Terry Eagleton criticised dawkins when the God Delusion came out, indeed lambasted him. Eagleton accuses Dawkins of setting religion up as a straw man in order to easily knock him down. That is, Dawkins paints religious thought as oxymoronic, as nothing but credulous fundamentalist swill that ignorant people subscribe to without ever considering the counterveiling arguments. I agree. None of the rabid beleivers I've ever argued with know the first thing about evolution, for instance; nor have they ever stopped to consider the tenuous foundations of their belief, retreating into their "faith" rather than considering its inconsistencies in a thoughtful manner--as though God might punish them for healthy skepticism.
In fact, Eagleton argues, most religions have had their great thinkers, whose theology cannot be so easily dismissed; but Dawkins doesn't address it, preferring to beat-up on the asinine fundamentalisms and narrow minded bigotry that seem to be overwhelmingly "popular" these days. The dark night of the soul has been a common discourse in the Christian tradition that is meant to be embraced as a prickly path to God. Yet today, like pop-culture in general, religion has all the significance and nourishment of a Big Mac with Fries. It's the headbanging Good News fundamentalism that's on the rise, and the non-thinking "the Bible's all I need" provincialism. On the other hand, the kind of positivism Dawkins presides over is also a kind of fundamentalism, in my view, in it's almost manic rationalism, that refuses to have any truck with philosophical considerations. For anyone interested, here's a link to Eagleton's article: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Oliver,
Yes, satan was evil in heaven. Revelation states that he was thrown down along with his cohorts, but did from time to time ascend again to Heaven to revile God’s people (see Job).

I would have thought that constraining evil would by virtue of its intrinsic nature also constrain the potential for good, but maybe not since Adam & Eve were "protected" from the knowledge of good & evil in the garden and God proclaimed that everything He created on Earth was "very good". Is innocence is a higher state of being? Certainly God would have preferred that Man remained in this perfect state, but had planned for mankind's redemption right from the start. So the question still remains "Why?".
Much to ponder on for me. Thanks for the thought-provoking challenges.

By the way...
New International Version - disaster
New American Standard Bible - calamity
The Message (contemporary) - discords
New Living Translation - bad times
King James - evil
New King James - calamity
21st century King James - evil
Contemporary English - sorrow
Today’s NIV - disaster

P.S. So since physical beauty is also an intrinsic, non-created "thing", who decided what was to be deigned ugly (before women's magazine, of course!)? Do we all share a certain penchant for well-proportioned bodies/faces or is it totally dependent on our upbringing/external factors? Does this same inter-relationship apply for all intrinsic values ie the need for both extremes to be meaningful/significant?

For OLO Forum:

Squeers,
I agree with most of what you say. The cacophony is coming from the two extremes and tends to drown out any contribution from the more deeply searching people in the middle. (The statement is open to question of course. I don’t usually fall back on one-dimensional models, but I’m in a hurry just now.) I’ll return with more to say later.

George,
“Glossolalia” was actually derived from the Greek. If we were to coin a Latin term for the state-of mind you describe in the Dawkins audience, I would suggest “risomania” – insane with laughter.

Dear david f,
The comedian Josh Kornbluth, a son of atheist Marxists who grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, said he never really considered himself Jewish until he sifted through a series of hypercolored portraits and emerged, as he puts it, one of ‘Warhol’s Jews’(a 1980’s series of silk-screen prints called “10 Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century” depicting luminaries like Einstein, Kafka and Golda Meir).Despite an obvious aversion to the Warhol portraits, Konbluth was commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York to comment on them. “I defaced my catalogue,” he said. “I put a Jewish beard and sidelocks and a yarmulke on [Warhol]...I began to look at the War-whole…Andy Warhol:Good for the Jews?”

“I don’t get it.” Konbluth shakes his fists at the portraits, “I don’t get the same feeling I get from the Rembrandt portraits at the Met. They’re resisting me, they’re pushing me away.” He looked closer and studied the colors “potchkied” over the face of Louis Brandeis, the crude scribbles outlining Gertrude Stein’s features and so on...Still, he said,“I get nothing.” Kornbluth then tried delving into the professional biographies of Warhol’s subjects in search of artistic substance: George Gershwin’s revolutionary mix of jazz, popular and classical music, the Marx Brothers’ films. Then he gets to the theologian and philosopher Martin Buber,“the one I know absolutely nothing about.” The comedian recalls his anecdote about a gay Presbyterian minister named Chuck who gave the teenage Kornbluth a brief lesson on “I-It” and “I-Thou” elements of Buber’s philosophy of human relationships.

“I-It” involves relating to a person as a functional object—“I objectify you,” as the Rev. Chuck put it;“I-Thou” involves relating to someone in a more engaged way. “When you feel ‘I-Thou’ you connect to the eternal… I-It’ is a monologue. ‘I-Thou’ is a dialogue.” “That’s what I have to do with these portraits to get inside them… I need to get from ‘I-It’ to ‘I-Thou.’ ”– his realization was the need to create a dialogue between his own experience and that of the subjects i.e.,the wide-ranging iterations of Jewish identity.

...Good comment Squeers.

yeah, yeah you guys don't like dawkins. good for you. but:

1) to claim dawkins is simply attacking straw men is absurd. he is at minimum attacking the type of religious belief that the vast majority of religous believers truly ruly believe. he may be cunningly avoiding tougher targets, choosing easy targets, but to suggest he's merely inventing his own targets is blatantly false.

2) it'd be nice if you actually quoted dawkins, and argued with what he says. simply referring to other critiques is pretty empty, and pretty authority-appealing.

3) to suggest, as eagleton does, that dawkins doesn't know the minutiae of his target is neither here nor there. i don't know the minutiae of numerology, but i don't need to know that to argue that it is nonsense. if you want to claim that dawkins is throwing some grand thought, some grand way of knowing, in the garbage, then demonstrate it.

4) i am still waiting for even a single example of dawkins' nonsense belief or crass mistakes. really, you guys can't even cherrypick or nitpick something?

5) i have no doubt that all religions have had their great religious thinkers. that is not the same as their religious thinking being great. that is no proof that the religious element of their thought added anything to their greatness. but if you think so, please provide me the examples of such people.

I've avoided commenting because 'the Sells', in my 'umble opinion, really has little original to say... as with most of us.

But, as always, the original ark-tickle is but an excuse for others to say what they want 'irregardless' as St. Barnaby Rubble, Senator for Qld, and The Great Thinker For The Farmers, would say when challenged on... just about anything.

Being guided by God, albeit a 'Mick' one, St. Barnaby simply cannot be wrong. Nor Sells, of course, 'irregardless' of reality.

But I've read a little Eagleton, he is prolific beyond good reason, and certainly beyond doubt within his topic- a sure sign of fundamentalism, if ever I saw one.

Could this be true of Dawko? Possibly. But I tend towards Bushbasher here, and wonder if the, as I see it anyway, point of the Dawko onslaught has not been missed, as BB seems to suggest.

We are faced, those from the secular world- which does not imply atheist I hasten to add- with the complacency of the established Church, Canterbury and Rome, and to hell with the Greeks and 'others', who have no interest whatsoever in 'end times'... and the recent upsurge of interest in the maddog Hillsong, CoC, Baptist, Sydney Anglican, and various sects of the Roman sham, who are very keen for Israel to blow up Iran to hasten the 'end times'.

Included, of course, are all the school chaplains in Australia, mad as hatters, all.

And Dawko is, as I see it, simply trying to point out to those complacent nere-do-wells who sit in the centre and pretend to be 'average', such as 'crasby' alludes to, the Doctors Wives who feel pain but do bugger all to relieve it, continuing to vote Liberal, or ALP, or... no, none would ever vote Nat,and thereby assume, wrongly, that because they are not extremists, the 'others' are wrong.

News for you ladies... and the men amongst youse all, you are timid, too timid, and refuse to see the danger that Dawko alludes to.

Dawko raises hackles. Eagleton ponders his ivory tower pipe smoking safe from the madding crowd.