Sometimes the way someone expresses him- or herself gives me much pleasure. This is one of those times. Someone named Terry Eagleton on the limitations of Richard Dawkins’ atheism is worth a read for this very reason – it’s beautiful stuff to read, and certainly on the money with regards to the limits of Dawkins’ comprehension of his pet subject.
Samples:
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist… He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
To say that [God] brought [the universe] into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need.
Jesus… was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris.
It’s wonderful, and it made me read it when I really should be working on stuff. You should go read it too. Here’s the link again. All this via Making Light which you should all be reading by now but I know you aren’t.