“There’s a passive-aggressive victim status that religious people now have, which is that they go, ‘Oh these fundamental atheists!’ Well, I’m not a fundamentalist atheist — being an atheist doesn’t mean anything to me, I don’t want anybody else to be an atheist, I’ve no interest in spreading atheism any more than I have… if there was a word to describe someone who doesn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy — a ‘flimpest’ — then I would have to say I’m a flimpest. But being a flimpest is meaningless; it just means I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy. It doesn’t involve a set of values; it doesn’t… my set of values comes from humanism, from the Enlightenment, from the very set of values that built this country, the set of values of Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and people who actually thought for themselves and didn’t take any text as gospel… which Marxists did, and which many religions do. I just think it’s terrible to be told what’s the case.”
Oooh, I can think of a few fundamentalist atheists who will likely have one of their two-minute-hategasms when they hear this. Then again, Fry may very well have already been an unperson to them based on other inconveniently sensible things he’s said.