Reason and Rudeness

In Reason, Faith and Revolution, Reflections on the God Debate, Terry Eagleton chastises ultra-orthodox rationalist critics of faith for too often buying their "rejection of religion on the cheap.”

An Irish Catholic Marxist, who is among the Anglo-American academic world's leading cultural theorists, Eagleton saves special scorn for the "ignorance, prejudice and intellectual indolence" of those who mock the Jewish and Christian Scriptures by creating a "worthless caricature of the real thing."

Two of his particular targets in the book—which comprises the Dwight H. Terry lectures that Eagleton delivered at Yale in 2008—are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. His deeper theme is the hyper-aggressive incivility, indeed barbed-wire intolerance, that characterizes the broader anti-theist movement.

Those of us who nurture the inexplicable addiction of reading newspaper letters to the editor can't help but notice the increased evidence of anti-theist incivility and intolerance on a daily basis. Nor can those with even semi-sharpened eyes fail to recognize the stupidity of snobbery in so many of the anti-theist letters published.

Yesterday’s Globe and Mail brought no relief, with not one but two letters spitefully denigrating, of all things, expressions of faith from the families of the 33 Chilean miners who were rescued after being trapped for 69 days in a desert gold mine.

The shorter of the letters is typical Globe reader ain't-I-cleverism from a Toronto woman who appears to believe she is the first to discover theodicy. The longer letter verges on the wicked in its castigation of a wife who urged her trapped husband to sustain faith in God until rescue came.

"Do people who place their faith in some arbitrary yet interventionist deity have no idea how offensive such statements are?" demands David Bright of St. Catharines, who goes on to argue that scientists, engineers, and government officials, not "cobblers elves" deserve the real credit.

Offensive? The woman's husband is trapped hundreds of metres underground. If she had called on the Big Dipper constellation to come down from the sky and use the power of its stars to scoop her husband out of the earth, she would not be fair game for such shameful, opportunistic sneering. She wants the man she loves brought home safe and sound. Who, with an ounce of compassion in his or her heart, could possibly be "offended" by whatever source of emotional and spiritual sustenance she calls upon to achieve that end?

Yet such is the irrationality of the rage against God exhibited by the current crop of anti-theists that any cheap shot rudeness, all lack of common human courtesy and understanding, is justifiable, even laudable, if it illuminates their posture as intellectually superior "rational" beings.

Such ideologues are the public spawn of the intellectual mutant hybrid that Terry Eagleton dubs "Ditchkins"—a conflation of Dawkins and Hitchens—and whom he dismisses as soft-bottomed couch warriors incapable of grasping the transformative power of love.

"Plenty of people repudiate God for eminently creditable reasons . . . Ditchkins reject him for reasons that are both boring and politically disreputable," Eagleton writes.

We might reasonably add insufferably sanctimonious as well.