Responses to Fundamentalism

This guy, I think, has the right idea:

These Founders were not simply “taking” the Christian religion as they found it; they were actively involved in a project to make such kinder, gentler, more sober and rational.

We should do the same with Islam.

The interesting thing is that the founders of the United States didn't try to tell people to stop believing in God, they tried to appeal to a rational Christianity. Some of my atheist friends have a problem with this. Rational Christianity is not authentic, they say. But this confuses me -- if you don't believe in God, why would you care about authentic Christianity?

This goes to the heart of a central disagreement that I have with most atheists: they think that literal belief in a mythic God causes irrationality. But there's circular logic in there. Belief in a mythic God is supposed to cause irrationality, but a person has to be irrational to believe the myths in the first place.

I see it the other way around: irrationality causes belief in a mythic God. Its an important distinction, because atheists frequently act as though proving the non-existence of God rationally is somehow going to convince people to behave rationally, that if only we could get that one thing out of the way, everything else would follow. But to me, even if you did manage to convince people to stop believing in God, they would just start believing something equally irrational.