“Respecting” faith while “appreciating” science

Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project is annoyed at (wait for it) “New Atheists.” He says members of the project have been “relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.”

The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists…

He doesn’t quote or name or link to any “New Atheists” doing this, so it’s hard to know if his description is accurate, but in any case…he seems to have the usual, and socially conventional, blind spot about “religious faith.” He seems, in other words, to be blind to the fact that to people who don’t have it, “religious faith” and fundamentalism aren’t all that different. To non-believers, the important difference is between religious belief and its absence, not degrees of fundamentalism.

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