I personally think organized religion as we know it is a sham, a convenient tool of elites passed down through the ages for use as a pacifier. At its best, it encourages complacency with ones life status; at its worst, it becomes a just-add-water excuse for mass murder. However, I do not treat individual religious people with derision simply for being religious, nor do I think in the abstract they are “defective”. Depending on their ACTIONS, they may actually be wonderful people regardless of their embrace of religion.

From the comments to a column about the stigma against open atheism and/or secularism in politics on the Washington Post website, here’s an example of the type that goes right into the “asshole” column:

I believe atheists themselves should be respected - as human beings created in God’s image, they are as valuable as the rest of us are and we can hope that they will eventually come around. However, I have seen no evidence that atheism itself is a respectable belief system. Rather, it is a deficiency. Maybe the person is missing a gene or has a mutated chromosome or something along those lines (and not, I should add, an evolved one - as evolution remember is to tend toward the positive).
-Brad (emphasis mine)

Now, this isn’t a “religious right” type. He states that he feels overemphasis on religion in politics is what got us Dubya, opposed the Great Iraqi Snipe Hunt from the start, and actually says quite obviously that, unlike the bible-thumper class, he sees no inherent contradiction between a deity and evolution. All this makes the view all the more repulsive: it’s as if in the 60’s a white person had said “I’m fine with blacks being around, but melanin is a mutation” right after giving a standard progressive schpeil for the time.

Funny thing about this is, the idea that religious belief is genetic was advanced by someone on “the other side”. In “The God Part of the Brain“, Matthew Alper argued that the human brain had a spiritual sector, and that its original purpose was as an evolution-provided psychological shield of sorts, allowing mankind a break from being reminded of its impending death every second. Far from being a bizarro-Brad on this, he left open the question of its modern-day usefulness — though his criticism of manmade religion in the book was willfully misinterpreted as “hehe, stupid theists”. Either way, Brad isn’t saying anything new here.

IMO, that theory that spirituality has a section in our brains was already proven way back when peyote started being used for religious ceremonies by many of the indigenous people of what’s now the US & Mexico. It’s even backed up more recently by studies I’ve seen showing that psychedelic drugs can trigger spiritual sensations. Common sense says if deliberately messing with your brain does this then something in there has to have that role.

Yet contrary to popular belief, spirutality and religion are not the exact same thing. One can believe that there are things beyond our usual comprehension, things that if we were to witness them would get a reaction of intense childlike wonder, without following a religion. I should know, I’m in those ranks*. That shows that rejection of religion is not a genetic defect, because everyone has that part of their brain — even us heathens. The assumption that because someone does not go to a building at least once a week wearing uncomfortable clothing and sing/chant/talk about stories thousands of years old they have something wrong with them, THAT is a defect.
(* - I don’t profess to be able to know all that is out there, or that reality in its entirety is only what we see on a regular basis. I personally feel it reasonable to believe there is something out there greater than us, the difference is that I see as contradictory the belief among theists that something can simultaneously be above you and understandable enough to know what the hell he/she/it wants from you, if anything. I go about my life as if there is no god because I see no point in picking one from all the options: it’s like playing Powerball with an infinate amount of numbers that can be drawn. Obviously, 99.999% of the time it is much quicker for me to say “I’m an atheist” or “I’m agnostic” than to explain this in public.)