I've been lurking around/in the religious newsgroups, for a couple of hours most days, for the past six months, and seem to have witnessed more anger in the alt.atheism (non-moderated) groups than in all the others combined... Several recent posters on alt.atheism.moderated have also commented on the apparently increasing 'noise' (immaturity-plus- anger-plus-profanity?) there. Now why? As a counselor of angry people I try to encourage my clients to figure out the cause/s of their anger -

• biology (sometimes anger is linked to allergies, diet, etc.),
• perceived injustice,
• personal frustration,
• threat/hurt, or
• is it a learned behavior (studies show that most very angry teenagers had at least one very angry parent)?

In the late 1960s - the Vietnam protest years - I was a counselor- of-students. My judgment was (and is) that most overt protesters - about/against anything - are angry about something much deeper than the presenting issue. As one said to me, after an 'aha experience': 'I think I'm just generally mad at authority figures 'cos I wasn't breast-fed or bonded properly to my mother...!' Now, back to angry atheists or theists. Here's my thesis: most angry theists are fundamentalists, who use as psychological weapons doctrines such as hell and judgment to try to 'validate' their anger. Most angry atheists probably felt victimized at some time by 'turn or burn' preachers... BTW I reckon there's more anger experienced by Americans - both theistic fundamentalists and atheists - than in the rest of the world combined. Why is that? Now there's something puzzling here: I would have thought alt.atheism group/s were supposed to be seed-beds of rationality... Rowland Croucher

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