As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, go have a look at P. Z. Myers' lengthy review of Eagleton's book. It seems that Myers was trapped on a very bad plane ride with only Eagleton for reading material. So what did Myers think?
As I was marking up his little book with these questions, something routine happened: the plane hit some turbulence, bounced about for a bit, and I looked out the window and had the fleeting, morbid thought, "What if we crashed?" We've all had that thought, and I usually dismiss it with little concern, but this time I had a new worry: I was sitting there holding Reason, Faith, and Revolution. You know that grandmotherly admonition to always wear clean underwear because, what if you had an accident, and they'd know? I had a vision of my broken corpse on a slab, and the sneering pathologist pulling the book out of my dead clenched hand, and making some mocking comment in his notes. Eagleton would be the skidmark at my autopsy. I resolved that if the plane did go down, the first thing I was going to do was fling the book as far forward as I could, both removing it from association with my body and satisfying a primal urge that had been prodding me since I opened it to page 1.
Get the idea? Myers' review is long but worth reading in its entirety. Go have a look.
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It strikes me that all the angst over whether PZ is a help or a hinderance, or too rude, or a driving force for reason, etc, etc, ad infintum, misses a really fundamental point about the man.
He's hilarious!
Indeed, the whole talk about hsi being a hindrance ignores the evident reality that different people will react differently to different styles, so where the Ken Millers of this world will fail, the PZ Myers' may succeed, and vice versa.
Such worries coul be justified if there were an "Atheist Party", for example, and we were worried about the posibility of its winning an election; the Republican Party is being damaged by the religious wingnuts it associates with.
However, very broad social tendencies like "Christianity" do not necessarily suffer from this. Liberal Christians are nto scared out of Christianity by the nuts: they simply regard the wing-nuttery as a set of beliefs almost entirely disconnected from their own.
It sounds like a very dumb book, i looked it up. i would much rather be caught dead with a richard dawkins book.