Terry Eagleton: “Truly civilised societies don’t hold predawn power breakfasts”

This book is one of the best reads for a long time – pity the dust cover is so dull, even if the simulated tear is meant to symbolise the torn fabric of human ways of knowing). In the London Review of Books, Eagleton (no friend of religion) previously punctured the ego of Dawkins by administering what can only be called a massive dose of qualified rationality! The straw men set up by Dawkins, the caricatures of religion in general and theism in particular, the sloppy argumentation, his culpable unawareness of his own prejudiced assumptions and emotional toxins – an absolutely unanswerable critique of a book that had it been submitted as an undergraduate dissertation would have struggled to survive the flaws of its own methodology. Treat yourself to the tonic of refined academic polemic, a masterclass by one of the sharpest and most controversial literary and cultural commentators. Eagleton in full flow can be read here in his review "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching".

This book, Reason, Faith and Revolution consists of lectures he recently delivered in the United States (hence the references throughout to USA). Here he takes on the new atheists with the same verve, conflating Dawkins and Hitchens into the new protagonist Ditchkins – and sometimes with hilarious effectiveness.

"Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labour. The sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States [and United Kingdom!]. Truly civiled societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.

Quite so!