I don't reject all Christianity as irrational. I reject exoteric, literalistic, politicized theology as unspiritual, existentially ignoble propaganda.
I don't say all worldviews are irrational. I say they're fundamentally so. Scientific theories are much more rational than pseudosciences and theologies. It's a question of whether all nonrational thoughts are worse than rational ones. If rationality has a specific purpose, other forms of thought may have other legitimate purposes. For example, there are artistic purposes which have little to do with reason.
As fundamentalists understand, the problem with taking any part of scripture to be errant, subjective, or metaphorical is that it sets you on a slippery slope to denying that any scripture is divinely revealed. Isn't it clear that God wouldn't write in genres? (The kaleidoscopic nature of the Quran is in line with that doubt, since its chaotic contents elude genre classification to make them seem more directly divine.) If all scripture is revealed by God, the genre distinctions must be irrelevant. Otherwise, there's a clear human contribution to scripture. So where does the latter end and God's contribution begin? The fundamentalist or inerrantist prefers not to address that thorny question, and just harmonizes the whole Bible as merely literal and historical (rather than mythical, poetic, psychological, or fictional).
So you say the Church fathers were just following their faith by persecuting Gnostics. But I don't recall Jesus telling his followers to be authoritarian busy bodies. I thought he said to turn the other cheek. So when you speak of the Church fathers' legitimate faith, the question is: Faith in what? Not in Jesus, evidently, so it must have been faith in their emerging theocracy. That's what they actually set up and defend, and that's the political role of Catholic theology, which is why that church opened itself to Protestant reform.
What you say about the burden of proof is nonsense. The burden of proof concept comes from epistemology by way of legal standards that long predate the media creation of new atheism. Your claim that atheism has the greater burden because it's historically abnormal makes a fallacious appeal to popularity. That's not how the burden of proof works. It's a principle of rationality, not of fallacious rhetoric.
