I say that if it was good enough for Richard Dawkins, it’s good enough for me and the Tulsa TA.

Fair enough. If all you were trying to do was generate discussion, then you succeeded. I didn’t spot the image reuse, but as I recall, it also strained credulity when Dawkins used it, and hence generated a lot of discussion.

So well done!

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/9307/goddelusionflyerel8.jpg

Different atheists actually have quite different positions on religion. There’s actually very little in Breaking the Spell, for example, that a non-fundie could disagree with if they actually took the time to understood it. By contrast, God Is Not Great has stuff in it that everyone can disagree with, theist and atheist alike.

Sam Harris does not believe that fundamentalist religion is “more correct.” He does point out that the fundies are more consistent than liberal believers (who seem to have no reservations making it up as they go, then claiming divine authority anyway), but this really is a trivial observation.

Trivial, yes. Accurate, no.

Harris’ “observation” completely ignores the way that religions, and interpretations of their sacred texts, change over time. There’s a simple thought experiment to demonstrate this: Would a 1st century Christian would recognise modern US evangelicalism as being in any way “Christian”?

Harris’ unquestioned assumption is that literal interpretations of sacred texts are the only consistent way to interpret them, as opposed to figurative interpretations. In this sense, he really does seem to think that fundamentalist religion is “more correct”.

Just looking at Christianity for the moment, it’s very easy to find examples of the New Testament using the Hebrew sacred texts figuratively. Indeed, it’s arguably far more common for a New Testament use to be figurative rather than literal. So in that sense, a literalist interpretation of the Christian sacred texts is not even close to being “consistent”.

(Incidentally, I did not mean to imply, by my use of quotes around “more correct”, that this was a quote from Harris. It’s not. Apologies if there was any confusion there.)

Incidentally, your parenthetical comment is also false for the most part: very few, if any, liberal religionists claim very much, if any, “divine authority”. There are some moderates that do, of course, but you said “liberal”.

A tendency to accept fundamentalist premises. Sam Harris is particularly famous for this; his position is that extremist religion is, in a sense, “more correct” or “more authentic” than moderate or liberal religion.

Sam Harris does not believe that fundamentalist religion is “more correct.” He does point out that the fundies are more consistent than liberal believers (who seem to have no reservations making it up as they go, then claiming divine authority anyway), but this really is a trivial observation.

How does one be a fundie atheist when atheism is merely the lack of belief in a god or gods?

I don’t use the term myself, but since you asked, let’s look into this a bit. Note that I’m not saying that any of this is true of you; I know nothing about you.

First off, the word “fundamentalist” is a word that has changed a lot in the 20th century. It originally referred to a 12-volume set of books called The Fundamentals, published in 1915.

The positions in these books are only superficially related to the beliefs of US Evangelical Christians, and not related at all to those of Islamists. So unless you are in the school of thought who believe that it’s only fair to call a religion or religious person “fundamentalist” if that’s how they describe themselves, it’s clear that “fundamentalism” doesn’t refer to The Fundamentals.

Secondly, many religious people (i.e. the moderate and liberal parts) go one step further than this; they feel that those usually referred to as “fundamentalists” have no more claim to the “fundamentals” of any religion than anyone else. As such, they argue that fundamentalism isn’t a belief, but an attitude.

For a moderate or liberal religious person, therefore, a “fundamentalist atheist” is an atheist who acts like a fundamentalist. Generally speaking, the sorts of things we’re talking about are:

- An apparent unwillingness to examine ones beliefs or non-beliefs critically.
- A tendency to accept fundamentalist premises. Sam Harris is particularly famous for this; his position is that extremist religion is, in a sense, “more correct” or “more authentic” than moderate or liberal religion.
- A tendency to utopianism; the position that “X” is the worst evil in the world, and many problems would be magically fixed if “X” were done away with.
- A tendency to engage in the sorts of tactics that fundamentalists would engage in. One atheist that I know criticised Richard Dawkins for maintaining that the existence of gods is a scientific question, and yet trying to settle the matter through popular books rather than scientific papers; a behaviour normally seen in pseudoscientists, not scientists. (I don’t think that this charge against Dawkins specifically is entirely fair, but it certainly made me stop and think.)
- The use of 9/11 as a generic “proof by example”. Claiming that religion in general is all to blame for it seems, to many people, to be no different from Pat Robertson’s claim that feminists, homosexual people and the ACLU were to blame.

Moderate and liberal religious people have a longer memory than many people give them credit for. They have bad cultural memories of people getting killed over who has the right and wrong religion. There is, therefore, something of a knee-jerk reaction when people act in an “I am right and you are wrong” kind of way.