“Fundamentalist atheist” is a term I hear thrown around every so often. It’s almost always flung by a Christian fundie who is upset about something, probably yet another perceived persecution.

When the term crops up, usually a few atheists try to figure out whether such a beast is even possible. Let’s look at the concept and see if there’s anything to it.

The first thing to do is to try to come up with a generic definition of a fundamentalist. These are the characteristics I’ve identified. Feel free to add your own. I’d like to try to keep this list focussed on the core characteristics that they all seem to share, not peripheral characteristics that aren’t so defining or not all of them have. Here’s my first attempt…

A fundamentalist has these core characteristics:

1. Rabid adherence to and faith in a rigid dogma
2. Inflexibility
3. Intolerance
4. Illogic
5. Anti-intellectualism

Now let’s take these characteristics and see if they might be applied to some of the more enthusiastic atheists.

1. Rabid adherence to and faith in a rigid dogma

There is no dogma of atheism. It is simply a lack of belief. There is no evidence for a god, so atheists live their lives as if a god doesn’t exist. This is different from making the affirmative statement “God does not exist”.

For all practical purposes, God does not exist. If there is not now nor has there ever been any evidence for a god, then in practical, real-world terms, it is identical to making the statement that a god does not exist. But actually making the statement that “God absolutely does not exist” seems (to me at least) to be making as much of an unsupportable claim as saying that a god does exist.

This is where the Invisible Pink Unicorn is useful. We don’t know that it doesn’t exist somewhere. All we know is that there is no evidence that it does, and we can go about our business as if it doesn’t.

For this category, then, I suppose anybody who makes the affirmative statement “I know God does not exist” could qualify as having faith in a dogma. Note that this category requires not just faith in a dogma, but rabid adherence to that dogma. You need both to qualify for this requirement.

2. Inflexibility

Every atheist I have met has at least expressed a willingness to change his opinion on various freethought topics if given sufficient evidence. I haven’t tested them, so I’ll just have to take their word for it.

There could easily be atheists who are inflexible here. I just haven’t seen inflexibility in action.

3. Intolerance

This would be an intolerance for other people and other beliefs.

Don’t confuse impatience and frustration (two of my traits) with intolerance. I don’t give a hoot what another person believes or does (except where that person’s actions interfere with society).

Some fundamentalist Christians, on the other hand, can’t stand the mere idea that homosexuals exist.

This category, then, requires an actual hatred for the existence or thoughts of another group of people. I haven’t seen this trait in atheists, but there could always be a few out there.

4. Illogic

This is an inability to use logic, which results in irrational beliefs. Christian fundies have this in spades.

You’d be hard pressed to find this trait in atheists. Most atheists arrive at their rejection of theism through a logical thought process.

One place you might see this trait is if they have an over-attachment to a philosophy, which causes blind spots in their logic. I have seen people who think that libertarianism or objectivism can do no wrong. I don’t think this leads to the whoppers of illogic that you get with Christians, but it is a possible vulnerability.

5. Anti-intellectualism

This is a celebration of under-education. It’s one of the defining characteristics of most fundies. Even the ones with PhDs have to get their degrees at Bible colleges in order to protect their deluded worldview from being challenged.

I do not see this in atheists. Period. There’s bound to be one or two out there. There’s always somebody living at the extreme end of the bell-shaped curve. I sure haven’t seen them.

Other Opinions

I wanted to see what other people thought, so I took a quick look at the Wikipedia Fundamentalism page. They have a section on that page called Non-Theistic Fundamentalism. It has some interesting paragraphs:

Some refer to any literal-minded philosophy with pretense of being the sole source of objective truth, as fundamentalist, regardless of whether it is usually called a religion

“[T]he sole source of objective truth” is an interesting statement. I can’t think of anything other than science as being capable of giving us an objective truth. However, there are two important distinctions:

a. Science is a process. Therefore it isn’t dogma, because the answers can change.
b. Science can never give us “Truth” with a capital T. We lack divine knowledge. We are at the mercy of our senses and our instruments. The best we can do is get at something approaching the truth. Hopefully very close, but we’ll never achieve total knowledge (“The Truth”).

Therefore, if I say “all we can know must come from science”, that is not a fundamentalist statement.

Wikipedia also says:

Others, including the blogger Austin Cline of atheism.about.com, argue that fundamentalist atheism does not exist, because it cannot exist on the grounds that atheism has no fundamental doctrines, and that fundamentalism is not a personality type.

True, but aren’t certain personality types drawn to fundamentalism? Couldn’t somebody with a fundie personality latch on to atheism? I did meet a new atheist who had recently thrown off the shackles of religion. He was angry that he had been deluded by it all of those years. I wonder if he will take that anger and use atheism as a weapon to swing back at the people who he feels oppressed him all of those years. Would he count as a fundamentalist atheist?

The high-profile atheists are the ones who are most often labeled as fundamentalists. Wikipedia says this about Richard Dawkins:

Some atheists and those called “evolutionists” by creationists, for example, have been called fundamentalists due to their outspokenness and high level of certainty. On the Canadian talk show The Bigger Picture, the biologist Richard Dawkins said that his critics mistook passion for fundamentalism. He has also stated that, unlike religious fundamentalists, he would willingly change his mind if new evidence challenged his current position.

Clearly in this case, the charge of fundie atheism is unfounded. This illustrates, in fact, that the vast majority of times that label is thrown that it is done so unjustifiably by people who feel threatened by our outspokenness.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the requirements that must be met to make oneself a fundamentalist atheist are quite hard to achieve. I suspect that maybe a few people, out of the millions of atheists in the U.S., could qualify. I don’t know for a fact that they exist, but I think they could. Maybe they’re riding the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

In honor of my recent controversial statement that all creationists are either extremely ignorant or extremely stupid, I present for those creationists an illustrated guide to their choices. Please choose one.

Would you rather be ignorant…

…or stupid?

Special Bonus

Unrelated to the above, I also found these two images at Creative Disease and thought I’d share them:

In a comment on that last video, Arkonbey recommended a video by Marcus Brigstocke. It’s absolutely worth watching, so I thought I’d elevate it to the top for everyone to see.

I then went shopping around on YouTube for another video worth posting. Here’s Penn & Teller plus Michael Shermer.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. There are a lot of good posts. I want to call your attention to three.

No More Mr. Nice Guy has a belated look at the War on Christmas, but he says it’s actually part of a larger War on Knowledge. He asks:

Could it be that the true believers dimly sense at some subconscious level that the elaborate and beautifully constructed edifice which is their religion is a house of cards built on quicksand?

KC at Bligbi makes some excellent points about why non-believers need to make some noise, in Speak Now, Speak Loudly, and Speak Often. She says:

We should speak now, because remaining silent allows the opposition think they’re unopposed.

We should speak loudly, because speaking softly allows the opposition to think we are unsure.

We should speak often, because while we may be few in number, we are not alone in our opposition to those who would prefer us to speak softly or remain silent.

Finally, in what I consider to be the best post of this carnival, Rastaban at Atheology covers Mike Huckabee’s recent theocratic statement, then he gives us a bit of history of the Godless Constitution. Read Huckabee and the U.S. Constitution. Also be sure to read the first comment on that article for a good balancing view.

When you’re done with those, check out the rest of the articles.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up at Axis of Jared, and it’s an especially good one! When I let you know about these, I like to point out at least one good post that you should read, in case you don’t have time for them all. There are just too many good posts this week. Here are my favorites. Consider reading at least these.

Let’s start off with something fun. Polite Company has a hilarious script showing what happened when God got Mary “in trouble”. And he didn’t even have the decency to make an honest woman of her! You should consider performing this play at your next church event.

The next two are philosophical. The Barefoot Bum talks about what “The New Atheism” is really about. He says:

The New Atheism is anti-religion. Not because religion is always bad, or because everything bad comes from religion, but you can use religion to “prove” anything, good, bad or indifferent. It denies and actively erodes the skepticism and criticality that is each person’s only fundamental protection against being exploited and oppressed by lies and bullshit.
…
But, bad as religion is, it cannot be eliminated by force. Religion is, in a sense, self-slavery, and you cannot free a person who has enslaved himself.

Martin Wagner, at The Atheist Experience, has a profound insight into religion’s hold on people, in his article “Is faux-intellectualism part of religion’s appeal?” This might explain the behavior of one of our recent prolific commenters:

It would seem that, to a least a percentage of its followers, Christianity appeals because it provides them with a vehicle for intellectual poseurdom. Without anything in the way of scientific education or expertise behind them, creationists are unique among cranks in the perverse confidence with which they lash themselves to the mast of their stale and long-debunked claims. They’ll confidently and even condescendingly inform experts with Ph.D’s and 25 years of field work that there is no evidence at all to support what is probably the best-supported theory in all science. This goes beyond mere stupidity or even run-of-the-mill ideological denialism into a bold and deliberate repudiation of knowledge and even reality itself.

Speaking of our recent troll, Shalini tells people like him “For what seems like the millionth time, I am *not* a Darwinist”. Here’s just one pithy excerpt:

A lot of Darwin’s ideas are outdated and plain wrong. Therefore, when the ID-iots trumpet their silly list of ‘scientists who are skeptical of Darwinism’, it is clear that they are either liars or people who have no clue about what they are attempting to argue against.

The last article I want to call your attention to is not part of the Carnival. While I was over at Shuffl reading his Carnival entry, I found an even better article: “If Religions Made Bras”. For example:

Fundamentalist Christian “Original Sin Bra” “The Fall” came when Eve ate the apple and so there isn’t anything to be done about it since bosoms are evil, evil, wicked, satanic, vile, and against biblical family values, but our bra is richly padded and embroidered with biblical passages to make you look more upright and smug and yet pleasing to the eyes of the men God has sent to bless your life.

ID Bra
1 One size fits all creationists. (from Frank J.)

2 It supports nothing, but does a pretty good job of covering it up. (from Jim Lovejoy)

3 It provides no support and comes in two sizes: myth and misses! (from Homer Sapiens).

4 Actually you can order it, but it falls apart on examination. (from Walter Bushell)

What? No Duggar Family bra?

Lastly, for your entertainment pleasure, I present the ID Creationist Bingo card. Use it the next time an ID-iot leaves a comment here. I had to shrink it to get it to fit within my margins. You can find the easier-to-read original over at Skeptico. This was suggested by one of the commenters to Shalini’s post.

I like old weird films. I have no idea why. I guess it’s just a personality defect. I recently came across one that fits both the season and this blog perfectly. Supposedly it was originally called “The Santa Claus Suit”, but the beginning of the film is missing, so I can’t be sure.

I’m guessing this thing is from the 1950s, because they would have needed a lot of cheap content for TV in those days. It’s ten minutes long. I hope you can spare the time to watch it with us.

It’s about two puppets, Stripe and Spot. Stripe is using his brain and questioning dogma, instead of just taking everything on faith. If Stripe would just follow things to their logical conclusion, he could become an atheist. Instead, he fails the final test and retreats into the demon-haunted world.

(YouTube page is here)

The filmmakers clearly had an agenda here. Stripe says that if he can’t see it, it isn’t real. This is the sort of faux atheism argument put forth by theists who want to disprove atheism.

What Stripe should have been saying wasn’t “If I can’t see it, it isn’t real.” Instead, he should have been saying “If I can’t measure it, it isn’t real.” All of the examples given in the film (electricity, wind, heat, and God) can be subjected to this test.

Don’t pollute. (via Too Many Tribbles and Astrazoic)

The October 14th edition of Carnival of the Godless is up over at The Skeptical Alchemist.

The carnival has several good articles on the subject of morality. That’s one of my minor interests/pet peeves (depending on how you look at it). The theists have managed to sell their version of events to most people, which is that modern morality derives mostly from religion. Since they’ve managed to convince most people of that premise, that makes their secondary point easier to sell: That atheists have no morals and/or a society without religion would be immoral.

That’s absurd, of course. I maintain the opposite. Religion was developed by early societies as a way of enforcing the morality that they developed. Threatening transgressors with the wrath of an angry god, from whom they cannot hide, is an excellent method of enforcing moral conduct.

In other words, the theists are not going back far enough. While it is true that many societies codified religious morality into their legal systems, it is those religions in turn that codified earlier legal systems into their morality!

One aspect of morality is altruism. Altruism has been documented in numerous animal species, so there is clearly an evolutionary advantage. That means at least part of our morality is coded into our genes. God had nothing to do with it.

Dorid, over at The Radula, has an excellent article about primitive altruism in fundies and other species, specifically the slime mold. This article is my favorite of all the articles participating in this week’s carnival. After you’ve read that, then head on over to The Skeptical Alchemist to check out some of the others.