Luciferase,
I don't so much have a problem with Pomo's relativism as it's prevarications and quietism. I agree with Jameson who sees postmodernism as a malaise rather than a philosophy: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

When I said you have to offer more than cliches I was referring to the fact that Dawkins and co are seeking to institutionalise "apolitical atheism", to purge the system of "irrationalities". Like them or not, these irrationalities are part of the foundering efficacy of "democratic capitalism": free market ideology confounded by democratic/humanist reformism--a fight democracy is losing. The New Atheist push is just another path to privatisation, to libertarianism and its vaunted freedoms. I've asked time and again, what are the politics of the New Atheism? Technocratic apoliticalism is neoliberalism by default. Just as science, as you correctly say, "has no such responsibility attached to it", Ditchkins' liberal rationalism is equally oblivious. Just as science indifferently developed nuclear and biological weapons and the gas chambers, Ditchkins is similarly blasse about the material effects of market-driven scientific progress. But Ditchkins is worse than that; rationalism has evolved into liberal rationalism, getting its knickers in a not about religious influence, tax concessions and "irrational" thinking (freethought's cool so long as it's sterile) while it's absolutely serene apropos the dreadful inequalities and obscenities, domestic and collateral, that our elitist, rapacious and vainglorious society is predicated on. Instead of pointing the bone offshore at benighted Muslims, what about an appraisal of Western lifestyles and say the destructive irrationality of consumerism?

tbc

cont..

And then, following Dawkins, you prate about religion and philosophy as though they were no more than fairy tales we should be disabused of. As though the whole human race and all it's generations of geniuses were the dupes of nothing more than a perennial delusion and wishful thinking--and Dawkins, without a clue, sees through all. As if today's commodified pop-religion is all there is to theology and the religious experience. Similarly, postmodernism has administered the kybosh to philosophy! Do you really think all those great thinkers and mystics, whom Ditchkins has never read, whose learning you would struggle to fathom, devoted their lives and conceived their absolute convictions based on nothing more than flagrant conceit? An embarrassingly obvious hoax?
Even supposing Dawkins is correct in his ignorant and simplistic deconstruction of religion, at the very least his own conceit, to paraphrase Heidegger, is that rather than following an intelligible progression from superstition to reason, his ascendency is part of a contingent succession of superstition, the most stubborn of which may prove to be that which now presents itself as the most rational.
But I need much more time than I have to begin to make my case here, which is, ironically, a case for free thinking.

Poirot,
I certainly don't defend what passes for religion. And it's in a similarly symbiotic relationship with hegemony as science. I find both sides "contrived, patched-up and sadly wanting [mainly in self-reflexiveness]".

Squeers,

I liked your bit on the "...great thinkers and mystics...whose learning you would struggle to fathom [who] devoted their lives and conceived their absolute convictions...."

I'm often overtaken by the notion that there is "something I'm not getting" about religion and religious experience. I'm drawn to the sacred space of churches and the grammar of the architecture, but no matter what I read or to whom I listen, I can't accept the premise or penetrate the mystery - and my curiosity is piqued for the very reasons you mention above.

But I often feel much less astute than people take me for, as if I'm missing some vital point of departure that would reveal why I'm attracted to the wisdom of religion, yet reject its irrational dogma.

I downloaded and just finished listening to the Dawkins-Pell debate. I was embarrassed how unprepared Pell was. After all, Dawkins did not say anything he has not said or written before, and there are certainly counter-arguments - convincing to ones, unconvincing to others - that could have been presented. Probably Pell did not have time to study Dawkins’ books, and he certainly is not an expert in the field of science that Dawkins bases his anti-God, anti-religion arguments and attacks on. Then why did he accept invitation to debate Dawkins? If Dawkins’ arguments were based on sources written in Hungarian then surely Pell should have chosen somebody, who could read Hungarian (and could somehow match Dawkins’ undeniable debating skills) to represent his side of the argument. Replace here “read Hungarian” by “was a scientist” or better, philosopher of science.

Poirot, thought you might like this from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature - Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.

"Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness.

They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.

It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view.

It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world."

For anyone who's interested the link I provided was not what I thought it was. This is the essay I had in mind: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jameson_postmodernism_consumer.htm
though of course it's already dated, but it's much more readable.