I’m sick to death of the whole Imus flap, so I thought I’d offer up nice, uncontroversial topic for discussion: atheism.
A popular frame among religionists (and even some non-believers) of late is that the current batch of prominent atheists, particularly Richard Dawkins, are espousing a sort of "atheist fundamentalism."
I call bullshit.
For the purpose of this discussion, I will define fundamentalism thusly:
Strict adherence to a set of fundamental ideas or principles, often accompanied by intolerance for divergent points of view.
Please feel free to interject if you feel this is an incomplete or flawed formulation. I want to agree on the semantics so that we can get to the substance of this argument.
Dawkins’ radicalism, specifically, his willingness to excoriate religion’s core mechanism -- faith -- is being conflated with ideological rigidity. Atheist fundamentalism would require, at the most basic level, positive certainty in the nonexistence of god(s). Dawkins has never made such a claim, nor have the vast majority of atheists I’ve met online or personally. The central tenet of atheism, incredulity, is the antithesis of dogmatic belief. Similarly, a deep understanding and commitment to scientific methodology -- the marriage of empiricism with skeptical logic and reason -- is not dogmatic, because it contains several carefully delineated means of falsifying unsupported ideas.
Religion, on the other hand, is an "ideology" about the nature of existence that operates absent, or in spite of evidence; it's truths are undisprovable; and it has no empirically demonstrable explanatory power. Religious ideas and claims should be treated like any other; they do not belong to a unique category exempt from criticism solely to spare believers from offense. Attempting to erode cultural acceptance of fallacious and irrational religious notions is not intolerance: the Earth is not flat, or the center of the universe, or 6000 years old. Calling a spade a spade, even by means of ridicule, is an entirely valid project.
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
The sharpness of Dawkins’ rhetorical barb rubs some people the wrong way and strikes many as counterproductive. Others still, including myself, find his outspokenness to be a refreshing break from the foolishness and absurdity we are regularly expected to suffer. A strong wit and sense of irony have their place in within this type of writing. In either case, these are stylistic preferences that do not speak to the premise of atheist fundamentalism.
Genuine allegiance to free expression requires that one must not only tolerate, but actively defend and expand people's rights to believe and speak as they will. That doesn’t mean, however, that one must or should abide the ideas themselves. No. If the ideas are garbage, intellectual honesty demands that one struggle against them. Extricating bad ideas is essential to any self-righting human system. The act is seldom clean or without difficulty, but that does not diminish its necessity.