If your friends are atheists, then you see that atheists come with any temperament. But when you hear about atheism from a stranger, there is a big chance he is a jerk, because other people usually don’t impose their opinions on strangers.
It works the same if you replace “atheism” by many other things. The most visible people are usually the most annoying ones.
Thank you for writing this. I started to write something similar, got bogged down in too many layers of qualification, and ultimately scrapped it; you expressed what I wanted to, far more succinctly than I would have.
Opinions of rude jerks are more known to strangers.
If your friends are atheists, then you see that atheists come with any temperament. But when you hear about atheism from a stranger, there is a big chance he is a jerk, because other people usually don’t impose their opinions on strangers.
It works the same if you replace “atheism” by many other things. The most visible people are usually the most annoying ones.
Thank you for writing this. I started to write something similar, got bogged down in too many layers of qualification, and ultimately scrapped it; you expressed what I wanted to, far more succinctly than I would have.