Originally posted by Surtur
Because people who are religious want to believe that deep down atheists are just people who are secretly crying for some kind of spiritual guidance. To them a person is not truly an atheist, just someone who doesn't want to acknowledge God.I could almost compare it to being gay. Not that atheists suffered any kind of persecution that gays did, but it goes back to when people thought it was just a sickness of the mind that could be cured.
In the end they can't stand if a person is content in life without any type of religion.
You're likely right in a number of cases. But I think there are a number of people who literally can't imagine a worldview without God in it. I didn't realize that this could be the case until I had been an atheist for a while, and people were genuinely mystified as to how I could define morality and purpose. These were people I considered friends, not those who would want to vindictively project their beliefs onto me.
So I don't think it's always them projecting their biases onto atheists (though, if I were taking a guess, that's what I'd say the OP is doing here). I think sometimes they're simply unable to imagine it.
The concept of persecution is a different topic entirely, but is one that interests me. The analogy to gays isn't entirely out of line, but it depends a lot on what kind of persecution you're referring to. For clarity, I tend to break persecution down into two primary variables: prevalence and severity. Prevalence is the number of people who dislike or mistrust a demographic in some way. And severity is the degree to which they're persecuted. No one should argue that atheists have been persecuted more severely than LGBT or, say, blacks during the Civil Right Movement. However, there is overwhelming, repeated data that the prevalence of atheist mistrust is higher than any other demographic in America (I can't speak for other countries). Only twice in the last 75 years or so - when data is present - have atheists been anything but the most mistrusted group in the country: immediately after 9/11, Muslims took over the top spot, and during the...I think is was 2008 election, the Tea Party was up there. Again, we're talking prevalence. But, as counterintuitive as it may sound, at any point in the last 50-75 years, if you took a random sampling of people, odds are more would mistrust or dislike atheists than any ethnic, religious, political, or cultural group. Scary stuff. I think the only reason we tend to dismiss atheistic prejudice as opposed to, say, LGBT or black prejudice, is that there are so few atheists that reaching the kind of cultural tipping point needed to make a societal imprint is thus far impossible. That, and those other groups have been persecuted more severely, which can't be ignored.