Why hate Athiest?

[Angrboda]

This isn't a complete thought, but here goes anyway. It's been observed, somewhat provisionally, that the sense of the sacred in western cultures is significantly different from that in certain other cultures. (India comes to mind.) Not only is their sense of the sacred present, where in western cultures it is largely ancillary or absent, it is also affected by different moral sensibilities; in the western, violations of the sacred are commonly viewed as violations of convention, which, morally, are more readily relativized than offenses against the objective moral order. And violation of the sacred in some cultures has a much larger moral dimension than even in religious subpopulations in the west. (It's noted that moral judgements, iirc, tend to excite one of two brain systems; one having to do with visceral revulsion, such as that experienced when encountering something physically revolting, like traumatized flesh, and a more emotive-cognitive based moral sensation. The sense of the sacred in these cultures extends more often into the dimension of revulsion. [As an example, despite westerner's views of ritual cleansing in the Ganges as exposing oneself to all manner of toxic substance, to the devout Hindu it is (or should be) experienced as a restoration of their original sacred state. The moral sense of washing away one's impurities overrides any temporal concerns for bodily contamination.]) (cf. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind.)


Anyway, as noted, this is a somewhat incomplete thought. Just suggesting that different senses of the sacred, as well as the types of emotions provoked by violation of the sacred, and especially its moral significance to some, may figure prominently in how the religious view atheists and vice versa, along dimensions which may be entirely invisible to the atheist.

Anyway. Just spitballing here. FWIW. Void where prohibited by law.