Whenever I meet someone in his thirties who's a rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth atheist, I look at him like he's an adult who still yells at his parents or has unframed posters on the wall.
In college, I voraciously ingested all the great anti-theist scribes, from Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris, as if preparing for that one hypothetical argument with a religious person over dinner while everyone else awkwardly ate their meatloaf. It enabled me to roll my eyes at anything religious with the best of them. Little is more fun than smugly looking down on a group of people and saying cruel things about them with a feeling of righteous superiority.
Still, this unrelenting disdainful stance gets tired after a while and doesn't stand up when dealing with actual human beings who can talk back. My once-rabid atheism evolved not into belief, but into a calm acceptance of the more faithful people I met, as I gradually came to understand what many non-believers fail to: You're not smarter or stronger than religious people, and you don't know something that they fail to grasp.
