Trying to Understand Angry Atheists

I confess I do not understand Marc Gellman. Am I to believe that he would not be angry if Jews were subjected to the same attitudes and behaviors that currently afflict atheists?

What if he learned tomorrow that the majority of voters would never vote for a Jew, or let their child marry a Jew? What his children were subjected to Christian indoctrination in school? What if his son had to attend church with the coach if her wanted to play on the college football team? How about if his daughter was required to pledge allegiance to "one nation under Brahman"? Suppose that he was continually told "there are no Jews in foxholes" or some similar dismissal of his core beliefs? Or that his kids may not become scouts because they are jewish? Or that the courthouse in his town displays a banner stating "thou shalt venerate Mohammed"? And so on. Enough aggravation of this kind and I suspect that any self-respecting Jew would be angry indeed.

He is certainly right that religious folks don't "wake up thinking of new ways to aggravate atheists," but unfortunately there is enough unthinking intolerance around that inventing new ways to aggravate is quite unnecessary.

I believe the negative attitude guessed by religious people on Atheists is that in my view of Atheism, the perspective that only an imaginary entity can bring hope to existence is a deeply bleak view of existence. It's depressing, and therefore, troubling, hence the anger. To see hope in the continuation of life, either during one's lifespan or on the succession of generations is somewhat trivial when you are not conditioned to expect an imaginary eternal being to reverse the horror of death.

The stories of Atheism that I know are definitely not related to tragedies. They are mostly about very smart people who've progressed intellectually enough to see the arbitrariety to stick to a tradition of belief in the actual existence of otherwise obviously imaginary entities. Maybe Atheists are a next species of human in the making. After Homo abilis and sapiens, Homo genius. Maybe the anger is with how limiting and inconsisting the sapiens though it for geniuses.

The intellectual depth of this article rivals that of a wading pool, the whole article consists of blatant ad hominem attacks. The author makes ignorant statements saying that, in a nutshell, the majority of atheists are angry or sad, that atheists don't have hope, and that you need religion to be happy. i am used to this from fundamentalist Christians, but seeing this written by a Rabbi disheartens me.