Revisited - habits of atheism and smoking

A while back I mentioned link to a posting of an ex-atheist where he talked about giving up his habit of atheism.

An excellent article; not one that is trying to convince others, but rather explaining some of the things he saw as he matured that "failed" in atheism. That summary is woefully inadequate and misses a LOT, but it's the best I can do in a short, single sentence.

He's just followed it up with a follow-up (hmmm, that was redundant redundant, wasn't it) talking about his experience of commenting on an atheist site - friendlyatheist.com. Another good article and one which I will shamelessly use as a segue into a mild rant that is totally divorced from his topic.

Anyone who has ever gone out commenting in a forum that is even mildly controversial will immediately recognize the different types of commenters that he ran across. The ratios vary from blog to blog, but just about every blog has a mixture of the ones he talks about.

In my parlance they are:

Mr. You're Welcome If You Become Like Us
This fine fellow invites you in with kind words about how nice it is to see newcomers and people with different points of view. The welcome starts to wear thin pretty quickly and pretty soon he will be wondering why you even bother coming to a place like this where you obviously don't fit in. This guy is pretty tough to get past because he's one of the few people who say nice things to you if you're in a "hostile" locale and when he starts turning on you it's very discouraging.

Mr. I Totally Disagree In Every Way
This is my favorite. No blarmy about how nice it is to see you - he tells you right out that you're an idiot and immediately goes about showing you why. However, he's relatively nice about it (by Internet blog/messageboard standards) and stays at a pretty decent level of conversation. It's best to treat him in turn, and stay honest and on topic. He'll treat you as an equal as long as you don't start gutter sniping. He's a good guy eventually.

Mr. You Are WRONG, You &*$%#@! Moron
Abusive and nasty to all newcomers, but at least he at least addresses what you're talking about to some extent. Depending on the percentage of the population that this type makes up, you can pretty safely ignore him. If you stick around long enough, he'll start turning into his cousin, Mr. ITDIEW.

Mr. You're An Idiot Who Isn't Worth My Time
A very annoying sort of person. He can either be a very tired and jaded Mr. ITDIEW, or is a college-age arrogant jerk. He'll pretty much just say you're dumb, you're an idiot, and that it's a miracle you manage to pull up your pants. He never goes into giving reasons why. His brother is:

Mr. You're A *bleep*ing *bleep*er, You *bleep*er
Much like his brother above, he'll just call you names, but instead of dropping it there he continues to vociferously castigate you at every turn for being a moron and won't stop.

Mr. Wow! Friendly Company! Yay!
This guy is one of twins who are hard to tell apart at first. The first is an intelligent guy, who for whatever masochistic reasons has gotten himself embedded in hostile territory. The group accepts him and respects him to some extent. He will be your biggest help. His twin brother is a class A1 jerk who happens to agree with you, refuses to leave, and totally embarrasses you by being of the same persuasion as yourself. The longer this guy has been around, the harder it will be for anyone to accept you.

There are a few other types around, but these are the main peoples you will run into when venturing into hostile territory. You can be a Conservative going into Liberal places, Atheist into Christian, or anything else. If you're going into hostile territory, you'll run across these guys.