why is chatting about a 13th apostle conspiracy (or such) exciting on an atheist board?

That’s easy, at least for me.

Religion is so all consuming in this society (and any others I have a passing acquaintance with), with a church on every corner, proselytizers going door to door, full time cable TV channels, and so on; pictures of Jesus over the mantle (or mezuzahs on doorways), knowing that “the Bible is the best selling book in the world!” and much more -

And yet atheists have managed to wriggle out from under that blanket of belief, and to stand “athwart the gods”, if you will, to declare “it’s a bunch of hokum.” I think there is a natural curiosity, once you have deconverted - to try to understand why the rest of the world doesn’t see it the same way. I mean, once you have lost the faith, the idiocy of it becomes all too much to bear.

One meme I see in the Facebook feed a lot is:

“You mean Mormons believe Jesus came to America, that wearing magic underwear will ward off demonic attacks, and that when they die they will be transported off to a distant planet where they will become gods in their own right? That’s ridiculous!

“Now excuse me while I eat some magic bread which transforms into the actual flesh of a 2000 year old dead Jewish zombie so I can be forgiven a sin I was born with because a rib woman was tricked into eating a piece of fruit by a talking snake.”

So we scratch our heads and say “Yeah. Dumb.” And that leads to more investigation of the truly stupid, of which there is much - and not just in those religions, but in all of them. I suppose “quiet” atheists don’t question much about 13th century saints, but some of us question everything, and delight in finding ever more contradictions and inanities about the thing - the thing which has enveloped humanity since the beginning, and is only now just starting to show the faintest cracks thanks to the advent of science some centuries ago.

Yeah, I’m genuinely curious about it. Why not?