Catching up from last week. Yes, we talk Engame. No, we don’t spoil it. Also, Tony has exciting news! And William… also has things to say. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
Hat persons, What’s the difference between a well dressed man on a tricycle and a poorly dressed man on a bicycle? –Azuretalon
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Tony,
I highly recommend Terry Eagleton’s book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution” for its critique of Dawkins and Hitchins, who Eagleton refers to in most of the book as “Ditchins” (which is one my favorite things). To give a sense of the book and Eagleton’s writing style, I quote his description of what he’s trying to do:
“Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology. I therefore have a good deal of sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics. But it is also the case, as this book argues, that most such critics buy their rejection of religion on the cheap. When it comes to the New Testament, at least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion’s own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood’s opinions of it.
It is with this ignorance and prejudice that I take issue in this book. If the agnostic left cannot afford such intellectual indolence when it comes to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, it is not only because it belongs to justice and honesty to confront your opponent at his or her most convincing. It is also that radicals might discover there some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where the political left stands in dire need of good ideas. I do not invite such readers to believe in these ideas, any more than I myself in the archangel Gabriel, the infallibility of the pope, the idea that Jesus walked on water, or the claim that he rose up into heaven before the eyes of his disciples.
If I try in this book to “ventriloquise” what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists, I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy. But the Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions—death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like—on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling shyness to come to an end.”
I recently also cut the cable cord and am saving about the same amount of money. Don’t have Hulu yet, but am subscribing to YouTube TV which actually means I can watch most TV channels live as well. Mostly have YouTube TV because of soccer and cricket watching available for my husband.
Britbox reminded me to recommend (maybe again) “The Detectorists.” I watched it on Amazon Prime.
I think that the one person split into two myth (which appears in Plato’s Symposium) is not heteronormative. Some of the original people were hermaphrodites (and became heterosexual men and women) and some were male (and became homosexual men) and some were female (and became homosexual women).