Leap Of Faith Poem by gershon hepner

LEAP OF FAITH


A leap of faith leads you to idiocy,
in search of God without a video. See
Him in his works, believers say, and dump
your reason while with faith you highly jump.

Inspired by an article by James Wood in The New Yorker, August 31,2009 (“God in the Squad: A don defends the Supreme Being from the new atheists”) . He reviews Terry Eagleton’s “Reason, Faith, and Revolution, ” which attacks the new atheism as a kind of secular counter-fundamentalism and makes a sharp, limited case against Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, better than any previous book of its kind has. Eagleton shows little interest in the central claim of Christian belief that Christ was God incarnate. Jesus is less important to him as the Son of God than as a proto-Marxist. Heaven is not really about a world to come but about the transformation of the world we have. Eagleton recoils from the idolatrously human appropriations of the televangelist or the mullah. The Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston argues in “Saving God” that most religious belief is idolatrous. Johnston is humane and philosophically nimble, but his rarefied and almost scholastic definition of the ideally non-idolatrous God is not obviously very helpful to anyone but a rarefied scholastic. He Considers Wittgenstein’s view of religion as a form of life and John Rawls’s “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith.” If the new atheism offers an inadequate account of the varieties of religious experience, so does its most vigorous critic, Eagleton. What is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Wood writes:

For the new atheists, as for many contemporary American Christians, faith is assumed to be blind-an irrational closing of the eyes to evidence and reason, a leap of faith into an infinite idiocy.

8/29/07