I'm sure this will get fireballs too but i'd like to point out that although Luis has been more than a little aggressive in his opinions in other posts, (I've had to wade through the Germany nuclear power thread and stuff), as of the first couple pages when i was throughly reading, most of the points he made were completely fair to make, particularly that a lot of people were suffering from a blindspot in their reasoning.
It's not just what was being said, the actual quality of several of the people's arguments in this thread on the other side, people who are usually extremely organized and rational in non-religious debates, has been a lot less than I'm used to reading in their posts here.
Religion has multiple meanings, it's both what's on paper and what's actually practiced. Now you still need some more specific wording, but if you want to use this and other incidents to say something like "Christianity in the southern US is fracked up", you're not exactly wrong to bring that objection, which is more what i think several people in this thread were fumbling at trying to say. Events like these do seem to be more indicative of the norm (in that area), even if they're not indicative of normal Christianity.
There are objections that could be brought up ('we've discussed this before' , 'you're rambling' , 'we're not getting anywhere, let's cut this off' , 'this is the umpteenth post you've made on this topic, we get it already' ) , focus on those. The other ones aren't as particularly valid as people seem to think they are.
At the very least, he shouldn't need to bow his head, that suggests that he is 'playing along'. He should have just looked straight ahead, and then if people asked him why he was 'disrespecting' their religion, he could say he's not stopping them from praying, and why are they 'disrespecting' his atheism?
As a religious person, I think this is probably the best thing the kid could have done. He was more or less dealing with mismatched attitudes of people consumed by borderline extremism, not the religion as a whole.
Speculating isn't as productive, because then you get into an argument with someone else that posts an anecdotal story where that kind of thing caused just as much trouble, and then the two groups of you end up derailing the post arguing about which anecdotal story is less fair to bring up.
