Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press,192pp, £18.99
In his latest polemic, Terry Eagleton attempts to repel his atheist nemeses Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, or “Ditchkins” as he calls them, by reclaiming Jesus as a radical egalitarian. But the literary critic’s attempt to decouple Christian ethics from metaphysics is a doomed enterprise. The belief that Jesus was a great moral teacher, if not the son of God, is a canard that has afflicted modern minds from Thomas Jefferson onwards – moral injunctions such as “Love thine enemy” and “Take no thought for the morrow” are essentially predicated on a belief in imminent apocalypse and the prospect of eternal life.
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