You tell them to fuck off because you engaged with it and found it completely meritless/abhorrent, not because you're above engaging with it. If they present new evidence for lizard people, you should skeptically examine the evidence and tell them to fuck off when it doesn't hold up.

You don't have to engage with them and waste your time debating them, but you absolutely should be open to challenge your own positions.

But those examples are extreme on purpose

Yes they were! And you’re right, we need to allow ourselves to be challenged, to consider ideas outside of our comfort zone, but we also need to able to reject ideas that are not being posited in good faith.

This is the joy of debate, to question statements and receive nuanced answers in reply.

Confirmation bias is an incredibly stubborn human trait (and a near universal one at that). The particular issue this post is engaging with is called attitude polarization: two groups of people diverging more and more in their opinions despite being presented with the same evidence.

Why are humans like this? I think it’s a survival trait that people conform to the opinions of their in-group and are reluctant to let go of opinions that are most central to their world-view. They’ve already invested a lot in both their in-group and their world-view, so rejecting all that is more costly to them than rejecting the truth about some particular fact (that they may not even care about that much).

When you consider that beliefs and openly held opinions have different costs and different benefits depending on which group you belong to, it becomes a lot less obvious that abandoning a position is the right move.

Gentle as lambs and subtle as serpents, as they say.

Yeah "it came from me or my people" means that it is harmless and everything else is Satan. There's probably a psychological breakdown of that somewhere.

(Flip that assumption and you have the plot for half of all horror movies)

I've never witnessed an atheist making such an argument. Usually it's the theists getting hung up on him because they are used to appealing to authority figures and project.

There are also many definitions of god, and Dawkins engages with all of them. Dawkins is much more strongly opposed do theism, than deism for example. He engages with philosophical ideas about god.

Dawkins argues that we don’t need god to explain the universe, life, or anything else. He further goes on to argue that religious belief in god trains people to be irrational fanatics, which damages society, progress, science. In the end Dawkins says, there’s no proof for the existence of god, and that we would all be better off without religion. However IIRC Dawkins recognizes that religious belief can have positive psychological effects.

The new atheists have become their own subculture with its own values. The online new atheist scene also attracts people who love to argue, provoke, and pick fights. Contrarians and skeptics are not the same, but can overlap.

There‘s also a pipeline that goes like this: new atheism > anti religion > anti islam > white nationalism

The issue here is that the left has abandoned its opposition to religion, especially regarding Islam, in the name of anti-racism and intersectional identity politics. So these people are rejected by the left and driven to the right.

I unironically think the braindead atheism online greatly contributed to the rise of Christian nationalism we've been seeing in the past decade...