Ignorance Or Faith?

I was in the usual area today, when a certain individual burst in, practically. He could not have been too old, which completely under minded his avid faith in God. He kept pronouncing that 'God was awesome', and that any others who did not believe in God would be cast down in to hell.

The troubling thing is that he was much too young to actually have formed such an avid faith in my own opinion. So I asked myself this, before kindly reprimanding him for enforcing his beliefs on others... was it ignorance, or faith? Surely, faith is not frowned upon. At least, I myself do not frown upon it, even though I consider myself to be a devoted Atheist. From past experiences with Christianity, or any other form of it though, I was inclined to believe that it was selective ignorance. A misinformation, of sorts. I judged the boy to be around thirteen years of age, perhaps a small amount older, probably with parents or a church community who had told him certain things, narrowed his area of judgement, and predisposed him to certain ideals.

Although I did try to reason with him as to why he should not enforce his beliefs on others, he eventually got frustrated and left. Of course, not before throwing a few slanderous comments my way. At that moment, I decided that it was indeed both Ignorance and Faith that were the cause of all this... It seems that both go hand in hand, from most believers I have seen...

Why is it that those who are faithful are so ignorant and narrow-minded, almost all of the time? I find only a rare few people who are not like that, and I greatly respect those people for their open-mindedness, but it becomes so confusing at times, to wonder how such a simple and pure belief could have been twisted, into a chaotic, narrow-minded, excluding, and in certain circumstances, even cruel ideology.

When is it that our race will finally progress? For right now, we are truly just fooling ourselves.