Upvoted because that really is a failure mode worth keeping in mind, but I don't think it's responsible for the attitude towards religion around here; I think that's a plain old founder effect.

Ah, of course, because it's more important to signal one's pure, untainted epistemic rationality than to actually get anything done in life, which might require interacting with outsiders.

This is a failure mode I worry about, but I'm not sure ironic atheist re-appropriation of religious texts is going to turn off anyone we had a chance of attracting in the first place. Will reconsider this position if someone says, "oh yeah, my deconversion process was totally slowed down by stuff like that from atheists," but I'd be surprised.

"Pick a side and stick with it, supporting your friends and bashing your enemies at every cost-effective opportunity" is the dominant strategy in factional politics much the same way tit-for-tat is dominant in iterative prisoner's dilemma. Generosity to strangers and mercy to enemies are so heavily encouraged because in the absence of that encouragement they're the rare, virtuous exception.

Yes, obviously we have to interact with outsiders. That's what makes them outsiders, rather than meaningless hypothetical aliens beyond our light-cone. The question is, should we be interacting with organized religion by trying to ally with, or at least avoid threatening, the people in charge? Or by threatening them so comprehensively that (figuratively speaking) we destroy their armies and take their cattle for our own?

The antichrist is a hypothetical figure who poses the greatest possible ideological threat, an exploit against which the overwhelming majority of Christianity's (worldly) resources and personnel cannot be secured. The popular theory is, that individual's public actions would trigger the ultimate 'evaporative cooling' event. Everybody who doesn't really believe, everybody who just checks "christian" on the census form and shows up to church for the social network and the pancakes, will stop doing so. In short, the sanity waterline would rise.