A lot of people--on the Internet especially--encounter nothing but a mob of angry atheists, and they cannot exactly understand just why they are angry; they simply want them to go away, or liken them to their fundamentalist counterparts in order to try to simply dismiss or belittle them.
But this isn't exactly the case. Atheists view religion completely differently than religious people view it, and the experiences most atheists claim to have about coming out as an atheist to family and friends has an enormous impact upon what they think of religion, above and beyond whatever philosophy they turn to in its place.
To be an atheist--again it depends upon where one lives and goes to school, etc--is more or less the same as being a homosexual, insofar as homosexuality is actively reviled by the dominant group. When one typically comes out as an atheist, especially if one grows up in a very religious household, or attends a religious school, or lives in a small town in the south or midwest, it is not surprising if the open-atheist is ostracized or even exiled from his or her community. Jessica Ahlquist recently won a lawsuit requiring her public school to remove a sectarian banner, and is now being attacked by angry Christians1.
Religion, to the atheist, is nothing more and nothing less than a power structure, a requirement and condition for tribal membership, to the point where whatever meaning may be derived from religious belief for the believers cannot be considered authentic because,as they see it, it is imposed upon the individual by greater society. To the atheist, religion is not unlike the Matrix, the simulation built by the robots in order to pacify their human resources (literally), and as such, religion must be annihilated in order for individuals to be liberated and given the agency they need for intellectual and emotional fulfillment.
The atheist does not commonly recognize that religion may indeed bring authentic meaning to people's lives by way of its transmission from parent to child (the master-slave relationship in which the child does not have any rights or agency under the parent; s/he is not typically given the agency or the knowledge required to make an informed choice about what it is he or she believes).
The atheist is typically right on these points, however: Most Americans have not actually read The Bible, and children--as well as adults--living in a community dominated by a given religion do not have the recourse to forfeit their faith without serious social consequences. If one looked at religious beliefs in society, one may certainly find that it serves as a social control first, and a source of meaning for individuals second.
But the people who know their religion, who know and are comfortable in what they believe, are much less likely to oppress others; the much smaller number of the religious who fit into this category--who have truly studied and care about what it is they personally believe--lends itself to the view that for most Americans, religion is more of a social control than an authentic source of meaning for individuals. They do not have any access to other philosophical or theological frameworks unless they are willing to forfeit membership to their tribes, and this says nothing about the traps built into the religions in order to keep the numbers of the faithful--namely, Hell.
On the other hand, independent of all of what I have said so far, what can be said about the atheist is that s/he has as much allegiance to his or her new group--the drive to belong is the same for all people, no matter what race/religion/sexual orientation/ethnicity/etc, etc--as the Christians do to one another, and this in itself precludes any meaningful dialogue between sides, especially for new (de)converts. This point is the same for every single belief system ever: The new initiate in any system of belief is on shaky ground, and among people in which he can confide--fellow (non)believers--s/he may be more open to exploring new philosophical/ideological ground, but to outsiders, s/he must appear sure of himself or herself, to the point of making claims s/he does not yet know how how to justify.
The Big Bang of the atheist community is leading more people to truly figure out what it is they should identify as according to what they believe: "Am I agnostic? What does that mean? Am I a 'gnostic atheist', or an 'agnostic atheist'?" (Do I know that there are no (G)od(s), or am I only to varying degrees certain that gods do not exist? Conversely, it is possible to be a gnostic theist--to know that (G)od(s) exist--or an agnostic theist--to only be certain by varying degrees that (G)od(s) exist.) This conversation is healthy and productive, to broaden the range of possibilities for belief (or non-belief).
It would, in my view, be very difficult to deny that religion does serve the purpose of social control, but at the same time, I'm not quite certain that it is specifically the fault of religion itself. The truth is that I think people would generally be quick to find some or other political or philosophical difference to fight to the death about after extinguishing all others. It is true that most human conflicts are defined in religious or ethnic terms, but the language used is often just dressing for realities that are much more banal. It is just tragic that, in our time, as globalization continues to become an ever-present reality, the only justifications available to the last bastions of isolationism are religious and nationalistic, to the point where a grotesque hybrid of the two has emerged, a phenomenon with which most of the politically-informed is already familiar.
1) http://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/01/that-christian-compassion/
