Belief as a trump card

[sawyl]

This, from an post on why atheist anger is both justified and productive, pretty much sums up my view on why arguing with True Believers is generally pointless:

I get angry when believers say at the beginning of an argument that their belief is based on reason and evidence, and at the end of the argument say things like, "It just seems that way to me," or, "I feel it in my heart"... as if that were a clincher. I mean, couldn't they have said that at the beginning of the argument, and not wasted my fucking time? My time is valuable and increasingly limited, and I have better things to do with it than debating with people who pretend to care about evidence and reason but ultimately don't.

There's nothing worse than someone who pretends to be a radical skeptic just because they're losing an argument. It's telling that the same people who reject the evidence when arguing about religion insist on it in other areas of their lives. For some reason, they still seem to want their cars crash tested, their medical procedures validated, their buildings, bridges and properly engineered etc. If they had the courage of their convictions, surely they'd want designers, doctors, engineers, whoevers, to skip the evidence based testing in favour of woolly hunches and warm fuzzy feelings that their whatever is totally OK.