They like to be told what to think, as they can absolve themselves of personal responsibility and say "God did it" or "it was God's will" no matter how terrible it was, such as a person's death in a natural disaster, or how good it was, like living through a natural disaster.
Atheists tend to base their actions on science and observable facts, not wishful thinking. Wishful thinking ignores causality, or inserts causality where there is none. Like random occurrences are credited to praying for something.
That is a lot tougher than saying "it's god's will".
I KNOW the sun will come up in the morning; where and when can be calculated. It's math on the celestial sphere. No wonder Apollo was the Sun God. The Sun is certainly more reliable than a sky daddy.
I live in a very conservative area. If you don't go to one of a few Protestant churches, you have no social life. People invite you to their church to be friendly. And if I say, "We're Unitarians. We go to a church that draws from many different spiritual traditions," they don't understand that because they are so programmed to believe their church is the only true church, whether it's an established denomination with actual seminaries, or an independent church with a stupid, uneducated half-assed preacher.
I was raised Presbyterian. They are liberal and educated and don't berate people with commercials for Jesus. When I first ran into Jesus freaks in high school I was horrified. I learned a lot about religion from my mandatory religion courses at the Presbyterian college I graduated from. They were not about doctrine. They were about sociology and psychology of religion and history. I got an excellent liberal arts education there.
Right down the road at Incarnate Word College, the religion courses were about sacraments and doctrine and catechism. Very different. Indoctrination, not expanding your mind with fundamental questions like why we have religion in the first place.
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