everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

Pretty sure we ALL live in the world. Unless you mean they live in open society. ...If I need to spell it out any further I'm going to ragequit. ;D

Yep, that is what they mean. Those in religious orders take vows of poverty which is meant to detach them from the world. The average priest off the street, or any bishop, is diocesan which means they can own property and "priest" is just another job to them.

Not a good example; I laud the efforts of the individual and I abhor the credit given to the religious institution to which one belongs for the individual's work, since the religious aspect is unnecessary.

They are the one who financed him though. And you don't see too many secular monasteries.

No they won't. Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that having a bias towards their own work is counter-productive and detrimental to the process of discovery, as history has taught us repeatedly. It's a little thing called confirmation bias and it's highly frowned upon in the scientific community.

Um...I am currently also working in a scientific lab getting a PhD (though I won't finish it). Bias is always present 9especially wrt religion, race, gender etc) and you control for it in experimental design. And when you want to critique the study and find room for bias to affect the findings, you critique the design of the experiment, or the way they interpreted the results. Not that "oh you are a woman, therefore your study on breastfeeding is biased" or what have you. There's no reason why a Catholic (not that all researchers at a Catholic university are Catholic, btw) cannot do a scientific study on religion, or why a woman can't do a study on gender, or why a black person cannot do a study on race.

What you are specifically doing is ad hominem circumstantial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
>Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false; this overlaps with the genetic fallacy (an argument that a claim is incorrect due to its source).

Yeah, and all the evangelicals and creationists and the KKK and the entire middle east and the whole debacle with the IRA don't exist. I gotcha.

Huh? Wow this sentence. I mean, you lumped a ton of random scare words in a sentence and...you expect me to believe that they are all ignorant ( I'd say that of the KKK and to a much lesser degree, creationists, not the members of the other groups), AAAND that their ignorance was "induced by religion"? Not any specific ideology outside of religion, but "religion" itself? Yeah no, you'll need more evidence than that.

Might also be that there's a social stigma to being an atheist that leads to them being considered or just simply becoming outcasts considering a vast majority of the people I've ever admitted being an atheist to jumped to wild conclusions about me almost instantly, NONE of them positive, and this entire forum is filled with posts from people who've endured this kind of bullshit in the exact same ways for the exact same reasons, and the very beginning of this thread began with us discussing why the hell christians seem to jump at the chance to mash on the "hate" button whenever it comes to atheists...

Except you are confusing "atheist" with "irreligious". Not all irreligious are atheist and not all atheist are irreligious. There is also plenty of hate dumped on members of individual religions.

I think another factor may be that you are reversing the cause and effect. Those with high psychoticism are probably going to have an aversion to religion. Most of religion places a strong emphasis on community ties and charity, and on working to better yourself. A person with higher psychoticism isn't going to fit well in with a religious community, unless its one of the left-hand paths.

I haven't given those sites a check yet, but I'll probably do it after I get home from work tomorrow. Gotta [attempt] sleep here in a short bit, last thing I want to be doing is being a mail presorter on less than eight hours of sleep...this job is mind-numbing enough without me being half-awake before I even start. XD

Sleep well!