It made Ken Macleod want to spit, but I'm very much more with Mr Eagleton than with his opponents:
"Yes, I quote my father who insisted that Jesus Christ was a socialist and that any Christianity that is not on the side of the dispossessed against the arrogance of the powerful and rich is utterly untraditional. Dawkins and Hitchens write about Christianity and never link the words God, justice and love. That is either a sign of their obtuseness or a sign of the massive self-betrayal of the Christian movement. It has got to the point where intelligent people like them don't understand that Christianity is not about how many months you get in purgatory for adultery. It's about a love and a thirst for justice that will bring you to your death. There's nothing lovely about it."
Eagleton believes in Jesus, or rather in the symbolic power of Jesus the revolutionary who urged his followers to feed the hungry, love their enemies, give away their possessions and visit the sick, and was finally tortured and killed for such advocacy. If, he argues, we want an image, a signifier, that captures the ugly awful truth of human history then we could not do better than choose the tortured body of the innocent Christ - the crucifixion.
...
... Our history, he believes, demands an image that constantly reminds us of our failures to set the world to rights. This is not for Eagleton a fatalistic denial of the value of attempting to improve the world, or indeed a denial of the manner in which liberal endeavours have enhanced our various freedoms. But it is a powerful iconic reproof to all those who have perverted liberalism - an ideology, asserts Eagleton, with its roots in Christianity - into a belief in unilinear progress.
Hi All (in particular Stuart)
It stikes me that Eagleton and Chris Knight may well have some interesting things to discuss on this subject. Clearly the standard atheist line is boring,inadequate and fails to get to grip with the anthropological/symbolic power of religion. It can also lead to the reactionary company of Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens. Give me a progressive Christian every time!
I have read a couple of Eagleton's books which I have enjoyed and when you factor in that he now works at Lancaster University... well!!
His new one looks interesting and I will await its production in paperback before buying it. I am also warming to this idea that Jesus was some kind of socialist and have recently got hold of Kautsky's "Foundations"(yet to give this one a proper read).
I think we should be thankful to Eagleton for raising the bar in mainstream literary/philosophical circles - Ditchens and co should now be considered passe by all serious thinkers on this subject.
Dave
Posted by: Dave | July 15, 2009 at 07:55 PM
... er sorry I meant Ditchkins!
Posted by: Dave | July 15, 2009 at 07:57 PM
Boring and inadequate -- my thoughts exactly! I remember Robert Anton Wilson saying that when he wrote books on mysticism, he got many angry and nutty letters from just two kinds of fundamentalists: religious fundamentalists, and materialist fundamentalists. Ditchkins is in the latter category.
I started to read Kautsky but found that pretty boring too. I much prefer Hyam Maccoby's 'Revolution in Judea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance'. Which reminds me, I must give that back to Jake...
Cheers
Posted by: Stuart | July 16, 2009 at 10:05 AM
Like Dave I shall wait for the paperback. A couple of Eagleton's recent efforts have been disappointing, but I too, even as an atheist, find myself more in agreement with Eagleton on religion than Ditchkins. His position is both more nuanced and more empathetic than theirs, and, I think, more ethically in tune with what I regard as socialism, from both a consequentialist and deontological point of view.
Jesus' moral code doesn't require that God exist to be a message worth listening to, any more than MLK's or Gandhi's. They can still reach a better approximation of justice than any number of Lenins.
Posted by: John Green | July 22, 2009 at 05:14 PM
"from both a consequentialist and deontological point of view."
What's that mean?!
"Jesus' moral code doesn't require that God exist to be a message worth listening to, any more than MLK's or Gandhi's. They can still reach a better approximation of justice than any number of Lenins."
Exactly.
Posted by: Stuart | July 22, 2009 at 06:42 PM
What does it mean? Well ..er I'll tell you what it means, sort of...anyway it's conchy talk, Bolshevism and it wouldn't work anyway!
Dave
Posted by: Dave | July 23, 2009 at 06:50 PM
At ease, Blackadder. I thought just a short back and sides and a trim of the old moustache today.
Posted by: Stuart | July 24, 2009 at 02:50 PM
No Sir, that is Corporal Black. Captain Blackadder is here about the secret mission.
Posted by: Dave | July 26, 2009 at 11:08 AM