Intolerant Atheists

[yokaze]

Here is something I don't get.  When I am browsing various religious and Atheist forums, I come across a lot of anger and insults from Atheists directed at religious types.  In fact, most of the insults on said forums are from Atheists.  The religious folk tend to be much more polite and conciliatory.

This is NOT to say that all or even many

Comments

[jaerik]

In sociology, there is what's termed a group identity bias that goes into categorization.

All humans possess a personal "threshold" upon which they view the actions of a sub sample to be representative of the group. However, that threshold is wildly biased by one's feeling of personal attachment to that group.

Being sympathetic to a group's cause, or a member itself, raises your internal threshold, to the point you need [i]more[/i] examples of bad behavior to write off the group itself. Being unsympathetic to the group means you are willing to write the group off after only a handful of negative experiences by individuals.

There is nothing inherently wrong about this, it's just important to understand what's going on. It's arguably the best system that evolution could have provided us, to work in the most instances in a complex world where categorization is necessary for survival. ("Eat berry, feel sick, never eat any berries that look like it again." "Tribe Member Ugh kill someone. Punish Ugh, don't punish group. Neighbor Tribe Member Bugga kill member of own tribe. Kill entire Neighbor Tribe!")