The article itself answers the question posed in the headline by saying, "Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry." I'll expand on that point a bit, as an American person who was brought up with belief in God that was taught to me as a basis for personal morality and who no longer believes in God but still likes to follow standards of personal morality. Teaching of children in a great variety of religious organizations, not just Christian organized religions, presupposes that one rationale for morale behavior is the approval of the God or gods (or conformity with the thought of enlightened men) promoted by believers in that religion. Young children so brought up are not encouraged to consider the possibility of moral behavior on the basis of purely human, this-world considerations.

In my own life, I was influenced at what I think is known to be a critical age for forming group allegiances (around the time of puberty) by two boys who were my classmates in junior high. They were my two best friends at that age. Both were very smart, eventually becoming engineers who have done challenging work in their adult careers, and one was deeply devout by upbringing, while the other was militantly atheist by upbringing. It happened, I would now say by coincidence, that the devout evangelical Christian I knew among the two friends was a young man of exceptional kindness and quiet self-confidence that never crossed the line into arrogance, while the militant atheist was a young man who delighted in teasing other students (even a girl in our class with cerebral palsy) and who never hid his pride in his IQ and his secularism. The religious point of view that resulted in kinder, less arrogant behavior was appealing to me, and with the example of the two friends in mind, I became much more evangelical Christian in my outlook during my school years than I had been brought up to be.

Over quite a few years, including years when I was employed doing evangelistic work in another country, I have become entirely an atheist, but still very much interested in encouraging myself, and the children in my care, to be kind, non-arrogant, and willing to take on intellectual challenges. Meanwhile, my childhood evangelical Christian friend is a still an active church-goer, but now a member of a "liberal" denomination and certainly, as his career verifies, not at all "fundamentalist" in his view of science (as he once was). The formerly atheist friend is now a follower of the Baha'i religion. He seems to have mellowed out quite a bit in his middle age. I am much better acquainted these days with the first mentioned friend than the second, because the formerly atheist friend traveled to other far-away places over the years.

I think many people rely more than they realize on salient personal examples to form their opinions on abstract subjects such as religion. Perhaps atheists in the United States will gradually gain more acceptance as more people have personal experience with interacting with kind, thoughtful atheist friends (as I have). Because the United States population includes a large percentage of people whose ancestors settled in America specifically because of their religious commitments (as did more than half of my ancestors), religiosity probably still has a long time to go as a characteristic feature of American national culture. On my part, I think the writings of Sam Harris go a long way to helping religiously committed Americans to rethink their point of view and to be open to the possibility that morality is separable from religion.