I used to be what most would call a very spiritual person.

That was some time ago.  When I opened up as an athiest, the response from friends ran the gamut from "you're too extreme" to "you've hit a new low".

Those that didn't say anything either didn't care, or were probably in agreement with where I was now coming from.  It took me a long time to admit to myself that I was an athiest.  Therefore, I don't like it when the non-religious declare themselves agnostic and face criticism for it from the athiest community: reaching athiesm is a transition (tho some never get there, or even close).  For some, that transition longer than others.

No, that came from the realization that I simply could not accept the most basic tenant of agnosticism, that we simply "cannot know for sure".

As I grew older, read more, thought more, I realized that we CAN know. It's something of a variant on something else Bertrand Russell said -- that all religions cannot be right, so they must all be wrong. For me, it comes down to BELIEF requiring me to reject so much of what science has actually shown us to be true. If science finds a problem it cannot immediately solve, it keeps digging, sifting, sorting, questioning. Eventually the answer will come -- or it won't. But none of that falls into the religious response of "there are somethings we were not meant to know" or, even worse, "here is the answer, and if it contradicts your common sense, YOU are wrong."

First of all, this is America and people have the right to either believe or not believe whatever they want to.

That said, I think that the main reasons that so many American atheists are not readily accepted by "people of faith" is not so much for their professed disbelief in God, but rather for the intolerance on the part of some atheists towards “people of faith” when they discuss religion.

I have heard some of those arguing an atheist’s POV use the term "stupid", "illogical", "uneducated", etc. when describing the beliefs of the religious, and sometimes they do come off sounding a bit nasty.

More often than not, I've seen the reverse. Many christians are often quick to take offense when topics like evolution are brought up. Sometimes they simply scoff and sneer but other times they do in fact, get nasty about it (of course that is when various religions aren't too busy taking swipes at each other).

Yup - it does go both ways. Tolerance is what's needed on all sides.

PS. If you ever get the chance, read C.S Lewis's autobiography Suprised By Joy - this tells the story of how JRR Tolkien helped Lewis make the leap from athiesm to theism and then to Christianity.

I think it was Richard Dawkins, reacting to a writer who referred to "Moslem babies", who pointed out there are no such things as Moslem babies, or Jewish babies, or Catholic babies, or babies of any faith. We are all born as blank slates, slates upon which those aforementioned authority figures immediately begin writing. And none of us have any way to know that writing is occuring until it is so deeply ingrained into our very sense of ourselves that we honestly cannot imagine a scenario in which it was not a part of us.

And that's brainwashing.