Former Catholic atheist here, 4/7 sacraments through my teenage years. In my late teens/early twenties when I was still trying to define myself, I used my religious background as a base point before I fully developed my epistemological views. After some time, for political reasons, I began to focus more severely on Wahhabist Islam and Evangelical Protestantism as the worst case expressions of religious thought.

However, even after that I understood that if I was the reduce religious identification to a metric of social identity, then I could no longer target it in excess to the other metrics I saw. I began to take it easier, even on the fuckos in the Westboro Baptist Church or even fucking Daesh. My desire to view the world beyond religious eyes made me dispassionate to saying "these" are the villains and "they" are not, but rather to interpret how strong belief can lead to strong actions, and strong actions can be a precursor to what we consider true evil.

I don't want you to agree with me, but to finish my story I've become much kinder to my former Catholic faith, which a decade ago was my primary target of contempt and bile. I was younger, and that was the only faith I knew intimately. I needed to rely on it in order to express my belief by contradiction, before I had the perspective to feel comfortable forming my own opinion that could be applied in turn foreign faiths and dispositions.

I'm sure this isn't the response you anticipated, but I've been more attuned to my Catholic background the past few years, though I know I'll never go back. I haven't subscribed to r atheism for over two years because I couldn't reconcile the prevalent tone their with my increasing softness for the larger religious world and more importantly the real people who participate in it constantly.

Anyways, sorry for the long windedness. I'm drinking a few beers and haven't talked about religion on Reddit in a long time. I'm not calling you out specifically, but instead just trying to seize an opportunity to cast a different light on the non believers of Reddit.

PS: I like Pope Francis and his Jesuit background, particularly relative to JP2 and Benedict. After Francis' encyclical on climate change placing such an emphasis on the perils of overconsumption, abuse of resources, and unsustainable economic thinking, I had hoped he would be stronger on overpopulation as an underlying factor. However, that is probably a bridge to far :(