That headline was funny, noting that the atheist prof's e-mail had irked "fundamentalists".
The thing liberals, both in and out of the media, never recognize is that one can be a fundamentalist atheist, and Mirecki clearly is such a "fundie".
This whole idea about atheists and secularists being "open-minded freethinkers" is just nonsense. I remember years ago reading a news report on a pro-life referendum victory in Ireland. The reporter (pro-abortion, as usual) blamed the pro-life win on people in rural Ireland, whose minds were supposedly under the control of the Catholic Church. The pro-abortion voters weren't thought to be under any control at all. They had, supposedly, voted the way they did because they independently and open-mindedly concluded ("rationally", of course) that abortion was a fine thing.
But that was just the usual self-absorbed atheist/secularist nonsense. Such people are just as fundamentalist and just as much prone to being influenced and even controlled by outside ideas than the so-called religious fanatics, if not more so. Go to any message board or thread with a lot of atheists on it and they all pat each other on the back, fully agree with one another, and generally take their position from the prevailing zeitgeist, which is what "controlled" the votes of those pro-abortion voters in Ireland.
Atheists are, in fact, quite easily herded.