First of all, I'd like to start by saying that I absolutely understand where you are coming from in this post and I do agree that we should indeed be guided by the Golden Rule and by trying to cause as little harm as possible to conscious creatures. That's really what I try to live by, too.

But let me share a possibly minor point of disagreement.

Besides the Golden Rule there are other things we need in society that allow for progress and well-being. Whatever the society is, we sooner or later find problems and we sooner or later start facing hard decisions. And another thing we desperately need in those situations is the ability to discern fact from fiction, reality from unsubstantiated faith and dogma. Because if we can't do that properly, we are bound to make the wrong choices along the way as they would be based on assumptions that are false. That's why we should speak out against all beliefs that people might have that are unreasonable and virtually all the time religious belief falls squarely into that category. It's actually even worse as most religions teach that faith is a virtue instead of a failure of reason.

You can look around the world and you can see how valuing faith and accepting morally problematic religious principles can lead to a wide variety of problems starting with religiously motivated homophobia, misogyny, genital mutilation, cast systems, unjust limits on free speech and even religiously motivated terrorism and violence. This is why talking to people that see faith as a good thing about reason is not a pointless activity and my blind guess would be that helped you in some way to escape the clutches of indoctrination which in turn has probably helped you appreciate the importance of truth and reason more deeply than before. (I do hope my blind guess has not been too presumptions or even insulting in some way).

That's why I think it's really important for us to sit at the table and talk about all kinds of things with smiles on our faces, but the topic of what we believe and why we believe it should not be taboo at that table and disagreement should not be viewed as something bad. And from my point of view freely expressing disagreement is always welcome and I don't see religious people trying to convert me as something bad as long as they don't mind hearing my honest opinion on the claims they are putting forward.

Great post and all the best! :)