Atheist Fundamentalism

[Esquilax]

That's a big if - and that is, I believe the point this moderate is trying to make. Most of the religious people don't the information to be the divine architect of reality and/or they don't believe it to contain ultimate moral goodness and/or they don't regard it as the backbone of their religious beliefs. What he'd probably argue is that the capacity to be the arbiter of religious instruction is what gives religion its true potency (bring morals to the scripture and not morals from the scripture).

Which is just perplexing, because it takes all of the actual content out of the religion and leaves just the name. If you get to pick and choose whatever you want out of a religion and leave the rest then you're just acting like a person, not with the kind of purpose or unification that would indicate group membership. It'd be like forming a club, but having no declared interests or tenets or requirements. You can call it a club, but that's just people meeting in a room. There's nothing differentiating the members of that club from a bunch of random people stuck in an elevator.

Moreover, if that really is Aslan's point, then the actual authority of religion to govern the lives of others, and especially the lives of those who don't believe in it is essentially nil, because there's no actual content to those beliefs beyond what any given adherent would believe anyway.

If you have to take away the defining aspects of religion, the tenets, in order to make it palatable and immune to atheist criticism, then there was nothing worthwhile in that religion to begin with.