ZeaLitY is rigidly intolerant of theist points of view, and never ignores any opportunity to attack them, even when they are harmless.
I don't attack "Jesus said, help the poor." But I do attack the behavior of the Salvation Army, which helps the poor so that it can use its clout to influence policymaking decisions of cities to support its beliefs. Same goes for the Catholic charity in DC, which also threatened to close its homeless shelters this season as DC mulled over giving homosexuals the right to marry. DC approved the right, called the Catholics' bluff, and the Catholics backed down. This is evil, evil behavior. It needs to be exposed and publicly damned.
My problems with his behaviour have nothing to do with the specific target of his actions, actually--I'd be just as happy not to have to defend the religious, because some of them are guilty of the sexist and other nasty actions that he accuses them of.
Most, not some. The Catholic flock who give donations to Papal coffers are enablers for the Pope to execute his drastic, anti-human policies and spread his ignorance. Mere adherents of a religion are also usually walking promulgators of that religion, even if in subtle ways. And beyond this, religious people who predicate their behavior on an irrational worldview (such as people who live based on gender roles prescribed by holy texts) are hindering themselves and the rest of the humanity in their behavior.
But ZeaLitY really, really rubs me the wrong way because he effectively sets himself up as the thought police. Who the fuck is he to decide what other people should think or believe?
Humanity's very civilization and modern existence is founded on an attachment to reality. Humanity didn't invent airplanes and molecular science by reading the Bible. Humanity did so only after thousands of years of the scientific method in action—observing; hypothesizing; learning from mistakes and results—not by asking "God" or listening to seers and revelators.
Reason is how an average human learns to fix a computer error; how a child learns to avoid touching a hot stove; how a scientist learns how to cure a disease.
Religion (or rather, faith) is diametrically opposed to reason. It is based on preconceived, fictional conclusions about the universe and phenomena. It suspends the process of learning and asks its adherents to accept prefabricated results. These tenets of belief were not handed down by divine authority; they were dreamed and written by humans, just as L. Ron Hubbard created Scientology, the Greeks created their pantheon, and early humans created the Abrahamic religions. These are works of fiction, taken to be reality. This is ignorance.
So to answer your question, I can be the thought police because this is a matter of reason, and faith is unreasonable. And I exercise that capacity because faith is also detrimental to humanity.
That's exactly what the people he's complaining about are doing. He's preaching a religion just as much as they are--it's just that his happens to be antitheism and "rationality". And I consider preaching to be wrong no matter who is doing it, or what their topic is. It's an attempt to force people to accept your way of thinking, instead of letting them make their own decisions. Thing is, unless they do make their own decision, whatever you force into them will never be more than a thin veneer over what they truly believe. Preaching is a recipe for creating resentment and backlash.
The "atheist fundamentalist" label doesn't hold water. The "new atheists" are named so simply because they're actually defending reason and science, rather than hiding in the corner.
As for your second point, there is a justifiable need to "preach" reason. Because of religious belief, today, several newborn boys and girls have just been ritually mutilated. Several people have been discriminated against because of different beliefs. Several of those have been attacked because of different beliefs. Even more have had to spend a day in a world in which their rights are denied because of differing beliefs, or an absence of them. Today, women have been raped and sequestered in homes because religious belief grants this privilege to men. Other women have endured time in gender roles supported by religion. And the entire lot have wasted another day living a less meaningful life because of their irrational belief.
Religion's sins are innumerable—rape, violence, murder, discrimination, oppression, mutilation, ridicule, and tyranny—and every day, they make life on earth a living hell for some, and an illucid blunder for most others. Many religious people believe this world is fated to end in an apocalypse, and that humanity is inherently corrupted, and cannot avoid this self-destruction. I lack this irrational belief, and I'm committed to an earth and a humanity that is sustainable, even such that it can explore the wonders of the stars and the wonders of the mind. Religion is fighting that. For the sake of humanity, religion must be fought; faith must be battled with reason.
And there's another little problem with what he's preaching: some of mankind's greatest achievements are founded on the irrational. Art and literature are not rational--in fact, I would describe them as the active pursuit of delusion. A perfectly rational, perfectly well-adjusted human shouldn't need escapist entertainment...say, what is this board supposedly devoted to, again?
Artists and writers don't actually believe that the fictional worlds they've created actually exist, or that they're actually the omniscient Gods of those worlds. That's the difference. I don't defend reason as if I'm advocating some kind of Vulcan lifestyle. It is completely reasonable for a writer to imagine fantastic stories and create art based on his or her experiences, thus celebrating the human condition. It is completely unreasonable to actually
believe in fairy tales like religion.
To return to your original charge of bigotry, I am intolerant of ignorance. So are businesspeople, engineers, artists, electricians, graphic designers, and even more so than many, schoolteachers and professors. To function in this world, we must be intolerant of ignorance; we demand logical behavior from our peers and ourselves to navigate the puzzles of life. Atheists and rationalists are merely being intolerant of an ignorance that's been institutionalized and romanticized for thousands of years. Of course some people are going to be offended. But they are believing in fairy tales, and their behavior is actively damaging and hindering humanity. Again, we don't call a teacher who corrects a child's math problem a "bigot of ignorance." I'm doing the same as that teacher. You are treating the religious as if their beliefs are worthy of respect, but their beliefs are naked emperors, demanding baseless, unwarranted respect. Let their assertions about the universe be treated just as all the others—with observation, testing, and
reason.