Richard Dawkins Confuses Moderate and Fundamental Religionists

While Dawkins is clearly right in his contention that religion -- any religion -- should be fair game for critics, his brand of purist atheism is grounded more in philosophy than in a cleare-eyeed look at the real world or the way religion works in American society. The difference between moderate religion and fundamentalism, now as in the past, is that moderate faith attempts to accommodate itself to secular education and ecular government: the American religious right rejects both. If there were only miniscule numbers of unreconstructed fundamentalists within the United States, American religious exceptionalism would not seem so peculiar or so threatening to so many Europeans.

Notes:

The difference between them is that one group is willing to concede things about their religious doctrine, while the other is unyielding in its irrationality.

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The Age of American Unreason

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Jacoby , Susan (2008-02-12), The Age of American Unreason, Pantheon, Retrieved on 2011-04-06

Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism elitism