Slap

He has, in the local vernacular "a face you'd never tire of slapping".

Eagleton on culture

Most aesthetic concepts are pieces of displaced theology, and the work of art, seen as mysterious, self-dependent, and self-moving, is an image of God for an agnostic age.

Eagleton

One couldn’t imagine the Queen’s chaplain asking you if you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. As the Englishman remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.

Dawkins & Eagleton

He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Marx

Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’,

Dawkins and Canterbury

Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. [Eagleton]

Fish on academic freedom

The special protection afforded to professors leaves them free “to articulate and critique more knowledgeable and complex assertions … in ways not possible on street corners or on television.” Now I have my elitist moments, but this is a bit much. Only professors, we’re being told, do real thinking; other people accept whatever they hear on TV and retail popular (but uninformed) wisdom on street corners. Thus while there is no reason to extend special protections in the work-place to non-academic speech — which is worthless — there is a good reason to extend them to the incomparably finer utterances of the professorial class.