Christopher Hitchens is often painted as a disrespectful firebrand, but in this piece he has nice things to say about the people with whom he has been debating:

I have been all over the South, in front of capacity and overflow crowds, exchanging views with Protestants most of the time, but also with Catholics and, in New York and the West Coast and Canada, with—mostly Reform—Jews in large and well-attended synagogues. (So far no invitations from Orthodox Jews, Mormons, or Muslims.)

I think he reserves much of his ire for those whose beliefs are held to be beyond debate.

Perhaps his experiences are not so helpful for an OTDer dealing with frum family or local rabbis. For one thing, of course, he doesn’t debate Orthodox Jews, but he also gets to occupy the comfortable position of being completely out of the closet. He is not identified as an ex-Christian, atheist-Jew/Arab, etc., but as the atheist in the room. (He may be called an ex-Marxist.) Being a white guy may help provide a blanker slate for that. But wouldn’t it be nice to start the discussion with that out in the air for all to see?

I don’t think that a Jew, whatever his beliefs, can be seen that way by other people- at least not as easily. Once you start questioning, abandoning, disagreeing and condemning, there are always the people who will accuse you of self-hatred/disrespect of supposedly ancient traditions/forgetting that people suffered and even died to keep this religion/finishing Hitler’s work/ingratitude or whatever I’ve just missed. I think that many Reform and Conservative Jews might think these thoughts about you even though they may not want to give up their own freedom and become frum. Plus, outside Orthodoxy, your atheism will be marked as Jewish somehow.

This last bit used so many modal verbs, I have to admit that your experiences might be very different from mine. Would love to hear them.

Here is the article: http://www.slate.com/id/2233586/