I read articles like this, and it always leaves me shaking my head wondering what I just read:

February 12 used to be known in classrooms across the nation as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. But over the last decade, an increasing number of schools and community groups have decided to celebrate the birthday of the father of evolution instead.
...
Darwin Day celebrations provide an eye-opening glimpse into the world of grassroots Darwinian fundamentalism, an alternate reality where atheism is the conventional wisdom and where traditional religious believers are viewed with suspicion if not paranoia.

Promoters of Darwin Day deny that their activities are anti-religious, but their denial is hard to square with reality.
...
Given such sponsors, it should be no surprise that Darwin Day events often explicitly attack religion. At a high school in New York a few years ago, students wore shirts emblazoned with messages proclaiming that "no religious dogmas [were] keeping them from believing what they want to believe," while in California a group named "Students for Science and Skepticism" hosted a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, on the topic "Darwin's Greatest Discovery: Design without a Designer." This year in Boston there is an event on "Biological Arguments Against the Existence of God."

What we have here are people on both sides of the aisle attacking the other for attacking their beliefs.  There is no other way to see it.  What's funny about these sorts of articles is that they seem to brush aside certain basic realities.  First and foremost among those realities is that in general, evolution contradicts an important tenant of most religions.  It shouldn't be surprising then that atheists like it so much.  So calling celebrations of Darwin "anti-religion" is about as foolish as calling Christmas "anti-atheist".

While it may be true that many evolutionary scientists still believe in God, there are also a great many people Christians who believe that the Bible is the literal truth, and that evolution is flat out wrong.  Christians who point out the religious scientists always find a way to forget about their brothers who have more fervent beliefs when they criticize those t-shirts decrying religious dogma.

What I find sad in the case of this article is the need to paint those t-shirt wearers as automatically being lunatics on some sort of fringe of belief, when they would attack any liberal for criticizing a person with a Jesus fish on their car.  Things aren't helped either when you have people like Bill O'Reilly hyping his own book on the air about the fake culture war that is supposedly consuming our country.

My question then comes back to the title of the post.  Is being anti-religion a bad thing by definition?  If so, what makes it so bad?  Is it the fact that so many people promote atheist belief?  If you answer yes, do you also think that evangelical Christian groups are by definition bad?  Or are these groups simply bad because they disagree with you?

Via Patrick McIlheran.