Atheist Fundamentalism

I've been seeing the term “Atheist Fundamentalism” pop up now and again in discussion with others on the topic, and I'm a little bothered by it, so I did a little research.

The word 'Fundamentalism' refers to a name for a movement in the American Presbyterian church in the late 19^th century. It was a reaction to a liberal modernist theology which was explicitly skeptical toward many of the dogmatic principles surrounding the life and preachings of Jesus Christ, especially the ones involving scientific or historical inaccuracies. The movement resulted in the outlining of “five fundamentals” which define what they believed it meant to be a faithful, fundamentalist Christian.

The Five Fundamentals were (so far as I can tell, accounts vary) as follows:

The Bible is literally correct.

Jesus was born of a virgin.

The crucifixion and death of Jesus was “vicarious expiation” or atonement for all sin.

The body of Jesus Christ was and/or will be physically resurrected.

The miracles performed by Jesus are historical truth, Jesus was divine.

Throughout the 20^th century the movement spread to other protestant denominations, and still exists strongly in believers (especially Lutheran and Baptist) who want to believe that the bible is the literal, historical word of God and that it is the only way God communicates with the faithful. It's basically a modern affirmation of Luther's sola scriptura or “scripture alone” and sola fide or the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

The word now basically refers to any ideological system which requires an unwavering adherence to a core set of specific, dogmatic tenets.

Now, most of us who have read the Bible know it's a massive work of literal contradiction and historical inaccuracy, but the only real relevance that has to a Christian fundamentalist is that it requires an amazing capacity for doublethink to believe that the inerrant word of God is rendered so because us mere mortals must constantly account for and correct errors in the work and call it interpretation.

Why would God need an editor?

Atheism has only one uniformity common to all atheists. It's not a rule or commandment to be followed, it's merely what it means to be an atheist. An atheist does not believe in the empirical existence of one or more gods as they are defined in the major world religions. It's as simple as: if you believe, you're not atheist; if you don't, you are. There is no confirmation, there is no entrance exam, and there is no saying “yeah, but those atheists aren't really atheists.” There is a spectrum of weak to strong atheism, but the umbrella similarity is as stated. (logically, if you actively believe there are no gods, you must also disbelieve in the existence of god(s))

The only fundamental interpretation of atheism is the definition of the word “atheism.”

Atheists don't need a specific set of dogmatic rules simply because there are none. There is no ambiguous holy book within which one might equally draw heretical conclusions by contradicting the accepted, orthodox version. We aren't afraid of losing members of the atheist flock to a rival organization or a competing orthodoxy. There is no overarching atheist ideology even if there are similarities in how most of us think and what some of us believe aside from our conclusions on the subject of god(s). We do not state, anywhere, that anybody who is atheist must submit to any ideological standard and there is no common belief that anyone in violation of the definition of atheism is inherently immoral, evil, wicked, lower, unsaved, unintelligent, or in any way not involved in the human experience. Frankly, most of us don't care if you're atheist or not. We discuss it because we want to learn about what people believe while making sure they aren't misinterpreting what we believe. We also want to discover other atheists who might like to know there are people like them out there and possibly shed new intellectual light on other things we might have in common. We talk about it because that's what people do regarding subjects that interest them.

The reality is that atheist fundamentalism just refers to any atheist, and is misapplied to those of us who enjoy talking about theology and the consequences to an ideology if you remove "god(s) exist(s)" as a premise. If you call one of us an atheist fundamentalist, you're basically just spouting a meaningless tautology that in no way resembles fundamentalism when applied to any religious group. There are atheists who evangelize and those who hate evangelism. There are socialist atheists, communist atheists, capitalist atheists, libertarian atheists, liberal and conservative atheists, atheists who believe in supernatural dualism, atheists who believe in materialistic determinism, atheists who see ghosts, and atheists who celebrate Christmas. There are gnostic atheists, agnostic atheists, faithful and faithless atheists, skeptical atheists and atheists skeptical of atheism.

There might even be an atheist out there who really does believe that Jesus was magic, born of a virgin, and came back to life after his death, but just doesn't believe that God exists either as that man or otherwise... and that person would be an atheist fundamentalist too.