It stands to reason that your level of passion for atheism will be affected by your surroundings. Here in NYC I felt more out-of-place as a practicing Christian than I do as an atheist. I'm moving to the Ohio suburbs this summer and, while it's a much more "bibles and rifles and a church on every corner" type of place, I don't think it'll be anything like what you've experienced. I'm thinking that the people who single you out for being an atheist are the same people who complain that atheists are "shoving their atheism in our faces" when they're in a situation where they can't just bully us into silence.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
