I was working off of experience - I had no stereotype for atheists. My expectation came from my own having arrived at atheism from reading holy books of all the major religions, looking into Tao, Confuscism, African Animism, Native American beliefs from a number of tribes, you name it.

I expected that since lil' ol' me arrived at it from knowledge, others had too. And the humanist gatherings I went to at Stanford and Berkeley were impressive - the first one I went to at Stanford featured Russel Brandt, whom I know when he was head of network security for Lawrence Livermore Labs, the son of the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog.

This crowd was not up to that standard.