Thank you Dan. This really needs to be said!

For a book I am writing on church-state relations in France, I came across this quote:

“I love my atheist friends, of whom I am blessed with many. I relish the existential grist of our talks, the deep sense of substance and mutual respect. I also love the constant jokes. We keep each other honest.… God-cancellers are different. I know a few of them too. They use mockery more than humour, ridicule more than bemusement. They have a superior attitude, as if believers must surely be less intelligent than they are, unable to see what is blinking obvious to them. The religion question has plenty of room for people to be atheists. They suspect we are insensitive to the pain caused by our church communities, not realising how bad that pain feels from the inside when you live with it day in and day out.” https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/atheists-and-god-cancellers/14767

Furthermore, I remember a brother bishop who had been raised as a fundamentalist, shook it off, became an Episcopalian, started writing books passionately, but had no time for those who disagreed with him. As a progressive, he had the same mindset as before, but the perspective was different.

Finally, we see the same intolerance in the toxic political climate (and not just in the US). If you back Donald Trump, you must be a racist, misogynist, fascist, colonialist (whatever that means)... If you do not, then you are a traitor, "woke" (whatever that means), "Antifa" (ditto), socialist elitist who knows better than anyone else how to run everybody else's life...

Political fundamentalism is just as bad as religious and and anti-religion fundamentalism. Critical thinking is out the window. Even worse, such people are all too willing to sacrifice complex living human beings on the stone altars of their abstract ideals... first metaphorically, then literally.