Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Trying to prevent RationalWiki judging Christianity too harshly/reply (41)

I don't think we're all on the same page here. Let me lay out my argument point-by-point.
 * Discrimination against atheists exists. (As well as against other non-believers and all religious minorities, if you want to cover religious discrimination in general.)
 * Discrimination against atheists is not as bad as discrimination against other minorities. However, it does not follow from this that it does not exist and/or is inconsequential.
 * Discrimination against atheists is driven by different motives than most other forms of discrimination. Disgust is more often the motivating factor behind discrimination, but when it comes to atheists, it's distrust. (See Edgell et al 2006, Gervais et al 2011, and Gervais and Norenzayan 2011)
 * Discrimination against atheists seems to manifest in a categorically different manner than other forms of discrimination. Why this is is hard to say because there's little research published on it. However, the basis in distrust, relatively small number of atheists in the population, inability to tell atheists apart by appearance alone (unless the person's wearing a Richard Dawkins t-shirt or something), and regional variation in religious belief are probably big contributing factors.
 * Yes, there are some people using this to hop on board a "me too!" bandwagon, but that doesn't magically make actual cases of discrimination go away. Now I don't go around yelling "Help, help! I'm bein' repressed!" as I live in the Mecca of Lib'rulism and work in that hive of secularism, academia. (In some places, I'd say overt religiosity is less welcome than atheism.) But the story is totally different, say, in the Bible Belt. (Mostly, the question interests me because there seems to be a very different set of psychological phenomena in play when it comes to discrimination against atheists.)
 * All I'm seeing from TOP and WfG are "not as bad as" or "I don't see it, so it doesn't exist" arguments. See all the documentation I've provided, and I'll ditto Knight's and Blue's comments again. I think you guys would be singing a different tune if you lived somewhere else. That's about as clear as I can make myself here.