Newly deconverted

[Excited Penguin]

I find it surprising that you met atheists who thought of Christians as subhuman. I, myself, think religion is a sort of mental illness, in the most outstretched sense of the word, and that people suffer from it to different degrees, most of them I think to a lesser degree, which is very good and we couldn't coexist in today's world otherwise. I'm talking about genuine belief here. I'm sure there are a lot of religious people who only identify as such but don't really experience anything spectacular because of it. But I wouldn't for one second classify religious people as second-class citizens or anything of the sort. As far as I'm concerned, they are my fellow human beings and I would much rather seek out the potential for rationality and correctly applied compassion in them then the more troubling parts that make the world a worse place than it needs to be. I hope you appreciate my comment, as you asked for our opinions.

Welcome and I hope you find here a community to your liking, where you can continue on this journey of self-discovery and truth-seeking.

I think the reason I thought atheists were this way is probably because I mainly ran into them under circumstances that pitted my worldview against theirs.  Even now, I watch videos on Youtube and look at the comments beneath and find atheists abusing people who are just like I used to be.  Sometimes I will comment that they should be spending their time trying to educate and have constructive dialog with people, because this would have been very beneficial to me at the time.  Instead, I was mocked and derided, which only made me more staunch in my position.  As a Christian, I tried to engage atheists in rational discussion.  As an atheist, I try to engage theists in the same way.  I think people are more reasonable than we give them credit for when engaged constructively, but just attacking them seems to trigger some tribal instinct that causes them to revert to "PROTECT" mode.  In fairness, Christians are as bad, and there were times as a believer that I found myself siding with the atheist against nasty theists.  I've awakened to the fact that there are good people and crapholes, and whether or not you're a person of "faith" seems to be irrelevant in that equation.

I don't classify people like that, at least not in this case. I think they are just people, and they all have their reasons for their different behaviours. You'll find atheists even here who can be nasty to theists, and I too find that to be a problem sometimes(from a pragmatic pov), but I also know it's coming from a good place and it can at times be, at least partly justified, even if it doesn't really help anyone but the bunch of atheists who mock a theist for his stupid, arrogant remarks. You have to keep in mind that atheists are very much discriminated in many parts of the world, including the more civilised parts. You'll often find a Brit is more likely to be understanding and an American to be more prone to lash out against theists, and this is understandable when you look at their cultural differences. An atheist in America is one of the least trusted minorities and is treated very badly, albeit in a superficial sense, not in the violent sense. You'll seldom find an atheist fear for their lives in a progressive country. But in the U.K. you're more likely to be thought of as weird if you say you're particularly religious, than if you're an atheist, as in much of the rest of Western Europe, for that matter.

I, myself, am from a deeply religious country in Eastern Europe, and yet I didn't have much trouble for being an atheist and I know for example my father had a friend who's an atheist, and so on. It's not that big of a deal, although I surely think it's still a problem, but that's a talk for another time. I'm both extremely anti-religion and antitheist, to the point where I think it's one of the most concerning problems of our times, and very understanding of religious people. I understand them, and I'm very sympathetic with them, but that's the more reason to want to help them, and sometimes a more blunt approach can be necessary to shake someone up. It's not the same with everyone, though.