The smart ones, yeah. But there's also the meme-atheists whose
knowledge of religion goes as far as the memes take them. The
upgraded level from there is memorizing the chart of fallacies.
They're often found in debate groups online and you can tell
when you've found one when their input doesn't go any further
than memes and practicing calling people on fallacies. The level
above THAT is the ones that have a few scripts memorized that
are engaged when someone says they are Agnostic, This one I know
because I've encountered the same script quite a few times.
Initially I thought, "Oh good, someone who knows their stuff".
But they didn't. After a number of encounters with the same
conversation (same from their side, I like to vary it up a bit)
from different people in different places and saw their was an
incapability of discussion anything outside of that, I knew I'd
found the upgraded meme-atheist. Now, I'm agnostic. But.. if *I*
was atheist,* and this was something important to me, I'd do
what I could to educate the meme-atheists beyond these levels,
because they've become a blind-follower stereotype of their own
and really should go beyond a few logic tricks... and definitely
beyond non-fact-checked memes. Why? 'cause they're making 2015
atheism looking less smart than it used to look. The worst
offenders are those who quote Dawkins and other modern atheist
greats regularly. Nothing against them... but when you hear the
same 5 or 6 people quoted over and over again with the same
exact quotes, it feels like being in a fundie bible camp, just
with different bibles being quoted. Just my two cents from an
outsider's perspective who's been involved in many online
discussions and debates through the years. These are my own
personal category names btw. I don't know if others noticed the
pattern or not. I don't like stereotyping but I sometimes
categorize just so I get a better feel for what kind of
conversation lay ahead and what they're going to say next.
