Liberals and opinions

siderea wrote a really interesting and thinky post about the unpopularity of New Atheism. There's a lot of insight her post, particularly on the necessity of religious tolerance for civic peace even while it has some unresolved issues. It seems it is having unintended side effects (e.g. on intellectual freedom) and may yet be proven to not actually work to maintain civic peace. The main point of the post is the very sensible observation that people aren't annoyed with New Atheists for being loud and in-your-face about something that everybody basically agrees with; they're annoyed with New Atheists because the New Atheist view of religion is in fact threatening.

My response here is more some thoughts that were activated by the post, than a direct rebuttal. Siderea personally, you're very welcome to skip this post if it seems likely to be annoying to you, and also very welcome to challenge me in comments if you'd like to. Where I'm coming from is that I think the OP is making some common, but not entirely accurate, assumptions about liberalism, and it's those I want to talk about.

( just my opinion )