For someone who enjoys mocking, Edwin Kagin manages to take himself and his overweening pretensions dreadfully seriously.
William Blake summed up this kind of nonsense 200 years ago; although, unlike Edwin Kagin, his targets had a modicum of intellectual coherence:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
You realize you could sing that to the tune of “Ride on, Ride on, in Magesty?”
So you can! It would take someone who sang in a choir to notice that 🙂
He’d have done that on purpose, no doubt.
I’ll bet that interviewer is a Christian. Kagan didn’t answer his questions, really, did he.
Blake, I mean.
So today it would be Christpher Hitchens and company.
Blake still holds true today.