/lit/ - Literature

>>20398841
Certainly, Dawkins cannot be gainsaid in pointing out that a purely literalist reading of Christian scripture is unsustainable. Of course, he lacks the sophistication to know which of his claims are really sound, which arguments solvent, which criticisms accurate, and so forth, and on the whole these pages read like a digest of material culled from atheist websites. I imagine, in fact, that this is where much of it comes from. So it is hardly surprising that he lazily adopts quite a few inane arguments along with the good ones, or that he assumes that fundamentalist literalism is the Christian norm. And obviously he is insensible to the amusing reality that most of the textual inconsistencies and historical dubia he cites were identified first by Christian scholars. But, again, whereas in the past these bumptious vacuities were annoying, here the effervescent banality of the prose renders it all somehow—how to say it?—renders it all somehow rather cute.

This is, after all, as much as one can ask. At this point in Dawkins’s career, no one could possibly want him to deviate from his accustomed channels. Taking all of his previous publications into account, it would probably be rather unsettling if he all at once began to exhibit philosophical gifts; it would seem eerily unnatural, like a kindergartener suddenly mastering quantum theory. And in this respect his new book does not disappoint. Despite decades of the best and most persistent efforts on the parts of his philosophically literate critics to disabuse him of his crudest conceptual errors and to rouse him from his dogmatic slumber, Dawkins has made not the slightest advance in dialectical subtlety. He is like a marvelously flawless diamond that the winds of time cannot blemish

>>20349337
>Smarter than Nietzsche
>Makes atheists seethe
>Is a committed socialist
The man has it all, God bless him

>>20112262
You haven't read David Bentley Hart. Start with The Experience of God then move on to the Beauty of the Infinite.

Perhaps no doctrine strikes non-Christians as more insufferably fabulous than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe: that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, that the universe verse languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward ward the Kingdom of God. Such language, of course, can strike even many Christians as mythological and dualistic. Some, certainly, seem to fear that if they lend too much credence to the idea of a fallen order actively opposed to God, they will thereby commit themselves to a form of fundamentalist literalism. Alternatively, there are those who suffer from a palpably acute anxiety regarding the honor due the divine sovereignty. Certainly many Christians over the centuries have hastened to resituate the New Testament imagery of spiritual warfare securely within the one all-determining will of God, fearing that to deny that evil and death are the “left hand” of God’s goodness in creation or the necessary “shadow” of his righteousness would be to deny divine omnipotence as well.

- David Bentley Hart, the Doors of the Sea

Was he right?

>>16876760
How can one man rape Dawkins so badly?

>One cannot, alas, remain an infant forever; we must all sooner or later put away childish things; toy-land, toy-land, once you pass its portals . . . (and so on). In the end, if we want to think deeply about ultimate questions, Dawkins is not the man for us. We all have to outgrow him and his kind and all that they represent. Happily, the buoyant callowness of his most recent book invites us to do just that. In a sense, it gives expression to a degree of self-awareness on Dawkins’s part that has never been conspicuous in his work in the past, and of which he had seemed until now incapable. It suggests that, at some level, he has learned to recognize his ideas as essentially idle diversions for unformed minds—something on the order of a birthday-party clowns or miniature ponies or balloon-animals—and in this way it gives us license to ignore him with more geniality than we might otherwise have been able to manage. He means well, after all; he simply is not—and never will be—a thinker for adults. So, though outgrow him we must, we need not do so with rancor or disdain. We can even, if we wish, pause one last time before departing the nursery to appreciate his awkward but earnest ingenuousness, smile at his artless games and rambling stories, and perhaps fondly pat him on the head. In that sense, this book is a gift.

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/richard-dawkins-discovers-his-ideal-idiom-and-audience/

Does anyone have read non-Catholic theologians?
I personally enjoy David Bentley Hart quite a bit.