We are fulfilling scripture

When I was young and attending the little Southern Baptist church a few streets over, one of the things I learned that still remains with me is this: they will persecute you for your faith. I never really wondered at the time who they were; I just assumed they were stupid, evil people sent by the Devil to try to knock me out of my relationship with God. More importantly, I knew how I would respond to their persecution: I would remain steadfastly on the path to righteousness and salvation. Or whatever.

Nowadays I hear a lot of stories about atheists who were former Christians, and I wonder what church they went to that they didn't receive the same message that I did. Isn't it one of the constants of Christianity (along with Islam and Judaism) that Evil is going to throw everything it has at you to upset your relationship with the Divine? What about the early Christians, who were supposedly fed to lions for their belief? Anyone remember the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den? These people are fully braced to be made fun of, laughed at, ridiculed, punched in the face, or (in theory) even killed. Understanding this, what's up with the fellow atheist who once told me that ridicule was the very best way to deal with Christians?

A popular saying, sometimes attributed to Einstein, sometimes to Benjamin Franklin, is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In the two years since I came out of the closet into non-religion, I have yet to see a concrete case of a religious person who yielded to ridicule and abandoned his or her religion. I'd honestly like to see statistics on how effective this strategy is overall. It seems to me that, since the allegedly evil atheists are fulfilling scriptural edicts with such incredible accuracy, the person would more likely elect to stay with that which was on the money with the prediction, namely scripture. How do we end religion when we are doing just what the Bible (or the Koran, or the Torah, or whatever) said we would do? Wouldn't it be more effective for us to contradict scriptural predictions by not persecuting?

Just what is it that enjoins us to mount an offensive against Christianity in particular or against religion in general? Why can we not simply insist on being accepted in our society, rather than taking on the utterly impossible task of dismantling something that has been with us since nearly the dawn of civilization? And, once again, is not our call for the end of religion just the perfect mirror of the extremist Christian call for the end of atheism, or radical Islam's call for the death of all infidels? What, then, separates us from this so-called enemy? If we are that which we wish to destroy, should we not then be obligated to destroy ourselves?