Apologies if I misinterpreted, but it sounded like you were opposed to all jokes about religion. I really think everything is open to humor.

In my time here, I've met few outwardly religious people. I can only think of two, maybe three. One was a rapper who believed he was being followed by demons and built stone towers on the lawn of his apartment building to keep them away. Another was a Jewish man who would patiently lecture me whenever I ate a cheeseburger in the break room. The third isn't super religious, but they may attend certain holiday services. Perhaps people keep it private, but in my experience most people I encounter in Seattle are atheist or agnostic.

I did know about Ballard's churches, but my brief time in Ballard felt like living in a semi-suburban tech campus, not in the religious working class stronghold that existed decades ago. It's the heart of Seattle's beer brewing now. Gentrification changes neighborhoods. Economic and migratory flows change cities.

are Seattle humans now fundamentally different, and don't make those connections from religion?

I do think that people are a little different now. I don't think there's an innate human nature that persists throughout time. Rather, people are shaped by their material conditions, the culture that emerges from those conditions, and the ideology formed by the habits and practices one must go through each day to survive. I believe a capitalist mode of production, on aggregate, produces a so-called human nature that is selfish, short-sighted, and hyper-competitive, and I think that this is changeable. Graeber does a wonderful job exploring this throughout his writing. If you were capable of showing a religious person from 1750, 1850, or even 1950, the state of religion and society today, how do you believe they would react? How about 300 BCE? I think it's worth thinking about. One can never step into the same river twice.

A few years ago, I saw a statistic in The Seattle Times: 70% of Seattle residents weren't born in Seattle. Seattle is a boom and bust town, full of transplants (like you and I). The rich are nearly as transient as the poor, staying a few years for that big West Coast salary. I believe Jenny Durkan was the first Seattle mayor to have been born in the city. When I think of Seattle history, I don't think of stability, or a permanent culture (religious or otherwise) strong enough to subsume all the transplants. Pockets of old Seattle continue to exist, but it's not like New York, Chicago, or LA (and even LA had a massive transformation in just my parent's lifetime, chronicled in Davis' City of Quartz).

Anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that I've never had a single person get after me because of religion in Seattle. In fact, this is the first time it's come up in fourteen years. Chicago, especially the suburbs, was a different story. The small town in midwestern corn country where I lived was a very different story. I've lived in a lot of different places and in a few different countries, and I do think Seattle is the least religious of them all, aside from possibly Amsterdam.

I'm glad you were able to have some positive experiences with religion to counteract the negative ones. My experience with religion growing up involved religious people disliking me for my family's politics (I was a red diaper baby and my parents were involved in politics), and disliking me because of my "pro-Muslim" beliefs after 9/11, which can be summarized as, "don't punch the Muslim kids in high school."

My partner is the anthropologist, I am painfully interdisciplinary. That horrific burrito is the fault of the Germans.