Can anyone tell me what the passage from the "Dialektik der Aufklärung" actually says. I've been reading it for ten minutes and I can't work it out. I sincerely doubt its the translation either. I'm not trying to be glib but if someone is trying to draw some kind of intellectual equivalence between the enlightenment and the "mythical" they need to have some powerful arguments and the 'argument' seems completely opaque to me.

I think that people do mischaracterise passionate atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens because they isolate the militant style from its ultimate source. In a vacuum the militancy may seem irrational or deranged  - but in Dawkins' case its an extention of his work on evolution and zoology for Hitchens probably his Trotskyist abhorence of 'reaction'. Dawkins' passion is for the brilliance of evolution by natural selection and religious belief however mild, undermines the theory (however much people want to believe otherwise).

I am more sympathetic to Dawkins militant views on religion after reading The Selfish Gene and The Ancestors Tale than after reading The God Delusion.