A reason why people remain religious

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Most people need something to cling to, be that religion or whatever, even an atheist can cling to their beliefs or lack of beliefs.

I do find there are atheists who do just that....that their lack of belief is somehow an identity. That's why I'm starting to like humanists more as I see them as emphasizing the value of their humanity over their lack of beliefs; then again, humanists can also be theists so maybe that's the reason why.

Maybe it's because a lot of atheists have been known and labeled entirely by their previous religion and that shedding it means they need something else to identify with?

You have to bear in mind here that we get a lot of atheists who life in oppressive states where lack of/non-belief is either banned of ostracised (including the US).

People tend to get angry when they can't be themselves, doubly so when their personal (lack of) beliefs harm nobody but are made out to be the most evil thing possible.

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Basically, I'm self-centered and care about what atheists do to ruin the image of academia. If the Christians around me actually made Christianity look bad, I would do the exact same thing to them. I don't tend to see the Fundies use the internet and the majority don't live within 2,000 km of me.

As someone who is Involved in academia I can say that the discussions on the Internet on forums like this don't make one iota of impact on research programmes, research grants or even individual researchers. Most of the people who dismiss academic inquiry in conversations online tend not to care about academia or research anyway, or worse, accuse researchers of being in cahoots with the invisible forces that conspire against them all over the world (so many examples on here).

Nothing I do here impacts on my research, or my fiancé's (she's a microbiologist).

Bracketing out the debate about how one can even 'ruin the image of academia', research is not conducted for the purpose of one upmanship on the interwebz, though I understand that if one wants to increase the profile academia per se to we died audits who are ignorant to hostile to it it helps to use it in a format that can be readily and accurately assimilated.

I see fundies use the Internet all the time, very dangerously and to good effect:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27912569