| In my experience,
| atheists are scientific materialists who view all
| religion/spirituality as being dumb, literal belief in
| a cosmic daddy figure. They then pat themselves
| on the back for believing in science, which they
| regard as a rational belief. They're anti-religious
| in a very condescending way, but mostly they're
| just ignorant.
|
|
| You've just accused half of America as being ignorant.
| A bold and "condescending" claim.
|
| "Religion is dying out in America: Just 18% of people 60 and younger
| attend church and less than 50% believe in God"
|

You've made some jumps in logic there that
don't apply. I made a comment about people
who self-describe as atheists. That's not half
the population. Lots of people don't believe in the
Christian god. Those people are not necessarily
atheists. Most that I know don't have much
interest in the topic at all. They were raised
Christian. It didn't seem to be relevant for them.
Case closed. They're not curious and they don't
experience notable existential anxiety, so they
simply don't care about the topic.

What I meant by ignorant is that the atheist
argument always characterizes religion in the
very simplest terms. They're ignorant of religion,
lumping all religious peoples together as childish
believers in fairies or angels, or a simplistically
defined "personal god", seemingly unaware of
any other aspects of religion.
Thomas Merton? Theresa of Avila? St John of the
Cross? Monks of various faiths who spend their lives
in prayer, in some cases locked away for decades
in caves? Could any reasonable person really look
at all of those various aspects of what they call
"religion" and still conclude that it's all just a scam
to dupe fools?

What I hear from self-described atheists prone to
argument is a simple-minded position that refutes
its opposite. They don't grasp religion, or much of
anything else. They're not really capable of reflection.
They just believe in scientism and regard religious
people as "the opposing team". Since their own thinking
is simplistic they define religion as simplistic as well.
Such people are also ignorant of science, which is
not a philosophy and has no capacity to address the
meaning of life or the nature of reality.

What the vehement atheist really is, is a person
who likes to imagine they can think for themselves.
And they resent the implication from religious
teachings that perhaps they can't. They've adapted
the scientific notion of objective observation to the
nature of experience and come up with a hastily
thrown-together life view. But that view is really just
a band-aid, substituting for real reflection. There are
glaring inconsistencies. If we're nothing more than
chemical reactions then why live? And why do so
many care about how they'll be treated after death
if they expect to no longer exist?
(My very elderly father believes there's nothing
but what we see. I'd call him a "concretist". He accepts
experience without question and "knows" that when he
dies he'll be forever gone in every sense. Yet he's very
specific about how he wants his ashes handled.

Since all we can confirm is cognition itself,
how can anyone know what's actually happening? We'd
need to define a context of meaning for that. Ray Kurzweil
and his techie followers hope to move their consciousness
into machines and thereby achieve immortality. What
is their consciousness? What is it that wants to keep
living? Without sex, food, or going for a walk, what will
immortality mean? We only know consciousness through
human sense organs. As I see it, argumentative atheists
are simplistic thinkers who haven't really reflected on
life questions. They're simple concretists who don't
actually recognize that their view is based on uninspected
assumptions. If they'd stop attacking religious people
and maybe come up with some interesting thoughts
of their own about the nature of reality then I'd take
them more seriously. Failing that, I can only regard them
as noisy neurotics, because that's how they're manifesting.