n e u f n e u f: eagleton mops the floor with dawkins and hitchens

07 June 2009

eagleton mops the floor with dawkins and hitchens

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I am finding this series of lectures riveting, and not just because I'm having so much trouble hearing him. I don't know if you have limitations similar to mine at your desk, but I found that the best way to hear him since I have no external speakers and can't get the volume up any higher, was to go take the links from the Yale site and link them such that the newest version of Real Player will play the lectures. Seems to work much better sound-wise that way. Plus, when you get them from the Yale links you get to hear him in Q&A after each.

I don't know. He speaks sort of softly and mumbly and it clashes with the white noise from the waterfall not far out my window and it was a problem for me. So it was really worth my trouble to optimize this however I could. If you find yourself similarly handicapped, try using the links I made here.

It's really worth all the hours of listening carefully. He just creams them, especially Dawkins, who really is completely insufferable on the subject of religion, thoroughly obnoxious, so bad it almost puts me off my admiration for The Selfish Gene, and that's hard to do. This is an extremely worthwhile exercise in patience and attention because it is forever smacking us in the face, this polemic between religion and atheism, and religion and religion, and science and superstition, and, personally, I became terrified by Obama's address in Cairo in part because of how much religious mumbo-jumbo was in it. So Terry Eagleton is doing the most outstanding job of putting all these consequential squabbles in their proper perspective. Truly, it's well worth your time.

If anyone knows how to put these lectures into mp3 form so I can listen on my iTunes, where I have vastly better control of the volume, I would LOVE that. I feel as though I'm still missing chunks of it, even having succeeded in making a way with better sound. Anyway, already you have three options for it, any of which might do, depending on your hearing and your hardware and your background noise levels....

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