I wasn't aware that revolutionary France was mainly guided by atheism. I always thought it was mostly against the monarchy and the upper class.

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Communist regimes were also very anti-religious.

Weird. Why have I always been told that the French Revolution was mostly about monarchy? I had no idea that the French rose up and fired up the guillotine because they didn't like Catholicism.

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I'm surprised that this wasn't told to you. The church was associated with the monarchy, and you also had a lot of wealthy bishops and other religious figures. The pope sided against France in the War of the First Coalition, though Napoleon (sort of) reconciled France with the church.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

I knew that the church played its part and the corrupt bishops were part of the problem, but I didn't know that religion was the primary cause of the French Revolution. I always thought their abandoning of religion was more of a side effect of bucking authority.

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No one was saying that it was the primary cause, merely that militant atheism was an aspect of the French Revolution.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

There was a documentary about a small fat child that gets sent to the future ruled by atheists. They were fighting with each other and sea otters about what to call themselves. You can't argue with that.

Many would hail the Global Freedom Agreement of 2123, which established democracy as the only form of government, as the beginning of a new era in peace and liberty. But no one was ready for the tension between Presidentialists and Parliamentarians, which escalated into the bloodiest conflict of human history.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

Sounds incidental to me.

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Anti-clericalism was a significant enough part of the French Revolution for religion to be targeted and actively persecuted. In fairness, anti-clericalism is not the same as atheism. However, the persecution of Christianity in Revolutionary France could easily be described as a form of militant atheism.

Religion was also viciously persecuted in communist regimes such as the USSR (at least until Stalin decided the church would be useful to bolster the fight against the Nazis), Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

It always seemed to me that the anti-theism in those scenarios stemmed from either anger at the corruption of the clergy or a totalitarian regime not wanting to share power with clergy.

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I will always remember when I was younger I was in elementary school they took me out of the normal science classes and put me into the advanced ones. They hammered down Galileo's battles with the church and the Monkey Scope's Trial pretty hard. To an adolescence this was very influential and I felt very anti-religious. I basically throw a fit to not go to church anymore even though my mother worked as a Sunday school teacher. This advanced class I was put in made me feel above my peers and I would argue with some of the more religious kids. I couldn't believe there was any reason for someone to be religious other than the fact that they were stupid.

It wasn't really until I got older that I had any sort of positive influence from religion. I might some really nice people that were religious. I felt like they were more like me than your militant atheists. It was like tribalism without the assorted rituals or charity. There is this weird pop culture science associated with it even from people who have never taken a science class before but think hating religion is close enough. As someone who is STEM the two concepts don't seem like substitutes for one another. Science and math helps me build things and solve problems. Religion is more for community, fulfillment, and happiness.

I remember when I was a kid and a lot of my peers told me I was going to burn in hell because I wasn't baptized and didn't go to church. I remember a lot of kids weren't allowed to hang out with me because their parents knew I wasn't the church-going type.
Religion was for exclusion to me. It is only "community, fulfillment, and happiness" if you're one of them.

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Which took the form of persecution against religion.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

Alternatively instead of pointing out the worst of a group you can not kill infidels as a religious person or an atheist. Don't try to impose your views onto someone else.

Tell that to the evangelical right wing, please.

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Well not the violence and killing, no.

But I'm going to always seek argument and discussion. I've gained too much from that exercise to stop now.

Clearly no one told you that science is a liar sometimes and that Galileo was a bitch.

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There was a big protest against Daesh and general Muslim extremism in London recently.
https://imgur.com/a/RiC1f
Why don't Christians ever do something like this?

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Why don't Christians ever march to denounce terrorism?

I mean... does it have to specifically be a march? You get plenty of commentary against violence. You'd likely be hard-pressed to sit in a church sermon advocating terrorism.

Christian terrorism isn't exactly the highest relevance at the moment.

Continuing on from earlier: just as all religions are not equally-harmful at all times, there are differences between and within religions. So by comparison there would always be particular sects that generally promoted a more ethical life than other theists. A radical Jain is not someone that civilization need worry about at this time, for example. Or, as you say, Quakers (or from my own personal experience in a mild rural Anglican denomination) generally encourage people to be socially-responsible citizens. I don't actually know enough about Methodism, except that I am not that keen on the writings of John Wesley (from what little I have read by him), so I have to defer to your judgment on them.

But all religions are similar in one respect in that they share the fundamental mistake of making supernatural claims about the nature of reality. The idea that any one contemporary religion was true -especially one that someone happened to be born into- honestly seems as unlikely to be true as discovering that Zeus is the one true god. People can save themselves so much personal grief and stress after dismissing the supernatural - look at how widespread the fear of ghosts is and how scared people can get from that belief about the world. And the idea of an afterlife has been used to terrorize people for thousands of years; that an eternity of punishment or bliss awaits us all for finite deeds here. I seriously believe that to live your life under the assumption that the universe has been sorted so we -foolish apes that we are- might escape death, is to not appreciate that our lives really do have an expiration date. And so its the duty of each of us to live as ethical and enjoyable lives as we can in the time that we have upon this rock.

By this point my feelings on religion could probably fairly described as some brand of hardcore materialism - but I would politely disagree with your characterization (C9H20) of my beliefs being militant. On principle I am generally anti-theism, but these are dialectical discussions about the nature of the world. I am not cutting anyone's head off or badgering sick people for deathbed conversions, so me saying that I find the evidence presented thus far for gods and prophets to be less than persuasive isn't that radical, as far as I see it. And again -I was fairly active in my local church community growing up- so I don't mean to deprive people of sources of comfort in their life. Its just that, more often than not, I have come to find the ethical and intellectual claims of most religions to be harmful or untrue.

Your two considerations are 1) truth and 2) stress.

Stress isn't a factor. You state people can "save themselves so much personal grief" by not worrying about an afterlife, but you acknowledge at the end that religion is often "sources of comfort". Like all things in life, there is a balance of comfort vs. stress that has little bearing on truth.

As for truth itself? I'm not ready to dismiss the supernatural. I've heard and seen too much myself to will it away, so I personally would have trouble believing an explanation of reality that doesn't account for anything supernatural.

I would say that many people have an ideology shaped hole. Crushing nihilism and purposeless existence forces many to take up some type of ideology in order to find meaning to life. In the past that would have often been religion but now a days I'd say that's political ideology.

Indeed political ideologies have replaced religion for a great deal of many. We can see some glaring examples here on this very forum.