Believe what you want. It's no skin off my nose. But the vitriolic bile spewed by fanatics on both sides of this issue gets old...mighty old.
I can honestly say that I don't hate atheists. I hardly ever give atheism a thought...unless I see a thread like this on these bbs. Regardless of whether or not it is started by an atheist or a theist or a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or WhatHaveYou I couldn't care less....say what you want, believe what you want. Just check your hate at the door first.
For, gentlemen, one thing I firmly believe in, without fear of contradiction and in the utter certainty that this is the one thing about which I'm right...ALL hatred is TAUGHT. No matter how much you or I might think we reach such attitudes and conclusions on our own we are, in effect, blank slates upon which other people attempt to write.
Bulletin boards and blogs such as this are the tools that modern discontents use to leave their stamp on others or write their messages on the slates of impressionable minds...or, perhaps, to convince themselves that their ideas and beliefs occupy some type of nebulous, intellectual high ground.
So, when someone attempts to paint another group as being in some way inferior, whether intellectually, religiously, or whatever....the warning flags go up. As they should for anyone who reads such.
It is no more fair to say that all Christians want to wrest from others their rights than it is to say that all atheists are pedophiles, or all Muslims are head-splitting fanatics, or all Germans were or are Nazies.
Such stereotyping is never justified.