Atheist Fundamentalism

[Esquilax]

There is a fundamental misunderstanding among these critics of religion in that they believe, first and foremost, that people get their values, their morals from their scripture, when in reality the exact opposite is true. You bring your morals and your values to the scriptures; you don’t extract them from them. You learn that on day one of the study of religion — day one, that’s the first thing that you learn!

Funny that he skips over what happens next: you bring your own morals to your religion... which then promptly tells you that your moral judgments are fallible, flawed and inherently inferior where they contradict the religion.

It's very easy to assert that one brings one's own morality to religion, but to ignore the part where that very same religion spends much of its time devaluing independent thought and laying out the many punishments to be inflicted upon the person who follows their own moral judgment instead of the pre-set religious moral judgment is fundamentally dishonest.

And to a larger extent it indicates a real fallacy in the New Atheist movement, that is part and parcel of the lack of a religious education among these critics of religion, which is that they tend to read the scriptures more literally than any literalist I know. And when confronted by some particularly savage line in the scriptures, their conception forces an understanding [that says], “If you do not follow that little bit of savagery, then you’re not really a Muslim, you’re not really a Christian, you’re not really a Jew.”

You know who else makes that argument? Fundamentalists. And that’s why this notion that what these guys represent is a new kind of fundamentalism, an atheist fundamentalism, is so real. Because that’s precisely what’s being exhibited here in their utter sense of certainty; in their literalist, simplistic, exoteric, absolutist interpretation of religion; in their inability to recognize the diverse ways in which religion is lived rather than what we would refer to as top-down religiosity.

Yawn. A strawman. At least for me, the reason I'm more inclined to accept a literal interpretation of a given religious book is because the only thing we can be certain of is the words in the book. We can't ask the author what he meant, and we certainly can't entreat god for clarification, as should be evidenced by the many, many different and conflicting interpretations of religion that exist. The only solid thing that religion can provide is the words written in their holy books, and every divergence from that brings the interpreter further away from the one objective thing within the religion.

What reason do I have to entertain some random guy's personal interpretation of scripture? No input from the writer, no special insight into the true meaning, and no way to demonstrate accuracy over and above any other interpretation... why would I do it?