Where are these atheists that are being killed for their lack of faith? According to an item in the Huffington Post, a recent report by the International Humanist and Freethought Union found that there were 13 countries, all of them Muslim, where apostasy was punishable by death. But in the report no mention of any actual case where an atheist had been judicially killed for being an atheist or, indeed, murdered outside the judicial system. And, of course, the law in these cases applies equally to those people who chose to follow a non-Muslim religion. (There are plenty of recent reports of Christians being murdered for being Christian them being in church at the time is a clue.)
But this is an example of the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and lazy thinking that characterises so much atheist invective. The possibility that someone could be executed for being an atheist (in 13 of the worlds approximately 190 states) is turned into a completely fallacious received idea that atheists are being killed for being atheists all over the place. That is not to say that there are not countries where it is not easy being an atheist -- there clearly are. But the UK is not one of them.
You could dismantle other common received ideas of internet atheism in the same way. Indoctrination if it's so effective why is church membership declining? Of course parents want to pass their values onto their children I expect atheists do this too. They often want to call it critical thinking, but it actually comes down to 'think what I do'. And atheists whose children turn against their indoctrination and become religious often find it very difficult to cope with -- I remember a poster on here recently who said that her children becoming religious was second only to becoming drug addicts in her catalogue of parental fears.
Church schools fine, let's abolish them, but let's not forget that church schools exist because in the nineteenth century the church was the only organisation that cared to provide education for the children of the poor and that the bill to introduce universal free education was introduced by a Christian. Let's not forget, too, that the church bought the land and built the buildings of the schools. And that one of the reasons they still exist is because successive governments have not wanted to take on the transfer of ownership of all that land and buildings.
But it's easier to see religion as a vastly powerful web of oppression of ordinary powerful atheists even if there's no truth in the picture, it's a comforting myth. Perhaps it's a bit childish, to want to see yourself as a victim, I don't know. The idea that non-believers are helplessly subjected to the awful oppression of having to watch songs of praise on prime time tv strikes me as well, it's like complaining about being hit by a feather, isn't it?
It doesn't matter how many times people of faith say that they are not anti-atheist, or anti-women, or anti-gay. Either they are not proper Christians or Muslims, or they are simply acting as whitewash for others. What would be so awful about listening, for once?