Squeers posted Terry Eagleton's critique of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. In Eagleton's article was the following:

"Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide."

Terry Eagleton is probably a Christian, and like many other religionists is ignorant of the history of his religion.

Values human life deeply? “Blood and Soil” by Ben Kiernan is a history of genocide from Sparta to Darfur. Included are many instances of genocide supported by Christianity. An excerpt:

Page 64 “In the “first great slaughter of Europe’s Jews by Christians,” errant Crusader bands massacred possibly 8,000 Jews in eight German cities in May-June 1096. Marching into Jerusalem three years later, according to the Archbishop of Tyre, Crusaders murdered “about 10,000 infidels” – both Muslims and Jews – in the Temple enclosure. They burned more Jews alive in the synagogue and butchered thousands of Muslims in the al-Aqsa mosque.”

There was a Christian sect which did look forward eagerly to death. The Donatists were a schismatic sect of especially rigorous Christians in North Africa from the fourth to the seventh centuries. After the Constantinian shift, when other Christians accepted the emperor as a leader in the Church, the Donatists continued to see the emperor as the devil. The Donatist movement came out of opposition to the appointment of Caecilianus as Bishop of Carthage in 312, because of his pro-government stance.

The Donatists became characterized by a cult of martyrdom. They longed for the final and greatest outpouring of Gods grace, the death of the martyr, and greeted one another with the wish "may you gain your crown." [McManners ed., Oxford History of Christianity p. 43). They even would stop people on the road demanding to be murdered or else they would kill the person who refused to murder them.

In reaction to the Donatists the Church made suicide a sin. It was not previously

Oliver,
1. You still did not answer my question. I am not an anthropologist but I doubt many anthropologists - atheist or not - would be happy with your ideas on how they should go about their research.

2. Contrasts are qualitative, your examples assume also quantifiability of the property. She can be pregnant or not, you can a have temperature or not. However, she cannot be “a little bit” pregnant (because “being pregnant” is not quantifiable), however you can have just a low temperature, (because temperature is). The same about other examples involving graduation.

Nevertheless, you have a point. Theodicy - the problem of evil - is a branch of (Christian) theology that I am not an expert on, but as far as I know, there is no uniformly accepted explanation of this “why” of theology. I attempted at a partial explanation by pointing to the impossibility to understand or experience something without at least mentally being able to experience its lack or opposite. Another partial answer is that we could not have what we experience as free will if we could not choose to do what is regarded - by God or by our moral instinct implanted in us through evolution, (two not mutually exclusive alternatives) - as good (encouraged by God and/or beneficial to society) and what as bad (condemned by God and/or harmful to society).

3. Maybe in the sense that both Sellick and Dawkins tend to misrepresent those they disagree with, although they appeal to “congregations” of widely different sizes.

4. I do not know whether God could or could not have created this or that because He is beyond human comprehension. What is in the bible (or any other sacred text or mythology) has to be taken only either as
(a) His revelation to the “infinitely inferior“ human intellect or as
(b) an attempt of a particular cultural orientation to comprehend the incomprehensible, (again the two not being necessarily mutually exclusive).

In both cases I regard speculations - about what could or could not, should or should not, have been written - futile

Oh dear, Blue Cross, I should not have tried to make a quick contribution with the five minutes I had at my disposal. As I parenthetically mentioned, I am usually loath to use one-dimensional schemata to portray my view of things.

By placing the participants in the debate on a bi-polar scale between Dawkinsians and Fundies I allowed many – perhaps most – other people to be labelled “average”. I gave you a perfect opening, didn’t I?

Labels like “average”, “moderate” and “middle-of-the-road” are very misleading. They also have a rather derisive connotation, as if those who cannot be placed at one of the two poles lack courage or conviction, or are, to use your term, “complacent”. Thus did the Fascists and Communists -- polar opposites on the everyday left-right political spectrum, but totalitarians both -- rail about the apathetic ignorance and degenerate weakness of the rest (bulk) of the population.

My point is that there are many people who are searching for meaning or truth or immaterial reality, but deliberately refrain from noisy or aggressive public display of their views. This is often because they are honest enough to accept that their views could be wrong and may change tomorrow as they explore their own and others’ inner experience. And a great many of them are active members of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, as well as some Protestant denominations. Such people are anything but “complacent”, as you brand them. They are treading the path which St John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the soul”, and which Squeers has already mentioned.

It is no weakness that they usually find it more useful to communicate with others on a similar quest than to get sensational headlines in the mass media from day to day.

Bushbasher,
I’m in an awkward spot!
1) I agree with you that Dawkins is attacking stereotypical religious belief, and so does Eagleton; but I’m wary of stereotypes. Who says Dawkins is “inventing his own targets” btw?
2) Will look at this. Eagleton was generalising Dawkins’ critique—that is, Dawkins doesn’t get into specifics either. As for appealing to authority, well that goes both ways; Dawkins is also an authority for positivism.
3) Why don’t you “need to know the minutia to argue that it [numerology] is nonsense”? How is that different to a fundamentalist critique of Darwinism? The rationalist perspective then has ultimate power of veto? Then what is the point in debating the matter further, if rationalism rests on absolute conviction? How is this different to high Catholicism? Is life, the universe and everything really so transparent—a mere jigsaw for science to piece together while it adopts the same sanctimonious position as the church took in “its” heyday? Dawkins’ ex-cathedra pronouncements apparently also have no tolerance for dissent?
Dawkins is not throwing out any “grand thought” or “way of knowing”, he “is” making light work of a straw man—even Eagleton doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of theology, so I’m not going to. Dawkins is the one who labels his pet pathology the “God Delusion”, under which banner he implicitly condemns all thought that can’t evince its empirical credentials, as delusional. “God” means a whole lot of different things to different people—I mean outside the various franchises. Much as fundamentalism seems to be on the rise today, the term “God” signifies a diverse mysticism to many. Why should we throw the bathwater out with the baby? I have no time either for the narcissistic fervour of credulous evangelicals, or pietistic provincialism, full stop. But I’m not ready to profess the faux-objectivity of positivism either—to put my faith in the human senses, and its prized rationality, when they are so easily confounded. I subscribe to the tenets of perspectivism, rather than either extreme.
Shall have more to say.

Crasby... How can people with serious doubts about what they believe keep subscribing, voluntarily, to continuing their membership of a church?

"And a great many of them are active members of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, as well as some Protestant denominations. Such people are anything but “complacent”, as you brand them."

These are, no doubt, the Spongs of the franchises, as I see Squeers calls these cults, trying to have two-bob each way.

But, as the man said, if you do not believe in the Resurrection, then all else is dust. The simple secret of 'faith' is on display there, faith such as Sells invests his entire life in.

If these people who you say are 'struggling' so, yet remain active members of their church, then they have missed the entire point of their religion, as promoted by the cults- to 'believe' without question.

As I understand Dawko, he 'believes' to the extent that the theory-de-jour remains 'it', but he allows for it to be re-interpreted as new 'facts' emerge.

Not so religions. The Book is Writ, and shall always remain so...and never by 'man' by always by 'God'.

Do tap The Googles for the song 'why don't bees go to heaven?'

Dawko points out the futility of such blindness, Sells and his acolytes relish it, and draw income, power and prestige amongst the complacent in society on the way through.

Pondering 'why are we here?' can be done outside the framework of any religion.

In the end, of course, it really doesn't matter 'why' we are here, here we are.

Dogs know the answer that eludes us. Observe how they lope around the garden and sleep in dark corners 'waiting' for something to happen. The car door opens, doggie is encouraged to climb in, ears prick up, saliva drools from the jaw, woof, woof, goes Arnold for the entire journey, excited beyond reason.

Get to the other end, back at home maybe, and Arnold reverts to his normal routine, awaiting his next episode of the-purpose-of-life: the journey.

Squeers has brought Terry Eagleton into the conversation – he “probably [is] a Christian” and some on this forum are Jews. Both labels, however, I find irrelevant in terms of the discussion here. From what I read of Eagleton he is far from being what I’d term a “religionist” where, “…Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals..”

Eagleton wrote a critique on the “Suicide of the West” by Richard Koch and Chris Smith. Here he says, and certainly contradicts those with a superficial view of “love” and the OT, “The Mosaic law IS the law of love, and as such is every bit as personal and interior as Jesus's teaching. Nor was Jesus a dry run for Paddy Ashdown; he was a thoroughly anti-individualist first-century Jew, steeped in the ritual and doctrine of his nation. Christianity for Koch and Smith means helping the underdog; for the Yahweh of the Old Testament, it means the poor coming to power..”

Also, “…the ideal of science, too, has been undermined - not by Nazi eugenicists or Los Alamos physicists, as it happens, but by "fashionable fancies" such as the theories of relativity and indeterminacy. For all their wide-eyed zest for postmodernity, Koch and Smith turn out to be nostalgic Newtonians.” Fascinating.