The thing is, SC (and the Bay Area) community presents an incredibly skewed view of these issues, and their place/relevance in the national discourse. I am the absolutely last person to push my current eating choices on others, yet here in Chicago, the very omission of meat from my lunch plate at work garners aggressive responses from my coworker.

Oh, and yes, though I hesitate to single out one religious group from any other, Mormonism really brings the crazy, but not quite to the defree of Scientology. I think Scientology is a interesting case study in how made-up stories can, in the course of only a few decades, become considered by a community to be the “Word of G’d” — or space aliens, or whatever you choose to believe.

I recommend you read up a bit on atheism, and you might find you’re more of one than you think. Most atheists, being very rational people, grant that they don’t know that there’s no god; we just live by the assumption that there isn’t one, because the odds of there being a god (and of that god being the Judeo-christian “you’re going to hell if you don’t worship me/my son” variety) are vanishingly tiny, and the issue wouldn’t have even come up if there weren’t people telling their children and those people telling their children, etc., etc. that this one book was The Word (how’s that for a long sentence?). So the agnostic argument that we can never really know, and thus that there’s an equal chance that I’m right and that Mike Huckabee is right is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a load of crap.

I am a relatively conscientious meat eater (when I go shopping I always buy free-range organic, and I’m really trying hard not to eat beef anymore, and I’m generally aware of how destructive to the earth and my health eating meat is) and a self described agnostic (personally I feel that stating empirically that I KNOW that there is No god is as silly and borderline dogmatic as most organized religions - but I’ll admit that could stem from ignorance of atheism as an actual philosophy vs. a ideology espoused by pissed-off pseudo anarchist 20 yr olds who are simply reacting to their stale middle class presbylutheropalian upbringing) (wow that was a long sentence)

Having grown up in Santa Cruz, I have been surrounded by vegetarians/vegans for ages, and have been involved in a lot of lively discussion trying to suss out (i think) the way I really feel on the topic, and I’ve noticed something that must be very irritating for veggies -

Whenever someone in a culture like ours here in S.C. finds out that you’re vegetarian, they always feel an immediate need to rationalize and qualify their non-vegetarian status the exact same way that I did mine in my opening sentence. It doesn’t matter if you as a non-carnivore give any percentage of a shit about my eating habits - I’m not discussing the topic or arguing in favor of meat eating to you, I’m rehashing my argument to myself because on some level, every time I eat meat in the presence of a vegetarian I feel a twinge of S.C. hippy guilt. When I was a younger man this manifested in a lot of bullshit Dennis Leary influenced macho chest beating - but to be fair the vegetarians in my high-school were very over the top Lisa-Simpson- stealing-Homer’s-roast-pig aggro about the fact that they were vegetarian - when you’re that age, you think everything you do DEFINES you ‘cause you don’t have a clue who you are or what you’re doing.

In much the same way, this could at least account for the hostility “middle ground agnostic” folks (and I do include myself in this) feel towards both religious zealots and die-hard rational humanist athiests alike. To an agnostic they’re both equally alien viewpoints, and - more importantly - they are both more admirable. Atheists and born again Christians both know where they stand, as do vegans and Nascar watching Dennis Leary loving McDonald’s enthusiasts. The only thing us guilt-ridden try-not-to-eat-too-much-meat-aterians/agnostics know for certain is that we don’t really know where we stand. And like any human seeing another human possess something they can’t have, we resent you fuckers for it.

Atheism is a bold statement to make, that many of the people who occupy the middle ground are uncomfortable making — people are far more comfortable identifying as “agnostic”, which I consider to be a copout, though I know plenty of people who would probably identify as such if they had to. I agree that we need to make our point of view heard and noticed increasingly, and stand in opposition to the religion-driven insanity that considers hastening armageddon to be its primary goal. Our side needs a much better design and PR team, however.

I guess I see your point on the 9-11 thing, but a lot of us are just sick of apologizing and pussyfooting around. And you’re right, it’s not going to convince any die-hard religious people of anything (could anything?), but there’s also the - I suspect rather large - middle ground of people who really don’t believe in anything religious, but continue to pay lip service to it because that’s what people do. I think it’s good for those folks to see that they’re not alone. And hey, maybe some of them are better graphic designers?

For a group that desperately needs to overhaul its public standing (most polls show atheism as being on par with nihilism in most Americans’ minds), Hitchens, Dawkins, and this sort of thing just seems to be doing more harm than good, and this sort of sensationalism undermines the ideals of rationality that atheism prides itself upon.

I think you’re equating atheists’ saying “hi, here we are, we don’t believe your fairytales” with being a loud, ugly voice a la O’Reilly, and I don’t agree.

And yes, I’m still an asshole.