To think a lot about matter, to use the language of physics as your “final vocabulary”, to force all ideas to ground themselves in scientific truths before they are accepted as valid — none of these mental operations makes a person a materialist. It makes the the person an idealist who uses materialist concepts and language to construct a mental world. It makes them a materialoid idealist.

They think the mental model of the world inside their head is a faithful duplicate of the real world, and whatever they deduce about their mental world is necessarily true of the real world. They might say “I might be wrong”, but their doubts are epistemological, when they should be ontological. They misconceive what truth is.

Materialoid idealism is a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism.

Like all fundamentalisms it is collective-solipsistic.

Like all fundamentalism, it appropriates language meant to orient us to a reality of which we are a part, in which we participate, but which transcends us and reduces it to a set of ideas that fit neatly inside one’s own understanding, that is our own property, which we worship as supreme.

Fundamentalism is ideoidolatry.

Materialoid idealists are scientistic fundamentalists.

There is a weird sort of hostile consanguinity among fundamentalists. It’s like “honor among thieves” — an adversarial kinship among folks who live in opposition to one another but who operate at the same plane of existence. It is why debates between theists and atheists never go anywhere. They are self-reassurance rituals, that outside the us-versus-them, there is nothing.

This kind of person has two kinds of hate.

There is the ordinary comprehensible hate of fellow fundamentalists who believe the wrong things, who worship the name and notions of Allah or Jesus instead of the name and notions of Feynman or Marx.

Then there is the deeply anxious uncomprehending hate of aliens whose beliefs and practices simply make no sense at all, and which bring up all kinds of visceral, sincere but ineffable unpleasantness.

The second hate is so much worse that fundamentalists will set aside their shallower hate and ally against it, however much it exposes how little they actually care about the positive ideals they go on and on about to justify their true negative ideals.

Real materialists interact with materials, their thinking is a response to difficulties they encounter in the course of these interactions, and what they come to believe about materials are ideas that effectively guide their interactions.