I understand what you are saying, but I don't know what you are asking.

Here is your mad prophet dude or as close as I can find

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FCwwRJtTJfA

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wn2DC9rDNI0

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-HjHwrIuqHs

This is one of the biggest unknowns in my worldview right now.  Atheism clearly has an image problem.  I'm ok with saying that the theists are portraying us unfairly.  But, I've also been to some local atheist meetings, and have seen first hand that it's not all the theists' fault. 

How can I put this delicately?

Atheists are not always the most talented people in a social situation.

The simple fact is, being an atheist requires a certain level of anti-social tendency in America.  You've got to be willing to tell your family and friends to go play on a sit-and-spin, most likely.  Combine this with a tendency to like books about science, and you've got Revenge of the Nerds, except without the Darth Vader moon room sex scene.

Hmmm... I seem to have gotten a little off track.... Where was I going?

Oh yes...

Marketing makes the world go round.  Don't let anyone tell you anything different.  Atheists are terrible at marketing.  Theists promise eternal life, miracles, superior morals, financial abundance, and at least a dozen other nice things.

Atheism?  You get what you get.  Sorry if your life sucks.  Make it better or suck it up and live with it.

Granted, there's only so much marketing you can do without telling lies, so herein lies the dilemma.  What is it about atheism that is attractive, and yet true?

I don't know what the bumper sticker slogan is.  I know I've never been happier than since I became a born again atheist (I was born atheist, after all!) but it would take a good sized paragraph at the least to explain it to you.  If you don't know something about sociology, it probably wouldn't make all that much sense anyway.  It's kind of complicated.

 So, I don't think the question is, "How should we deal with crackpot late night atheism," but rather "How should we make atheism more accessible and marketable to people who don't care to read the collected work of Dawkins, Harris, et al?"

We have emotions because they work. Put another way, if we didn't have emotions, mothers would kill their babies, and humans would have died out long ago. While this example is a bit extreme, and might not be exactly true, you see what I'm saying. Emotion is a shortcut to evolutionary behaviors that were beneficial to the species.

Like it or not, there are only so many logical paths a human brain can consider, and then we must start taking shortcuts. Emotion is a quick and easy way that we've developed to take shortcuts.

Consider this question carefully:

Which is better?

1) A theist, moved to bitter anger upon learning of the long, brutal history of the church, and of the continual practice of favoritism and "sin" within the ranks, swears off religion and becomes "non-religious." Later, after socializing with atheists, and becoming emotionally attached, he is drawn into a more intellectual understanding, at which time he is a proper "logical atheist."

2) A theist remains in theism because it's more emotionally appealing than atheism.

Obviously, the former is better than the latter, right?

So, how about, instead of number one, we have this option:

1) A theist, after seeing a gimmick stunt, like the blasphemy challenge, is emotionally moved by a tearful testimony of a former theist, and considers for a moment that there could be something to it, etc...

Still ok?

So, what's wrong with actively appealing to their emotions?

I'm not a big fan of lying to get to a person's emotions, but what's wrong with finding the most appealing things to sell and then selling them?

It's how the world works!

It's why religion is so popular!

Like it or not, people make more decisions on emotion than logic. If you want to insist on living in a world of logic, because you think it should be that way, I'll be forced to call you out for idealism at best and, ahem... irrational delusion at worst.

(And we know what we think of people with irrational delusions, don't we?)

My personal mantra is simple. I remember being a theist, and I try to keep this in mind when I debate them.

Bearing in mind the rational truth, take what I'm about to say not as bragging, but an example:

When I was a child, I tested with a very high IQ. They put me in special after-school classes, taught me science, math, and critical thinking as part of an accelerated program. When I started middle school, I was so horribly bored with the curriculum that they allowed me to skip from 6th to 8th grade. I graduated high school when I had just turned 17, and college at barely 21, finishing in 4 years despite changing my degree my junior year and having to take a full load of core classes for my new major in my last two years. (I changed from engineering, for the record. I could do it, but I hated it.)

I could continue with this, but that really would be bragging. The point is that I'm very smart -- and I was a Christian until my early 20s, despite being able to win debates on any other subject. In fact, I was a very good apologist.

The point is, theists are not inherently stupid. Many are quite smart. Wavefreak and CptPineapple are both extremely smart folks, and both theists. Looking back at my own life, the transition to atheism seems inevitable, but it wasn't. Chance had a lot to do with it. In other words, if I may borrow from theism also, "There but for the Grace of God go I."

If there is one mistake I see atheists make in conversation more than any other, it's assuming that theists don't understand atheism because they're not smart enough to. It's seldom that. Most children, if left unindoctrinated, can reason out that god is as believable as Santa Clause. It's not intellilgence.

As you say, there is much more to the world than logic. Emotion accounts for probably 60 percent of the decisions we make in life, and incomplete logic for at least another 20 or 25 percent. The decisions we make on purely rational grounds are few and far between.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Christians are most often surrounded by other Christians -- their family, their spouse, their children, their friends, their coworkers. Fear of being outcast is one of the most profound fears a human experiences in the postmodern world. This fear can paralyze the body, but more importantly, it paralyzes the mind. Our brains are capable of shutting off the logic circuits in time of great peril, and believe me, the thought of losing EVERYONE you hold dear is a time of great peril.

Furthermore, let us not forget, believers really and truly believe that back on that snowy day ten years ago, it was god's hand on the wheel that kept them from hitting that oncoming car and killing those three innocent children in the backseat -- or whatever the situation might have been. Once you believe that you have experienced a miracle, it's very, very hard to give up the notion that you were singled out by god. That's a very profound thought.

If there's one thing that I know will help the dialog between atheists and theists, it's numbers. Right now, atheists are viewed as outcasts, rebels, and malcontents. The fact is, there are millions of closet atheists who go to work and smile politely when their coworkers tell them about the miracle that just happened to them. They are normal people who, for social reasons, or simple apathy, don't bother to mention it to others. Most of them fit into society perfectly. These atheists are crucial to the dialog, in my opinion.

That's why I think the emphasis should be on the ways that religion is damaging everyone. Winning the other atheists is the first hurdle. Once it becomes apparent how many of us there are, and that we've been living next door to theists for years, and we're just as normal as they, it will be much harder to dismiss us as the fringe lunatics.

The secondary emphasis, I think, should be on the fringe theists, and this is where the idea of compassion comes into play. They are not much different than us, and I think the similarities ought to be mentioned as often as possible. They should see that we are just like them, and that they have nothing to fear from us.

The fundamentalists, in my opinion, are lost. We can try to reduce them through de-converting moderates, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight, or even in a generation. It's going to take a sustained effort. A chipping away at the armor.

And most of all, it will take realizing that being atheist does not make us the smartest person in the room. In a lot of ways, it is just because we were born lucky.

There are wackos everywhere. I know of a ton of atheists who are also 9/11 Truthers. They are rational in one arena and blind followers of wacky ideologies somewhere else. You can't stop them; all you can do is condemn or at least criticize that element of their thinking so that it's clear that they don't necessarily speak for all atheists. I remember Christopher Hitchens mentioned in a debate that he greatly disagreed with a particular belief held by Sam Harris. He praised Harris for other things but made it clear where he differed from him.