Blake's Law

Overview

Blake's Law is an adage or conversational guideline which suggests that anyone who states or implies that vocal atheists are similar to religious fundamentalists should be considered to have lost the argument, as this claim and its entire family – including any claim that atheism is a religion (or is like a religion, or is no better than religion) – has been soundly refuted every time it has been thoroughly discussed.

For this reason, "fundamentalist atheism", "atheist fundamentalism", and variations should be considered troll phrases.

History

It was first proposed (namelessly) by Blake Stacey in a blog post on 2007-04-07, partly inspired by Godwin's Law which imposes the same penalty for comparisons to Hitler; biologist PZ Myers named it "Blake's Law" in a post on his well-known blog Pharyngula on 2007-07-16.