Athiesm is the new fundamentalism

I'm not too sure if I was supposed to pull more meaning from the image of a book cover than this, but I do have some disagreements with Maisel which I just wanted to bring up since I feel it does relate peripherally to the topic of this thread.

I actually have a problem with Maisel similar to those I mentioned in my first post in this thread. While he certainly is a better writer than the foursome which lead the New Atheist literary movement, some of the concepts he preaches, such as atheism being a scientific concept, and people who believe in atheism believing in scientific principles, stand out to me as being glaring contradictions between what atheism is and what science is.

Science is agnostic, indifferent. It doesn't draw conclusions from absense of evidence, it doesn't come to conclusions without support. In it's most basic sense, as underlied by how error and statistics in the sciences are calculated, science doesn't prove anything -- it just provides justification and evidence to call something factual. Atheism, on the other hand, is based on the ideal that a good cannot exist because it cannot be proven. It's based on a concept which is unfalsifiable -- atheism in and of itself is not scientific. Making a statement without evidence, or considering absense of evidence to be evidence in an of itself, is a failure in a slew of scientific paradigms. I'm not terribly enthused that Maisel went out of his way to popularize the a concept which does not make sense to me, although perhaps I am just wrong.

At the same time, being an atheist does not mean you are less likely to fall victim to the same pitfalls most people have with reasoning. Atheists still make the same errors, like strawmen, attributing false equivalencies and so forth, that theists can make. So do agnostics. We're all only human. Being an agnostic, an atheist or a theist does not make you inherently correct or incorrect, doesn't make your smarter or stupider, doesn't make you less capable or more capable of reasoning. All it does is define your beliefs.

I know this is a bit of a side track, but from a moral standpoint, and in the modern western world, at the most basic of levels -- of whether a divine being exists or not -- no one in this thread has a pillar of righteousness beneath them to help them rise above the masses, in my opinion. Saying otherwise skirts what defines fundamentalism.