New Atheists are indeed jerks but this doesn’t make religious people harmless or the victims here.
I’ve found it useful, in trying to understand the fury of New Atheist types, to reflect on my accidental privileges.
I am subject to the general influence the religious types have on our policy sphere but that’s about it.
I don’t have the personal oppression of those who grew up in highly religious families, towns or states.
Nor the personal pain of people made to suffer very directly by some of the general policy stuff- abortion, LBGT+, etc
So I try to make allowances for why I don’t feel that same visceral hatred for the religious and why other atheists do feel such rage.
My response to the OP is that sure, idgaf if my scientific colleagues are believers and I don’t think it impacts our work together.
But I’m not okay with tut-tutting our atheist colleagues into being more tolerant. They may have history that we do not share.
Now, if the point is that science or academia is a place that is by default atheist and this makes religious folks uncomfortable...
Cry me a river. The US public sphere is positively infused with casual and not so casual religiosity. #blessed
I’m not seeing it such a terrible thing if the religious have to operate in one space in which the default belief system is flipped.
The fact that you feel bad because of someone else’s opinion is not a good reason for them not to express it.
Even shouty New Atheists are not wrong *just because* it makes a religious person feel bad.
