Fundamentalist atheism

In my last post I gave some general conditions for what I think constitutes fundamentalist behaviour. Here I would like to list some behaviour from atheists which I think fits the bill. NB Dawkins is not guilty of every one of these points, but every one of them has been committed by someone.

You may be a fundamentalist atheist if…

• You claim that morality is entirely relative to culture and time, and therefore that there is no basis for trans-cultural or trans-temporal moral criticism – and yet your main complaint against Christianity is that in the past it has made people do things they shouldn’t do.
• You regard theists as hopelessly irrational for believing in an undetectable entity (God), while you yourself can believe in an infinite number of undetectable entities (a multiverse) without batting an eyelid.
• You call yourself a ‘freethinker’, yet you believe those very thoughts of yours to be identical with, or reducible to, electrical and chemical processes in the brain which are entirely determined by antecedent conditions and the ‘immutable’ laws of nature. Free?
• Apparently, asserting the eternality of a transcendent mind is deeply explanatorily unsatisfactory – yet asserting the eternality of matter, energy and laws of nature is fine.
• You actually think that dismissing the question of why anything exists at all will make it go away.
• You can look at the systematic elimination of priests and obstinate believers in 1790s France, in Soviet Russia and during the Cultural Revolution in China and, with a straight face, claim that in no case did institutional atheism have anything to do with it. At the same time, the fight in Northern Ireland between those who want to be British and those who want to be Irish is entirely the fault of religion.
• You talk about Richard Dawkins in the way Roman Catholics talk about the Pope.
• You believe in the existence of ‘memes’. Bonus points if everyone’s ideas but your own are explicable as such.
• When engaged in a debate with a theist, your time and energy is divided roughly as follows:
  - 70% telling your opponent how irrational he/she is
  - 25% telling your opponent how rational you are
  - 5% making rational arguments[1]
• You think that the mere mention of some comedy entity like flying spaghetti or invisible unicorns is supposed to discredit belief in God. Bonus points if you’ve made your own one up for this purpose.
• No amount of evidence would make you believe in the resurrection, and no evidence at all is needed for you to believe in abiogenesis. We’re talking about life from non-life in both cases.
• You believe that the early church picked Matthew, Mark, Luke and John out of some impossibly large number of potential Gospels purely in order to tell a convincing enough story to gain power, and yet was too dumb to realise that these accounts hopelessly contradict each other (apparently).
• You believe there are no such things as beliefs.[2]
• You think the Bible is worse than Mein Kampf.[3]

I may or may not list more of these as they come to me.

[1] http://mattghg.blogspot.com/2007/02/craigwolpert-debate.html
[2] http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/materialism-eliminative/
[3] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/05/iowa_state_promotes_atheist_pr.html
http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Words-Origins-Religious-Violence/dp/1591022843