IT'S hardly a new charge against atheists, but it has come up again several times recently in the blogosphere: that today's secularists, atheists, anti-theists and whatnot, including the publicly active ones, are "just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists". It appears again and again in reader e-mails sent to Andrew Sullivan's blog (currently in the hands of guest-bloggers). This trope needs to be laughed out of existence, immediately.