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Notes -
Presumably you've read Scott Alexander's essay on the topic (if not, you should). Internet culture was just different back then. It was taken as given that the purpose of discussion and argument was to convince people, or at least to discover the truth.
This classic XKCD from 2008 captures the feeling. What made the atheism wars especially susceptible to this phenomenon is that it was not a disagreement of opinion or judgement, it was a disagreement of fact, which meant it was theoretically possible to literally prove the other side wrong. The idea, common today in the intellectual right circles that many users here frequent, that religion is important because it binds the community together, provides shared values, and gives meaning to the lives of the populace, should not be anachronistically read back into the discourse. That's just not what these controversies were about. People back then really thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, hurricanes were God's punishment for abortion, and that demon possession was a real physical occurrence. Some people still believe that, but they know better than to open their mouths about it in public now.
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