An apologist provides me with this...
Most of these were tried here before, although some of the cruder tactics have generally been dropped in more recent posits on this board:
1. Scanning for Christian articles and comments – once new articles are posted, they jump on immediately, hard and fast, night and day.
2. Working in “packs” – there appear to be many of them, but they are actually mostly a fixed group of individuals.
3. Outright mocking and ridicule, shock tactics – be it your name or username, your article, your comments, your Biblical statements, scientific statements, etc. They can be outright vicious and nasty.
4. They attempt to provoke vicious and nasty comments back, then try to use it against Christians, by saying something like, “Not very Christian of you.”, etc.
5. Using, in their packs, the thumbs up for their own and the thumbs down against their opponents very consistently.
6. They dispute every argument with their side/opinions, and absolutely reject/ignore decent/correct responses.
7. Accusing their opponents and the Christian scientific community at large of being ignorant and stupid in scientific matters.
8. They purposefully use real science and flawed logic to advocate non-real science and ideas.
9. They use exaggerated, far-fetched and offensive terms – like “buy bull” for Bible, xian for Christian. They talk of sky daddies, FSM (flying spaghetti monster), etc. They are careful, humanistic and politically correct regarding other things, but NOT with Christianity. This is a big tactic they use.
10. They focus on specific scriptures in a twisted and out-of-context way to bring confusion concerning God’s Word. They refer to God as murderer, etc. [Yet I wonder how many of them are all for the death penalty and abortion.]
11. They harp on about the same thing in all their posts, in every article. Even when Christians respond to them on their “issues”, they ignore it and continue posting said “issues”. It then appears as if Christians cannot answer them on their “issues”, when the truth is that they were already answered, but now strategically just post the same “issues” over and over, while Christians ignore them. To the onlooker though, it seems as if Christians cannot answer them.
12. Where they have been successfully debunked, they use diversion tactics – by focusing on petty issues, like saying, “the Bible says CIRCLE, not SPHERE, hahaha!”, by using the gish gallop technique (that in all fairness was not their tactic initially but they love using it now), by bringing up long responses with many issues all at once, etc.
13. Ensuring that in their packs, at least one or more of them post after a Christian post, giving the impression/illusion that they had the last say and that their word is true.
14. Claiming victory when there was none.
15. When cornered and feeling the heat, resorting to INSULTS full-on, accusing the Christian of being a Poe or a troll. These are again diversion tactics.
The article notes that there are other tactics as well--would be interesting to add to the list as we see them employed here--but basically it's all about attack and trying to keep focus away from their justifying their beliefs on their own bases.
Perhaps it will get to the point where I will just respond with numbers to most atheist posits as they come up and the context will be clear before wasting any more time with them!
[He never did, which is a pity]
The source in full:
https://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Militant-Atheist-Strategies-Exposed-20120815
