@bstacey You might have imagined that people have a common reason for atheism. But, as can be seen from the attached picture, this is not so. Some loud atheists are authoritarian dominators, and derive dark pleasure from the experience of telling people (who may be imaginary) that they're wrong, in the same way hate preachers often really enjoy telling people that their favourite deity will hurt them.Such patterns can be particularly easy to miss when the preacher tells that they're wrong to people who, genuinely, happen to be wrong. I mean, you would need to do some deep analysis to see whether they're saying such sayings for the wrong reasons. It's often not obvious.A part of the reason behind this pipeline might be the American peculiarity of many loud atheists being young adults recently escaping fundamentalist child-raising. This is not the general pattern in present-day Europe, although it used to be more common in the 1800s, even early 1900s, and if you read old newspapers and memories, you can sometimes run into recognisable behavioural shards of present-day American Internet atheists.@rebeccawatson
