Religious Moderates, Phooey Phooey Phooey!

They're so icky!

They ask high-sounding and dumb questions like, "How can religious societies become less fundamentalist?" and they clearly are not the least bit interested in any sensible replies, such as, "By becoming less religious." Not interested in people pointing out that less religious IS less fundamentalist and vice-versa. They make these RIDICULOUS, STUPID comparisons of fundamentalism and atheism, even going so far as to insist that is such a thing as "fundamentalist atheism," and aren't the least bit interesting in hearing the plain truth, that "moderate" religion is always a potential breeding-ground for fundamentalism and fanaticism, and that atheism almost never is. [PS, 11 June 2017: Clearly, I was wrong about fanatical atheism. At the time I wrote this essay, I knew much less about Dawkins and Harris and New Atheists in general. I had read 2 books by Dawkins on biology, The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale. When I first heard that there was a thing called New Atheism and that Dawkins was its foremost proponent, I assumed that his writing on atheism and religion would be brilliant, informed and reasonable, just like his work on biology. Of course, this assumption was about as wrong as an assumption could be.]

These awful dingbats. Complaining about "secularists" telling them what to believe. Acting as if they're being oppressed by fanatical atheists, when in reality all that has occurred is that opposing viewpoints are gradually being tolerated. 1,600 years went by in the West with no debate about some very basic things. 1,600 uninterrupted years of anything will get people pretty used to it. But, no, believers, disagreeing with you, calling for an end to your privileged position, even (*sob!*) making fun of you, is not persecuting you.

And no, virtually no atheists anywhere want the West to emulate North Korea in any way.

It's so easy to refute them on all the elaborate mental apparatus with which they interpret the world so as to save a place for belief in God in it. Of course, if you actually broach the question of God's existence -- there's no good reason to do that -- but if you do, more likely than not the "moderate" nincompoop will smugly, triumphantly claim that they define "God" completely differently than you assumed they did.

Which might even actually be true. But was there some fucking reason we were supposed to know which particular weak semantic shell game a particular silly-ass "moderate" was going to play when the subject of God came up? No. There was not. (Another good reason not to touch that subject.)