Like how the Christians are so persecuted! I grew up Southern Baptist in the south thinking and feeling like that, for a while.

Let's talk about this.

My mother is an animist at best. My father is a rabid atheist. I grew up in a town with nineteen churches and one bar; two of those churches were LDS, who accounted for an easy 40% of the kids I went to school with. I have no idea what level of fatwah was issued against my family but I do know that some of my sister's classmates told her they weren't allowed to play with her because she was going to hell and I know that the cops singled me out from the minute I could drive (I shared the last name with the police chief, a mormon who really didn't care for my family because he'd accidentally gotten my mom's invitation to a lesbian wedding in 1983).

You may have noticed the alacrity with which atheists lean into persecution. For a bunch of people who don't believe in shit, they sure do crave sainthood. My father's refusal to profess a belief in a higher power (that's all it takes) is why my grandfather was a 33rd degree mason and my sister, my mother and I had to go to Rainbow Girls bullshit for my cousins by ourselves. And yeah - you can point to a lot of nasty shit done in the name of religion. That's not a fact unique to the religious, however.

The last substantive discussion I had with my father was me taking the standpoint that religion is not 100% absolute evil 100% of the time. I couldn't get a word in edge-wise. He damn near threw me out of the house. Note that I haven't been inside a church I didn't design or help design more than a half dozen times in my entire goddamn life. I am one of the most fundamentally faithless individuals walking the earth. But I've seen it be a great comfort to a lot of people so I can't be a fundamentalist atheist. I can't default to "GOD=BAD" and go all OftenBen on people. I recognize that people have a need to align themselves with worldviews, align themselves with people who share that worldview, and devote themselves to proselytizing that worldview to those who don't share it because it brings them comfort.

The Smarmy Atheist Class of the Internet aren't here to listen. They aren't here to bring anyone into the fold. They're here to score points with each other by belittling anyone who doesn't choke down their dogma with a smile on their faces. Because that's what it is: sure, there's a lot more evidence behind it and yeah, it's scientifically demonstrable but nobody ever fucking bothers with the evidence. They go straight to the scorn, they start screaming infidel and they cast whatever fucking stones they can find.

Especially when they're scared, or confused, or have any doubts of their own. There is nothing so dangerous is a zealot with his faith challenged. "Fucking magnets, how do they work?" Read the lyrics to Insane Clown Posse's "Miracles" then read the lyrics to Jim Henson's "Rainbow Connection" and tell me they're not the same goddamn song. One of them is from a beloved muppet and the other is from some white trash crackers out of Detroit tho so fuck the Juggalos. Every asshole posting that "here's how magnets work" meme didn't fucking know. They can look it up? But 99.9% of the assholes on line heaping scorn on a song that dared to express wonder in a tone of voice they didn't care for can't say more than "something something atoms mumble mumble."

And that's the real problem. On the one hand you've got a whole bunch of smug-ass mutherfuckers for whom "something something atoms mumble mumble" is the One True God, unassailable, unknowable, Wisdom Without End and on the other hand you've got a bunch of people for whom conventional wisdom hasn't played out quite right. They can't make ends meet, they can't afford to give their kids a salad, every time they go to the doctor they get scolded for this that or the other, and if they express a doubt?

Someone is going to call them a fucking asshole.

So they start hanging out with people who don't call them fucking assholes for doubting and before too long they're aligning with the idea that the earth is flat because fuckin' hell at least the flat earthers are inclusive. The people who could actually walk them slowly through the discovery process of determining the earth's curvature AREN'T because any assault on their tenuous understanding of the accepted wisdom is the tempting tongue of Satan while the people who have already accepted that 5G exists to command our implanted microchips are all about increasing the flock.

This is a battle I'd have on r/skeptic all the time. People would gripe about the money spent on studies proving once again that vaccines don't cause autism, homeopathics don't work and cell phones don't cause cancer BUT FUCKING HELL YOU CHOADS it is so much cheaper and effective than to try to give people a reason to believe than it is to give them a reason to rebel. If another ten million dollar study will get another ten million people to vaccinate their kids? Take my fucking money. Society only works if we care about the more vulnerable than ourselves because if they fall out of society they're an outgroup problem, not an ingroup problem.

Meanwhile those who pass the purity test are sitting there fretting about an "information apocalypse" because it's more fun to huddle with your buddies and scream about the invader than it is going "hang on a sec guys vaccines don't alter your DNA."