This is from Mark Shea:
“The division is generally not between Christians and Atheists. It’s between Christian Fundamentalists and Atheist Fundamentalists. Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist. Both Christian Fundamentalists and Atheist Fundamentalists have in common a flat-footed and simplistic approach to questions of faith, science, reason, and biblical interpretation”.
Even if this WOULD be true - and it false - the approach would be diametrically different.
The christian fundamentalist (and there is no reason to capitalize the words) start with the assumption that the Bible must be read literally… that the stories about talking snakes, resurrections, walking on water, turning water into wine, etc. describe literal truths. That the Earth was created in 6 literal days, about 6000 years ago. That Adam was created literally from dust, and Eve was a “rib-woman”. That the Earth was literally the center of the Universe.
For a very long time this was a general approach of the catholic church, too. Only when the actual, scientific EVIDENCE became overwhelming and made it impossible to ignore did the Catholic church stop digging in its “heels”, and was dragged, kicking and screaming somewhat closer to modern times. Evolution is no longer considered the work of the devil; Catholics are PERMITTED(!!! what a horrible approach) to accept it as correct, as long as they castrate the theory into a “guided” process.
This is NOT what the atheist “fundamentalist” say - whoever they might be. Educated atheists accept that there are literally correct events described in the bible. Also that there are stories, which are simply allegorical, to illustrate their points. And there are whole lot of nonsense stories, fairy tales.
The problem is with the Catholic approach is that they do not have a method to separate the goat from the sheep. When some problematic part is being offered for discussion, they do not have a “Catholic Annotated Bible”, written by the magisterium, all they can say that some parts cannot be read literally, that they cannot be taken out of context. If they are just allegories, then what were the actual events they are supposed describe. That might even be acceptable IF they would present argument to show HOW those parts SHOULD be interpreted. But that is never forthcoming. It is always a generic “refutation in the form of ‘UR’ wrong!”.
It is rather amusing that one can select a passage which allegedly contains God’s OWN actual words, like Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”, which shows that God is personally responsible for the “evil” in the world, and the apologists cannot offer some alternate interpretation, all they can say: “out of context!!!”. Or there is Luke 19:27 “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.” A parable, but very transparent. Jesus - himself! - commands to kill all the worshippers of other gods, and all the non-believers.
The church had over 2000 years to give guidance to these and similar passages, but it did not. The usual cop-out is that it is NOT the job of the church to nitpick any details, it’s job is to guide everyone toward the “Truth”, toward God. How can they hope to do that without coming clean about their teachings? To call it a “mystery” is totally unsatisfying.
