I can't imagine being simple minded enough to be religious. How can you not question everything all of the time? How can you submit so easily to authority? Religious people seem incapable of reason, and therefore are hard to trust.
In some cases (but I think not all) there can be a tendency for formalized religion to channel intellectual effort toward foregone conclusions, but in that case religious people are hardly the only guilty parties. That seems to be a large part of what they teach in law school, for example, and then there are modern secular groups that border on being cults (e.g. Ayn Rand's followers and the AI singularity people). There's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to bad faith arguments.
@dynamic I never said religious people are the only ones lacking in reason. They just have obvious limits on reason, even if they try to stretch and reshape those limits. However, "religious" isn't confined to recognized, organized religions. e.g., Ayn Rand's followers
@lwriemen
Speaking as (another?) atheist, I think you're being pretty unfair. Religion has many forms and flavors. Orthodox Jews and certain groups of Catholics, for example, do a *lot* of wrestling with ideas about the nature of god and the rules that dictate human nature.