By contrast, merely not believing in God doesn’t entail believing that religion is the greatest evil the world has ever known, nor even necessarily that religion is any problem at all. It means what it means: not believing in God. And, as this research confirms, that’s something most atheists manage to do without any abnormal levels of anger.

Ultimately, I suspect that the impression that atheists are angrier than other people stems from a more general problem, one that skews our assessment of all sorts of other phenomena, too: it’s always the loudest people who make the most noise. That might sound obvious, yet it’s alarmingly easy to forget – as you roam around Facebook or Twitter or the wider internet, or channel-hop through television shows – that you’re inevitably going to hear far more from people prone to anger and condemnation than from those whose beliefs are more quietly held.

It is regularly argued that the internet provides a glimpse into humanity’s collective id – that the fury and fear and bigotry revealed daily on Twitter, or in comment sections, represents the truth we otherwise hide behind polite offline facades. There’s probably something to that (and online abuse is a serious problem). But it’s still worth remembering that most people don’t spend their days picking fights, or screaming at people they hate – only the fight-pickers and the screamers and the haters do. Likewise, in debates about religion, it’s the angry participants on both sides who create the impression that such debates must always be fractious. It’s not atheists in general who are angry; it’s just the angry ones.