Beyond the Crusades
by Michael Paulkovich
Excerpt from Foreword
by Robert M. Price
Michael Paulkovich’s Beyond the Crusades is the latest representative of an important genre: the openly polemical treatise against the Christian religion. There is no pretense here of detached, scholarly objectivity, as if the book were a study of exotic butterflies or Wooly Mammoths. In fact, one suspects that such polite critiques of Christianity are no less polemical in intent (as well as in effect) than Paulkovich’s, but they are trying to hide it. Paulkovich’s cards are on the table. He means to join battle. And why not?
Our author is a NASA scientist, by no means some irate crank as implied in the phrase “village atheist.” He has done a very impressive amount of research, so don’t get me wrong. This is a “scholarly” book, but not in the antiseptic sense of pretentious ivory-tower “professionalism.” Why is this important? It matters because it demonstrates that one need not be a member of an academic elite (though of course, in his professional field he is) in order to take a searching, unblinking look at the facts in the case of the Christian religion. The vitiating problems plaguing the religion are not all that esoteric, except in the sense that the clergy (and mainstream publishers, who know where their bread is buttered) do not particularly want them exposed. If the fatal flaws of Christianity were esoteric and arcane, they probably would not be so powerful. Think of Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God...
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Published by American Atheist Press, Cranford, NJ.