A Tolkien criticism

This is part one of a two part post, containing an excerpt of a conversation
between me and another poster at the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
concerning Tolkien.  The second part of this post will be a reply from me to
this one with the background to this conversation.  Overall, the conversation
has evolved from flame bait with each of us baiting and goading the other into
something I thought might be of interest here.  Join us over in the Classic Film
group of the imdb if inclined, or post your responses here.

The first paragraph is the other poster who goes by agorelik quoting me as I
attempt to characterize his previous posts with a syllogism.  The second
paragraph is his response, which I found interesting, provocative, and worth
sharing here:

"Tolkien fans dress in costume 
Dressing in costume is stupid 
Ergo, Tolkien fans are stupid, 
and Tolkien is stupid. " 

No, I believe my argument is more subtle than that. I'm arguing that there is a
class of literature that is particularly susceptible to unwarrented and immature
worship. This literature tends to pander, usually overtly but also sometimes
covertly, to questionable traits within many readers. I think Tolkien, insofar
as his some of his writings are in that class, consciously participated in the
flaws of this type of literature.

I admit, usually these types of books are quite harmless. But, considering that
numerous people are taking large amounts of time with this type of book when
they could be reading better books in addition to their reading of Tolkien,
Herbert, Hubbard, etc., yes, I think these types of books are not good things.