These are points I am working on for inclusion in discussions elsewhere on the Internet. They are crude drafts, so they won't make a lot of sense.....

This is the very point I am tryhing to get at. When you associate one topic with a specific ideology that historically leans a certain way on a range of issues, it opens an avenue of attack, with the objective of dismissal.

To use an analogy, although I don't like them because they are usually inadequate, look at a label such as liberal or republican as a box containing a range of stances of issues. Someone that would disagree with one of the stances would dismiss it by association. Meaning, they would pick another issue out of the box, ridicule it to their satisfaction, and dismiss the package as a whole, thereby dismissing the actual point of contention without really touching on the issue. This is what I mean when I say labeling a group of people, or the setbacks one encounters with such labels. The group will be dismissed as a whole based on completely unrelated critereon, effectively ending any rational discussion.

To me it is a character flaw, simply because I am open to any idea that a fundamentalist would offer, but I expect proof, or some kind of verifiable evidence to support any claims. The problem, as I see it, is that a fundamentalist would expect acceptance of assertions at face value, without supporting evidence.

I think one of the points Sam Harris was trying to make, or perhaps one of his arguments against using the label, is that the person or group using the label is easily dismissed. As he puts it, atheism is marginalized by focusing any attention on the religious aspects of the label. It allows attention to be forced there so that any other issues that might be discussed as worthwhile are dispelled as ridiculous.

Put another way; when an issue is discussed, any contribution can be safely discarded if it is associated with atheism. Of course this is unreasonable, but we aren't talking about a rational mindset. Religion itself is not harmful itself, it is the irrational actions and views of people that are harmful, whether associated with religion or not. Religion just augments any conviction to such actions and behind irrational claims.