Susan Arendt said:
Interesting and valid point. Hadn't considered that, but you're definitely not wrong.
Honestly, from where I sit, the most likely reason (though there will truly be as many different reasons as there are people) is going to be simple "us vs them" mentality.
In general, the kind of people who embrace gaming and embrace the gaming community, tend to be the kind of people who reject faith, for whatever reason. It's definitely not a rule, but most gamers are at least to the point of agnosticism, and a significant portion (I doubt it's a majority, but it's probably the single largest group) are outright atheists.
When you get a group like that, people that don't fall under that banner become easy targets. Much like how racial segregation allows/drives racial hatreds to fester. Gamers, generally, are not religious, and even if they are, they don't generally discuss religion among each other. As a consequence, it tends to breed a... distaste? for religious thought and a dismissal of it as superstitious nonsense.
Is that necessarily fair? No. But the thing is, gamers are just people. We're going to suffer from the same flaws and facets that every other group of people suffer from. We're not magically immune to it because it's us. Generalization, xenophobia, and the promotion of one's group at the expense of others' are all
incredibly common traits throughout human history. Is it really so surprising that we would express our own versions of such?
Now, I don't want to come across as if I'm supporting it, because I'm not. When that shit happens, we need to call attention to it and try to stop it.
But we also need to recognize that we're all only human, and we're largely no better, or even substantially different (at the core), than any other group of humans out there. Fifty thousand years of evolution have hardwired us to be a tribal people. We instinctively have our "us" (generally defined by the monkeysphere, though I'm unsure of the technical term for such) and our "them" (everyone else), and we will
always prefer "us" over "them".
If we ever want to change that, it will take a substantial amount of work, and it may not even be
possible without changing the pieces that drive our most basic desires and instincts.