Everyone has a "religion" – i.e. a system of values they subscribe to.
Secular Americans are annoying because they believe they don't have one, and instead think they're just "good people", calling those who break their core values "bad people".
Secular Americans are annoying because they believe they don't have one, and instead think they're just "good people", calling those who break their core values "bad people".
That is not what a religion is.
> Secular Americans are annoying because they believe they don't have one
Why is that a problem to you?
> and instead think they're just "good people", calling those who break their core values "bad people".
No, not really. Someone is not good or bad because you agree with them. Even a religious person can recognise that an atheist doing charitable work is being good, regardless of whether they share a specific set of belief.
The attitude you describe is wrong, and from my experience much more common in religious fundamentalists than radical atheists (the vast majority of people in western democracies do not care whether you have a religion). I have never seen an atheist saying that. But I’ve had priests telling me that I had not "rejected Satan" because I was not baptised.
Because seculars/athiests often believe that they're superior to the "stupid, God-believing religious" people, since their beliefs are obviously based on "pure logic and reason".
Yet, when you boil down anyone's value system to its fundamental essence, it turns out to always be a religious-like belief. No human value is based on pure logic, and it's annoying to see someone pretend otherwise.
> Someone is not good or bad because you agree with them
Right, that's what I was arguing against.
> Even a religious person can recognise that an atheist doing charitable work is being good
Sure, but for the sake of argument, I'm honing in on the word "good" here. You can only call something "good" if it aligns with your personal value system.
> The attitude you describe is wrong
You haven't demonstrated how. Could just be a misunderstanding.
You don't get to co-opt everybody as cryptically religious just because they have values.
And yes, when it comes to value systems, those axioms are cryptically religious.
Statistically, white people make more money than black people and men make more money than women and there are differences in their proportions in various occupations. This could be caused by cultural differences that correlate with race, or hormonal differences that cause behavioral differences and correlate with sex, or it could be caused by racism and sexism. Much of the left takes it as an effectively religious position that the latter predominates even into present day. Many of them are quite militant and aggressive about it, and in particular will try to ruin anyone who presents evidence to the contrary or who opposes policies that would actively perpetrate injustice if their sacred assumptions weren't true anymore. Which isn't consistent with "live and let live".
And that's the nature of politics. You're never passing a law by a margin of 53 to 47 because everybody agrees with it. That's the 53% telling the 47% how to live.
"Only the other side does this" is false purity. There are no saints in Washington.
Which leaves the question of which is the dominant effect. But for that anecdotes are useless, because "I've seen this happen myself" doesn't tell you if it explains 5% of the difference or 95% and people have a tendency of jumping to conclusions without having all the information. If Alice made bigger sales to fewer customers and Bob made smaller sales to more customers and Alice is white and Bob is black, then if Alice gets the promotion the boss is a racist because Bob made more sales but if Bob gets the promotion the boss is a sexist because Alice made bigger sales. Or so you would think by only listening to the one complaining about not getting the promotion.
So then you'd want someone to do a study and we're back to anyone publishing a study that challenges the prevailing dogma getting punished for it.