It seems that every day I come across frighteningly stupid remarks by religious people about religion, or about atheism.

And I also encounter frighteningly stupid remarks by atheists about atheism, or about religion.

It's not that such people are necessarily representative of their respective traditions or world views, but that it's easy to dismiss atheism or religion by taking the idiotic remarks of its most unintelligent adherents as a reliable index of what most of "those people" believe.