Matt Taibbi: These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted May 9, 2009.

God People are constantly fine-tuning their weird arguments to pimp the righteousness of faith.



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.” -- Stanley Fish's Blog, God Talk - - NYTimes.com.


I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair.

This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/139927/these_god_pundits_can_give_you_a_splitting_headache/

[geckosfeet]

1. Great stuff -

"For another thing, faith of course is traditionally regarded as a question of certainty… not as a question of probability or speculation or guesswork, but actually as a question of certainty, which is not to say that it’s not also traditionally regarded as being inferior to knowledge. But only fully paid-up rationalists think that nothing is certain but knowledge. Faith, as the author of the epistle to Hebrews writes, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Whatever else may define the science of theology, or religion, it is from a theological view certainly not the question of certainty. I don’t think Ditchkins understands that."

I listened to this argument at least five times and at the end still had absolutely no idea what the hell Eagleton was talking about. I thought at first he might be saying that faith does not require certainty, but then again nobody who wanted to say that would bother with all that extra verbiage. Anyway this is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables.

Eagelton’s main idea, the one trumpeted by Fish in the Times, is an even sillier piece of syllogistic sophistry than his “God isn’t like the Yeti! We’d be able to see a Yeti!” trick. The basic premise goes something like this:

Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.

But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.

Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.

The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.” And…well, I’m not going to get into this too much, because taking an axe to some soggy old Catholic academic is beginning to feel wrong somehow. But something tells me we’re going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no other reason that whenever money gets tight and the times get nervous even intellectuals will suddenly start talking about God. You see this same phenomenon played out on a more crude level in Southern fundamentalism, where the megachurches are smart enough to send their missionaries to rehab centers and prisons and everywhere else you find people stumbling, confused, and vulnerable to a soul-snatching out of their various existential car wrecks — and now that 21st century capitalism has hit the wall and yuppies everywhere are flying through the windshield into debt and foreclosure, the God-hawkers will show up here, too, to argue that where materialism and science have let your postmodern liberal self down, religion comes ready with answers.

[bemildred]

2. "But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers."

Indeed.