@TheMiddleWay: Just because I think the world would be a better place without religion does NOT mean that I would eliminate religion if I suddenly became powerful enough to do so. My understanding that people are entitled to the freedom to think, feel, and worship as they will takes precedence over my opinion that the world would be a better place without religion.

@TheMiddleWay I'm not tolerant of religion and I certainly would eliminate if it were in my power to do so. Ignorance is not bliss. It is voluntarily relinquishing your autonomy to others. There needs to be laws to stop people being exploited by cults or occults or any other superstition.

@TheMiddleWay by living in hope that current religions will go the way of ancient religions that once millions believed in, fought for and died believing, following their phoney celebrants, and that is to die the death of irrelevance. Given human weakness for the simplistic answers of religion, and the phoney authority on which it is based, it is, I admit, idealistic to hope for a religion free world. But the trend line of history is clear, the right and wrong side of history all too apparent, as is which side of that history religion belongs.

Pretty much how I feel. Believe what you want but keep your religious laws off my body and myself, and stop calling and knocking on the door. Not interested. And don't use government to impose religious law or oppress women.

@TheMiddleWay nothing justifies blind hatred

It doesn't matter if the person doing the hating is Black, White, religious, atheist...

Understanding WHY people grow to hate others has good utility especially if we can oppose the idiocy through understanding and hopefully good education

@TheMiddleWay I think the chain of reasoning matters here. It is merely an opinion to regard religious faith as a sub-optimal basis for things, and to feel that strongly enough to argue against it. It also is fine to be agitating as an activist against these things provided you connect it to how it brings about injustice and human suffering. The basis must always be poor outcomes, not ideological incorrectness.

It only becomes intolerance when your rationale for rejecting what you disbelieve in is confined strictly to dehumanization, ridicule and ad hominem attacks. In my experience, New Atheism intends to ridicule things that are ridiculous, and to show them up as such. This is going to be very threatening (even, perceptually, existentially threatening) to those theists to whom it rightly applies, but I would not conflate this with dehumanization. I think there's a danger of it being both misunderstood and misused as dehumanization, though. That is why I am not a strict New Atheist. Sometimes you do catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Sometimes dousing some asshat with a full gallon of vinegar wakes them up. It is situational. There's value in recognizing that historically unbelievers have had to pussy-foot around the tender sensibilities of theists who have enjoyed totally unearned deference in the marketplace of ideas -- and thus to level out that playing field and destroying such authoritarian notions as blasphemy laws, etc. But there's also value in speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

BTW, FWIW ... I do not believe the US government was set up with Christian beliefs or any other theistic beliefs as an explicit foundation. The founding fathers were, for the most part, Deist at best. Modern fundamentalists push the total fiction of this being a "Christian" nation as if it were founded by fundamentalists who were not a significant social influence until, at best, the 1830s. And the religious beliefs of most of the founders, such as they were, are actually abhorrent to modern fundamentalism. It's like how they'll cite that a third of the world is Christian (by a very weak, self-labeling and largely cultural standard) when it suits them, and then reject most of those same people as apostates when that suits them.

The reality is that the US is and has always been a secular democratic republic founded at a time of widespread religious piety and so was propounded in such a way that the pious could see in its founding principles what they wished to see. As they do to this very day.

The Bible certainly happens to agree with and justify (in however misguided a fashion) many of our founding principles, seen from a certain perspective (in point of fact the Bible is ignorant of anything but the governmental systems of its day, i.e., absolute monarchy, institutional slavery, etc). You can, with some mental gymnastics, cite the Bible as a justification for many aspects of the US governmental system, but the truth is that if the US were literally based on the Bible we'd have a king and we would have affirmed slavery as a matter of course (which in fact we did, at first).

Which brings up the point that it's not a bad thing that this country has in ways become less a Christian nation. Christianity has in fact broken with itself and the cherished interpretations of Christianity by many of its followers, in that portions of Christianity have long promoted social justice issues, compassion for the disadvantaged, and agitating for progressive change. We must not confuse this happy development for regressive Christianity being able to lay any legitimate claim to the heritage of the higher ideals of its own founders.

@TheMiddleWay I have no malfunction with anything you're saying here.

"New Atheism" is something of an ad hoc movement with no central tenets or leadership and some people claim to be new atheists just by virtue of being in-your-face anti-theists, so it's hard to say whether new atheism supports the notion that religion is mental illness in some sense. Personally I do not subscribe to that and I am not sure that any prominent new atheist does, as anything more than a rhetorical flourish anyway. I think it's a dangerous notion even as a rhetorical flourish, so it's not one that I would advocate.

Religion is highly compartmentalized and people don't apply religious faith to all aspects of life. As someone said ... might have been Carlin ... "tell people that there's an invisible man in the sky and they believe it; but tell them the paint is wet and they have to touch it to be sure". We all have irrational beliefs. Many unbelievers on this very site clearly harbor irrational beliefs in things like ESP, homeopathy, new age / new thought types of notions -- and they even harbor less than historically accurate notions of what agnosticism or atheism are.

The human mind is a leaking sieve, truth be told. It's highly imprecise. Having the humility to understand the limits of your own thought processes is not compatible with calling religion mental illness, in my view. By that standard, we're all mentally ill. Just because we can see the wrong-headedness in religion, doesn't mean we're right-headed in all things.

By the way you are using the words you are basically agreeing with me. You already make the distinction between an atheist or anti-theist who takes action and someone who doesn't. If you want to explorethe topic further, here is one definition of tolerance (from the oxfort dictionary): "The ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with."
The term 'intolerant atheist', for example, is a bit vague.People would disagree what makes someone intolerant. To be more precise you might want to try to find out what the person is intolerant about. (1) Is it some religious practise that interfers with somebodys life in a negative way? I wouldn't call that intolerant against religion but intolerant against said practice, but you might have a different opinion. The next step would be (2) someone who is intolerant about a religious practise that doesn't affect anybody else, like praying quietly in your home. If that someone can't tolerate that he/she would in my view have to be an intolerant person in general, which would make that person an intolerant atheist. But, as others have already pointed out, it is a whole different question if being intolerant is good or bad in different situations. There might be an agrument that justifies being intolerant against praying quietly I though haven't heard about such an agrument yet.

I think the question that would be more interesting and also easier to verify is "Does someone calling himself anti-theist correlate with being intolerant?" I'm not aware of any studies about this, but there could be a connection and it would be interesting to find out the connection between calling yourself religious and intolerance to compare those things.

I consider myself an atheist, definitely and an anti-theist depending on the definition. In your example I would say that you would have to clarify how the church is funded. If it was privately funded I wouldn't have anything against it and I probably would say so even in private. Even though I might call myself an anti-theist you might say that disqualifies me from being one, that's one of the semantic grey areas here.
On the other hand, if it was publicly funded, I would definitely be against it, in private or in public, because I see no reason why all of society should (even if only in part) for a recruitement center for supersticious believes. In that sense I think most people would not hesitate to call me anti-theist.
So in summary, I might not be considered an anti-theist (by some people) because I tolerate everyones private opinion, but I'm definitely an anti-theist when those opinion affect my life or the live of othes.

Being opposed to or against is not the same as being intolerant.
I might be opposed to my neighbor painting his house brown, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't tolerate it, if he did.

@Dietl I can see your point but I'd argue that they are used interchangably quite often in society. Take anti-smoking for instance.

You can't be tolerant about something you are for or indifferent about. So you can only be tolerant about something you are against. Having those things mean the same thing leads to a contradiction of sorts. You can only be intolerant about something you are against, but you can only be tolerant about something you are against.