In their attempt to marginalize atheists, accommodationists are homing in on a common strategy, which includes these claims:

The last claim has just been made by Michael Zimmerman, founder of the Clergy Letter Project, an attempt to get clergy to sign a statement saying that there is no conflict between science and their faith. I’ve written about Zimmerman’s views before, criticizing his philosophical accommodationism and view of American religion as a largely liberal enterprise, and characterizing the Letter Project as “harmless at worst” (actually, I suspect it’s useful, but nowhere near as useful as its advocates claim). But I wouldn’t consider this an uncivil attack. Nevertheless, in his latest defense of the Project, Zimmerman goes after New Atheists in general:

Oddly enough, although these Clergy Letter Project members are often among the first to fight for all forms of creationism to be removed from our public schools and for evolution to be taught, they have also been relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.” The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists with whom they share very little theologically and they are then tarred with the brush of unthinking literalism.

Well, I’m not aware of these “relentless attacks” (a Mooneyism if there ever was one) on members of the Clergy Letter Project, nor have I participated in them. (My online dictionary defines “relentless” as “obsessively constant, incessant”.) Perhaps Dr. Zimmerman can point us to some of them (he implies that they’re not rare)—that is, attacks not on faith, but on “Clergy Letter Project members.” Yes, some of us have ridiculed believers in general (or even in particular; viz. the Pope), and have drawn parallels between fundamentalists and more liberal believers who nevertheless still accept superstition. But do those critiques constitute “relentless attacks” on Clergy Letter Project members? Like many accommodationists, Zimmerman seems unable to distinguish between frank criticism and vicious, rabid aggression.

Nor do they want to make this distinction, because if they did they might have to actually address the New Atheists’ substantive arguments against religion. The most important of these is this: “What’s the evidence for the stuff that you claim is true?”