Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.”
“Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.”
“The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.”
“Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.”
“All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.”
“[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.”
“An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.”
“All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins—is talking out of the back of his neck.”
“[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.”
“What is one to make of the tirades of those who appear to know little of politics beyond their own invaluable right to publish their stuff and say what they think?”
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Book Keywords:
individualism, rationalism, knowledge, christianity, tradition, god, optimism, insightfull, right-to-speech, scientism, faith, communication, zealousness, authority, linguistics, progress, politics, instrumentalism
