Evangelical / Fundamentalist Atheism as an ad hominem

[varkam]

I've written about this sort of thing previously, but some of the things that I've read recently made me think that it might be useful to open another discussion on this sort of topic.

I've been coming to R/T for a while, and I don't post unless I think I have something worthwhile to say, which translates to me spending most of my time lurking around here. There is, however, one thing that I'd like to address, and that is the use of the terms fundamentalist or evangelical atheism.

To begin, here are a couple of observations:

The terms are almost exclusively used by theists.
The terms are almost exclusively used in a context of expressing distaste.

Now, being that this is a liberal message board, it's perhaps not a shocker that most of us have a dislike of fundamentalists and evangelicals, as (among other things) they tend to be extremely conservative in their politics.

I'm sure that most of that seems readily apparent to you, but I wanted to flesh it all out in order to make the case that using those terms is more of an ad hominem attack or inflammatory bomb-throwing than anything else.

Perhaps some people who use these terms don't mean them as an attack, but rather mean to engage in honest communication. However, when you use those terms you're pretty much screwing the pooch in terms of dialoge with someone else as you're essentially calling them names at the outset. Sometimes, people use these terms even over the objection of atheists, as for one there is the implication that atheism is a religion - which it is not.

It seems to me that there are better ways to describe certain behaviors instead of using the monikers of evangelical or fundamentalist. Strident, assertive, stubborn, or even assholery are just a few terms that come to mind that don't carry near the same amount of baggage that the aforementioned terms do.

Some of you might be tempted to think "But atheism really is a religion!" Of course, calling atheism a religion is really just a dressed-down version of the evangelical / fundamentalist attack. That, however, is another post entirely.

I understand that there is a lot of emotional baggage attached to this debate, and that for many people their religion is a part of their identity. That being said, I can see why when people attack their religion, some will feel that they personally are being attacked. In my view, it is quite legitimate to assert flaws with a system of thought without projecting those same flaws onto people who think differently.

At least, that's my .02.