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Mr_No said:

I'm not gonna take the easy way out and say it won't happen. Heck, what you mentioned does have a chance of happening. Crazier and more ludicrous things have happened in America. Yes, Christians are diminishing in numbers at this point, but it won't stop religious-based discrimination from happening in both sides. For example, in your same hypothetical future, an atheist baker based on a small conservative town decides he wants to turn down several cakes for Christian weddings. Instead of the customers forcing him to bake it through law, they could happily go to other bakeries in town. They all know about the atheist shop owner who defined his religious stance by promoting non-religion and they'll look for someone else who can give them a better service. Either he makes a compromise or moves out to another place where only atheists will be buying his cakes. It's a free market so he can do whatever he wants, even if it's harmful for his finances.

And like Cobretti here, the more the extremists on both sides let themselves be known, the more they'll get mocked at by both religious and secular citizens.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. But it's just a hypothesis, a "what if", a chance.

Also, I find the bolded premise quite curious because I thought atheists, by definition, are against organized religion and won't consider themselves to be part of one.

Well as you say, they are "organized" against religion, so while not a religion per se, it is still an organized movement against religion. Most demographic surveys like Pew divide non-religious people into atheist, agnostic, and something like "none" or "not otherwise specified", with agnostics having thought about it but decided they couldn't figure it out and remaining skeptical to any choice, and the "nones" just having generally lost interest in religion and stopped thinking about it or giving a shit about it altogether. My hypothetical was of a future world where an atheist, the organized against religion sort (think Richard Dawkins or the like), sets up shop in a town or city with a vast majority non-religious population, so including atheists, agnostics, and "nones" altogether they make up say 90%, with the last 10% being split between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. The atheist discriminates against that 10%, and the other 90% either agree if they're atheist, or generally don't care and think religion is dumb anyway like the "nones", and as such, the atheist still gets support because at most only 10% of the town/city would be upset. Now lets say the town doesn't have a lot of cake shops. I don't know about you, but I don't know of all that many cake shops. They aren't exactly on every corner. The Christian now can't get a cake unless he goes to another town, and that's not really fair, I think. I mean a Christian in a future like this might not even be against science or gays or whatever, he just has some spiritual beliefs that don't hurt anyone. You can say it's just a cake, but who's to say this doesn't eventually go beyond cakes to other businesses?

Besides, like I said, it's a hypothetical meant to illustrate a "tables turned" scenario. Gays aren't exactly a huge portion of the population. Some surveys suggest that the people behind every letter of LGBTQIA altogether only make up 5% of the population, probably less in a rural, mostly Christian town. If a gay lives in some rural town today where everyone is a conservative Christian, and he's too poor to move, he has to just have his wedding without a cake, because the whole town is Christian and supports the cake shop, not the gay couple. Similarly, in my future scenario, if the Christian is too poor to move, and everyone around him likes the atheist's high quality cakes more than they care about the plight of the Christian because they generally think religion is dumb anyway so who cares about him, then the Christian has to just have a wedding without a cake. It might not seem serious, but it still creates a population of second-class citizens, at least in the mostly non-religious town. And there's still the possibility that other businesses go to court for the right to discriminate as well.

All I'm trying to get at is that this is about more than "let's help the poor gay people because yay liberalism and progressivism" and is more about defending minorities from the tyranny of the majority. As a white Christian myself, who knows he'll probably be a serious minority in the future (white Christians are about 43% of the population now, and still shrinking rapidly), I really wish more Christians would stop taking their majority status and the privileges that come with it for granted. I'm also trying to tell you that expecting the free market to always find a solution is magical thinking. A poor person in a sufficiently small minority will not have economic options to escape the tyranny of a sufficiently large majority, and the free market won't help the minority person because the vast majority of it is made up of that uncaring large majority. If the minority person isn't poor, they can afford to move to some sort of community with a greater concentration of their minority, but why should they have to? It's just wrong. They should be able to shop wherever they want. Expecting the free market to administer justice not only won't work in all cases, it's just wrong to put a person's rights and ability to participate in society on the market to the highest bidder.