Atheist fundamentalist - the empty insult

I really enjoy The Economist. And now, they've had a great piece on why it's silly to call an atheist a fundamentalist. They write:

First and most salient, as Oxford's Tim Garton Ash writes, "there are no al-Darwinia brigades making bombs in secret laboratories in north Oxford." Yes, sigh, many atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennet are just as convinced that there is no God as Osama bin Laden is convinced that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger. On one hand you have faith that makes people fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors (in church), stone adultresses, outlaw certain forms of consensual sex or even just make it impossible to buy beer on Sunday in some states. On the other hand there is the atheist "faith" that makes people write smug op-eds, put ads on buses (see photo), file frivolous lawsuits against nativity scenes on public property, and the like. Show me what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done.

Thank you! The author goes on to write about certainty. Sure, Dawkins and Dennett (and I) are quite certain that we are right. There is/are almost surely no god/s. But we have the weight - or should I say total emptiness - of evidence on our side that suggests that there is no such thing as the supernatural. It, and all of the gods its created, are generated by the gray matter between our skulls and our collective celebrations of these figments. As the article reminds us, the all-powerful creator of the universe could really clear it all up for us doubters with some simple acts. It could tell us all the 30-digit prime number Sam Harris wrote down or...I don't know...just appear to all humans on planet Earth at the same time and make a clear argument about why, say the Bible, is the ultimate guide to the universe. Right? It really is that simple.

So if I'm a fundamentalist then I'm a fundamentalist about some very basic things involving what is real. And my baloney detection kit is picking up nothing about an existing god or gods and a lot about people deluding themselves together to generate meaning, purpose, and happiness. But don't bother comparing me to the Taliban fighter who splashes acid in little girls' faces because she has gone to school and hopes to continue to go to school. We can barely measure the ethical distance between Richard Dawkins who says believers are deluded and the Ayatollah Khomeini who put a fatwah on Salman Rushdie. This says nothing of course of the innumerable holy warriors who, for centuries, fought and killed for their gods.

We may have certainty (a tentative certainty in some respects). But it is not the same as the blindly faithful conviction of the religious fundamentalist. We are not fundamentalists.