Why are Atheist on Sodahead such HATE filled Ranters?

You can tell that atheism is in trouble because it
is becoming increasingly intolerant. In the past, atheists (or secular
humanists or freethinkers) were often condescendingly tolerant of their
less-enlightened fellow citizens. While they disdained religion, they
treated their religious neighbors as good-hearted, if misguided.

But now key activists are urging a less civil approach.
At a recent forum sponsored by the Science Network at the Salk Institute
in La Jolla, California, the tone of intolerance reached such a peak
that anthropologist Melvin J. Konner commented: "The viewpoints have run
the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only
with a baseball bat?"

This newly aggressive mood (Dawkins calls religious
education "brainwashing" and "child abuse") is in danger of undermining
civil society.

CT columnist David Aikman recently sounded a warning in a
commentary for the Trinity Forum. Sam Harris, he noted, not only
advocates a shift from viewing religion as harmless to treating it as
dangerous, but he also wants to suppress religion. Aikman evoked images
of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia as the future of America—if liberals
ever abandon true liberalism.

Make no mistake; it is that potential abandonment of
liberalism that Harris and Dawkins are calling for. Dawkins told the
forum in La Jolla, "I am utterly fed up with the respect that we—all of
us, including the secular among us—are brainwashed into bestowing on
religion." In a blog post cited by Aikman, Harris wrote that he is as
"wary" of his fellow liberals as he is of "demagogues on the Christian
Right."

Christians have long disdained what Eagleton calls the
"mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other
people's silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people's."
But we have also understood it to be a safeguard in civil society.
Despite its vapid quality, such liberalism has been a blessing. The
antitheistic rhetoric that erodes the ethos of respect is a clear and
present danger. Atheists may be a minority (from 8 percent to 27 percent
of the American population, depending on the poll and the questions
asked), but they tend to dominate elite institutions.

The new atheistic rhetoric betrays panic, another sign
of weakness. Atheism knows that it is losing both arguments and the
global tide. Stories of the global vibrancy of religion are everywhere
trumping the grand narrative of evolutionary progress. And the best
philosophers are still taking the God-hypothesis seriously.