To remark on what a few posts upthread vaguely touched on, a repeated sentiment I notice is that the good atheist seems to feel a responsibility to say "hopefully some day people will stop believing in stupid shit, but that probably won't happen."
The atheist who says this or similar doesn't seem to realize that it is pretty arrogant. They are dismissing a wide swath of how human beings work as "stupid shit" without even really understanding it.
It's like this.
Atheist goes up to religions person. Atheist tells religions person that god does not exist, nature is nature, their silly superstitions have no basis in fact, and that really, he is just trying to help. Religions person looks at atheist, feels unsatisfied by being told that there is no god, even if he does not know why, and turns away. Atheist throws his hands up and screams "people are idiots! Most will never understand the truth and continue to believe in stupid things!"
The failure that has just happened here is not that people are too stupid to understand what the atheist is saying. Some may be too uneducated at the moment to understand the implications of what he says and thus feel that their religious explanations are more "sensible" since they already understand those and don't understand this science language. But education levels actually have little to do with how many people reject atheists when they come up for yet another round of "you're all being silly".
What is actually going on is that atheists and scientists and materialists are offering answers to questions. And religious or mystical people look at these answers and find them unsatisfying, so they're biased towards not believing them - or not believing they are the whole, complete answer - regardless of how inescapably self sufficient the answers look from the perspective of the atheist. The real problem is that the atheist answers are not dealing with why people ask the questions in the first place. The answer does not negate the need. Now the atheist, typically, may claim that the reason why people are unsatisfied by their rational materialist answers is simply because people are vain. They want there to be a god, want there to be angels, demons, souls, magic, etc. This in itself is a true observation. The problem and the failure to communicate is based on the atheist curling is lip up and sneering at this fact of human psychology.
It's like a man comes up to you and says you should only eat chocolate ice cream because the preference for strawberry ice cream is foolish and stupid and you are foolish and stupid for having this desire. if you like strawberry icecream, no amount of rationalization that chocolate is superior is going to overcome the fact that the guy is a fucking asshole.
Atheists, thinking they have found the magic cure for humanity's ills, do not realize that the "vanity" that causes human beings to create mystical structures is not a negative trait to be sliced out. It has resulted in human beings a whole doing terrible things. But every aspect of human psychology has resulted in human beings doing terrible things.
The "religious impulse" is in large part the need for human beings to narratize their lives and the world around them. It's linked to the artistic impulse. What rationalists are failing to do is to work towards recontextualizing the religious and mystical impulse instead of just going around screaming that it stupid.
A lot of people already naturally do this as an intuitive solution to the issue. These are the christians, for instance, who believe in SCIENCE! and evolution and whatever else, but also believe in "god" or the equivalent in a more abstract way than the more literal biblical interpretations of those who are merely uneducated and/or superstitious. What would be a far more useful conversation would be for the atheist or the rational crusader to sit down with such people and begin talking about how their "mystical" beliefs do not have to be framed in a way that causes a conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. The atheist /could/ offer that mystical frameworks can be metaphors and models that people use to create narratives about life or their interactions with reality. Actual conversation and exchange of ideas could happen. (And once in a while, actually does.) But usually this does not happen; the atheist just says "I feel sorry for you, perhaps some day people will not believe stupid things."
Many atheist crusaders of course, will take the easy way out and construct a popular atheist straw man - they will just point to some crowd of screaming fanatics on television who are raging about evolution being taught in school and sneer "See? See? These stupid ideas are terrible and evil. We must stamp them out!" This of course, does nothing for the very large number of people who are not screaming fanatics and are quite reasonable, and ALREADY understand and accept what SCIENCE! says. It is these people with whom greater understanding of the human need and process of mysticism could be attained, but instead, they are merely being told they are stupid.
People will always believe "stupid things" because these things are not stupid things. They're core to how the human mind works. The scientist may say "but I do not believe these stupid things! Why have I no need of them!" That's because the scientist /has/ his religion and his shrine, his forms, his taboos, his god, and his pantheon. He just doesn't realize what his own brain has latched onto to fill the necessary roles.
The atheist "movement" has a serious problem; it is very popular especially to young guys on the Internet because it just lets them feel that science has their back when they tell all these people who have silly ideas that they're stupid stupid stupid. But any real progress towards human truth is being swept off the table in the war against organized religion's insanity.
