although how there can be agency before there is
being and therefore an agent is not explained), and if we are able to
do that, why can’t we just keep on going and pull progress and
eventual perfection out of our own entrails?
That is where science and reason come in. Science, says Eagleton,
“does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it
can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to
its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle
what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence —
cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they
proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the
absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and
where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
“Ditchkins,” Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief “in the value
of individual freedom” in scientific observation. It is for him an
article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons
and judgments of right and wrong. “Faith and knowledge,” Eagleton
concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You can’t have one
without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone
by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality:
“All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith,
attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior
commitment.” Meaning, value and truth are not “reducible to the facts
themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare
account of them.” Which is to say that there is no such thing as a
bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and
postmodernism meet.)
If this is so, the basis for what Eagleton calls “the rejection of
religion on the cheap” by contrasting its unsupported (except by
faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded assertions of
atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted with a
choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a
spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a
progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and
extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.
For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete
faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes
that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure
that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal
dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic
intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”
One more point. The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and
angrier. (There is the possibility, of course, that the later chapters
were written first; I’m just talking about the temporal experience of
reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out why the anger was
there and I came up with two explanations.
One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may
not be the faith he holds to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he
says, “partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that
the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”
The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made
explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and
emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard
atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.
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Subject: For the last time, **Stay out of it Stanley Fish.** (This guy
is scaring me, he's so stupid)
Date: May 4, 2009 9:23 AM
NYT ARTICLE BELOW
=====================================
Stanley Fish- OMG. Now this idiot is trying to
talk science, when science is the last thing
a lawyer can do.
Who *says* religion does not explain what
science explains?
If E equals m*c(squared), and if Time is
removed from the equation, (c is a function
of time), or if Time goes to zero, what
does science predict?
We don't know because we can't test anything
in zero time. We could still have just
E, which is Light, which is that domain
claimed by the Creator. Therefore there
is no domain of religion that negates science.
If Judeochristianity discusses Creation in
allegorical terms, Adam and Eve could be the
first humans or first hominids who used deception
in speech. That is, “Original Sin” would be explained
as “Capacity to Bullshit.”
Any educated adult in America would have at
several points in their lives said, “What if no
one could ever lie? What if nobody ever lied?
What would the world be like?”
There would be NO TURMOIL.
Now take occult religions like Freemasonry
or nonsense religions like Psychiatry, which
is the worship of Sex and Me (note, Freemasons
worship the same idols, Sex and Me):
Freemasonry claims (Ayn Rand, remember, and
"The Fountainhead," which is the essential
dogma or religion of capitalism; Get Whatever
You Can/Every Man for Himself) to have secret
knowledge from the Kabbalah, which comes from
Babylon (idol worshippers, originally from
Egypt). The Kabbalah is secret text for summoning
demons and Lucifer is said to be extremely
knowledgeable, but requires sacrifices in
exchange for this knowledge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7HxZd7hESE&feature=related
^^^ The sacrifices being extremely diabolical
acts, like pedophilia. "There was a number
of gifts that you could choose from," says
Roger Morneau, when introduced to this
Freemasonry cult, the Montrealist Society.
Now, there is plenty of evidence of preternatural
and supernatural. Lorraine and Ed Warren are the
real thing and everybody knows it. There was
plenty of photographic evidence and thousands
of people reported a real solar event at Fatima:
http://www.actionlyme.org/IGNORANT_MASS.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/EXORCISMS.htm
The CIA had a program named MKULTRA in which they
performed diabolical atrocities upon young people
to get them to "dissociate," much like Freemasonic
Satanic Pedophilia, but what it all was, was
inadvertent (or maybe deliberate) summoning
of demons to possess the victims. A living
representative of these experiments, many people
think, is Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan has no recollection
of the performance over which he was convicted.
The CIA tried to recruit people who had psychic
abilities (and these shows are on TV, like
the History Channel) and studied telekinesis, etc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMj_bgzCUw8
The Russians were using it and the CIA was using it.
The CIA at first did not know they were moving
into the realm of the occult or the realm of
the preternatural. Here you see preternatual
gifts received by a Qi Gong Master:
http://www.actionlyme.org/KABBALAH_YING.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_E6sRQQAg&feature=related
(watch the whole thing to the end, and wonder
who it was who visited this Qi master??)
What one should do, is study psychiatry and drill
down into what is there scientifically. One will find
that there is nothing there. What you find is evil
masked in many disguises, but it is never discussed as
such.
Cross index these in your minds:
1) Psychiatry says evil acts are mental illness.
2) The courts say people know what they’re doing
when they do something wrong.
3) Psychiatry proves that people know it when do they
something wrong against others:
"But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic
as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto
you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your
heart you know you’re wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/science/01tier.html
So, if evil is a personality disorder or a personality
disorder is evil, where are the pills and the biomarkers
for evil? If lawyers and psychiatrists are left-brain
lying-brain dominant and have a mental block against
physical logic, like most women, what is the chemical
cure for their evil?
You *know* I am stating true physical facts about
brain hemisphere dominance and what are the functions
of those lobes. And if you don’t, then look it up.
Says NYT David Brooks et al:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html
“People are likely TRAINED in what they’re good at.”
Yep. I see it too:
Psychiatrists and lawyers are brainless liars and you can’t
explain the physical world to them, because they got
away with being liars as kids and then made a career out of
it. They’re stupid and to be avoided because they have a
Personality Disorder that disables their ability to
think and act like real men.
The psychiatrist Tom McGlashan was first a chemist
and was fascinated by psychiatry. Now he says
We Have No Clue What We're Talking About:
http://www.actionlyme.org/DIABOLICAL_PERVERSION_PSYCHOANALYSIS.htm
"HIDDEN AGENDAS:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qnXysb6HTA&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div
Okay, so you read Ayn Rand, and watch all that data
and read about what's in these Jewish texts and you
listen to Leo Zagami and John Todd, and you follow
Alex Jones into Bohomian Grove, and you read about
and watch the videos about UFOs and how some scientists
claim that these aliens are actually demons blah, blah...
Fascinating stuff to a real scientist. It looks as real as
Thermate in the WTC7 building.
It all comes together that Freemasonry is a diabolical
religion, but is the religion of capitalism. And a lot
of stuff is still unexplained, but the last thing
Capitalism or Science excludes is Religion.
For the last time, **Stay out of it, Stanley Fish!!**
If a lawyer wants to dabble in science,
by all means, they should get a degree in
chemistry and then join the fight. 'Explain to
other lawyers what is meant by the words "fact"
and "evidence," cuz among all the resources
this country is short on, it's TRUTH as the
catalyst for every other necessary reaction,
and especially ENERGY- that thing that is
inseparable from God (as far as anyone can
prove, according to Einstein's Equation).
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=============================================================
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/
May 3, 2009, 10:00 pm
God Talk
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason,
Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why
are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about
God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty,
scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance —
science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is
ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has
managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and
absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of
men and women?”
Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign —
many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least
religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for
its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity
itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of
life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it
generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical
transformation of what we say and do.”
The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and
pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the
perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A
society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized
politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth
where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there
anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually
intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation,
regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation
can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held
against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a
technology for explaining how the material world works should not be
held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When
Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the
telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an
explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But
Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the
first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric
toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often
when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched
attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched
attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical
act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions
one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else,
and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement.
Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after
something else.
After what? Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most
general terms: “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice,
fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might
normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-
heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.” Such a condition would not
be desirable in Oxford and Washington because, according to Eagleton,
the inhabitants of those places are complacently in bondage to the
false idols of wealth, power and progress. That is, they feel little
of the tragedy and pain of the human condition, but instead “adopt
some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human
progress” and put their baseless “trust in the efficacy of a spot of
social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there.”
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of
those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has
nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day?
Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise
of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval
superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns
the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of
progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically
related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) —
because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of
enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the
police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war
economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty
suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to
whether or not the things produced have true value.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery
wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and
imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring
all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of
history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of
credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a
few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its
center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death
for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous
amalgam of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong
glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not
both fall into the ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the
kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his
tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who
nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative
love.”
You won’t be interested in any such promise, you won’t see the point
of clinging to it, if you think that “apart from the odd, stubbornly
lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history on the whole is
still steadily on the up,” if you think that “not only is the
salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to all we
read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How,
Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well
self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?
“Self-sufficient” gets to the heart of what Eagleton sees as wrong
with the “brittle triumphalism” of liberal rationalism and its
ideology of science. From the perspective of a theistic religion, the
cardinal error is the claim of the creature to be “self-originating”:
“Self-authorship,” Eagleton proclaims, “is the bourgeois fantasy par
excellence,” and he could have cited in support the words of that
great bourgeois villain, Milton’s Satan, who, upon being reminded that
he was created by another, retorts , “[W]ho saw/ When this creation
was…?/ We know no time when we were not as now/Know none before us,
self-begot, self-raised” (Paradise Lost, V, 856-860).That is, we
created ourselves (although how there can be agency before there is
being and therefore an agent is not explained), and if we are able to
do that, why can’t we just keep on going and pull progress and
eventual perfection out of our own entrails?
That is where science and reason come in. Science, says Eagleton,
“does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it
can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to
its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle
what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence —
cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they
proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the
absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and
where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
“Ditchkins,” Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief “in the value
of individual freedom” in scientific observation. It is for him an
article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons
and judgments of right and wrong. “Faith and knowledge,” Eagleton
concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You can’t have one
without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone
by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality:
“All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith,
attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior
commitment.” Meaning, value and truth are not “reducible to the facts
themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare
account of them.” Which is to say that there is no such thing as a
bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and
postmodernism meet.)
If this is so, the basis for what Eagleton calls “the rejection of
religion on the cheap” by contrasting its unsupported (except by
faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded assertions of
atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted with a
choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a
spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a
progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and
extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.
For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete
faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes
that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure
that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal
dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic
intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”
One more point. The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and
angrier. (There is the possibility, of course, that the later chapters
were written first; I’m just talking about the temporal experience of
reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out why the anger was
there and I came up with two explanations.
One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may
not be the faith he holds to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he
says, “partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that
the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”
The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made
explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and
emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard
atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.
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