Kristian Kulturkamp

Oh, those internets. Every now and then you stumble upon a site and you are reminded why God gave us the mili-industri-academe complex which, in turn, gave us all those systems of tube, which, voila, gives us this:

Following cultural studies, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, I believe it's important to understand the radically utopian impulses, unspoken yearnings, and unconscious desires that flicker through contemporary evangelical Christianity. Dawkins and Hitchens make short work of Christianity and all its bigoted, irrational works and ways, for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. But their analysis lacks subtlety, and their understanding of why so many are seduced by religion, especially in America, is millimeter-deep. To say that Christianity is a Bronze Age fable, a holdover from the primitive childhood of the species, may be deeply satisfying to those of us tending the Enlightenment flame in these new dark ages, but it's also thumpingly obvious. Harris and Hitchens may be right, but they're not terribly enlightening, at least to anyone not living on a flat earth, in a pre-Copernican cosmos.

Then, too, there's the obvious problem that Dawkins is a humorless prig, as sanctimonious in his unbelief as true believers are in their faith. (I'm with Cartman on this one.) He's on a Mission From God when it comes to prosecuting the atheist case---a one-man crusade so obsessively all-consuming it runs the risk of elevating his unfaith to a sort of faith. He makes an ornament of power, as the postmodern Marxist McKenzie Wark would say. Meaning: he so fetishizes the object of his critique that he ends up exalting it, giving it more power than it actually has. As for Hitchens, he's blind to the situational irony of his own position, namely, our most mordant critic of religion is, at the same time, a fervent fundamentalist on the question of Iraq. Buried under an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, he insists that our little imperial adventure in Iraq is a Just Cause; that all the blood and treasure spilled there is just the price of "sewing democracy" in the Middle East. If that isn't the limit case in blind faith, I don't know what is.

Read it all, and enjoy!