Fundamentalism

There are self-described fundamentalist Jews and Muslims and Christians, probably some Buddhists and Confucianists, too.So why not atheists? It's interesting that the ones who get called "fundamentalist atheists" generally recoil from the name and insist that it's not proper. They've got no ["holy" book] to be fundamental about. It took me a while to figure out why I considered some atheists fundamentalists. It was a matter of figuring out the commonality with other fundamentalist groups. And it's actually a rather simple distinction.

The difference is that the fundamentalist atheists have a mentality that everyone is either with them or against them, with them or part of the problem, with them or a wooly-minded-anti-science-unicorn-rider. If you read the comments on the posts I linked to yesterday, you'll see a great deal of that. They've even got the "no true atheist" bit going on, though they call the "non-true" atheists "Neville Chamberlain" atheists. How is this any different from "You don't interpret things the way we do! You're not a true [Christian|Muslim|Jew|Aiel|Buddhist|Confucianist|etc.]!" ? Oh, but they're not fundamentalists. Oh, no. They're just right and everyone else is wrong. Yuh-huh. Sure.

Even more interesting, they blame all the evils of society on religion. Not just some, but all. Every so often they'll preface this with "Oh, atheists aren't perfect, but..." Sounds a lot like the Christian rubric of "Not perfect, just forgiven." There are probably equivalences in other religions as well, but I haven't encountered them yet. And when a religious person actually does something good, the attitude is that this is always in spite of said person's religion. They are incapable of acknowledging that something religious could have a positive impact. Rather like Christians who blame everything on the eVIL, godless [commies|atheists|oppositional Christian sects|homosexuals|etc].

There's really only one important distinction (and it's not the belief or lack of belief in a deity). Religious fundamentalists embrace the title. Atheist fundamentalists deny and shy away from the title. This does suggest they have a bit more sense than their religious counterparts, but they're still fundamentalists: exclusionary and intolerant of disagreement with their dogma. Their dogma may not come from a book, but that doesn't change anything.

Note: Many of them do claim that if they found evidence of a god's existence, they would drop their atheism and become believers. Their definition of "evidence" seems to be that the god emerges and presents itself to them directly and performs a miracle of some sort. This may be the kind of god that some fundamentalists believe in, but it isn't the kind that the vast majority of people who consider themselves religious or spiritual describe. Which renders this claim irrelevant as far as mainstream religion/spirituality goes. Rather like the Creationists who refuse to believe in evolution until they see a frog turn into a cat, or some such nonsense.