This is exactly the case, and it is sometimes quite shocking to hear sincere justifications from people who agree with you that are insanely wrong.
While taking the ideological turing test I had a hell of a time fighting the urge to label people giving bad arguments for atheism as Christians. It turns out that many atheists have very bad reasons for being atheists. Not all skeptics are rationalists.
There’s also the effect of topic selection. I’ve seen an example on an atheist forum in which users were astoundingly adept at refuting creationist arguments, but as soon as anybody posted a silly economic conspiracy theory, the posters seemed to take it at face value. It turns out that, politically, you can predict most people’s opinions one one thing by their opinion on another thing (e.g. opinions about abortion correlate with opinions about gun control). Try prodding around with people who agree with you on one issue and see how quickly they become insane when you bring up an unrelated issue.
This is exactly the case, and it is sometimes quite shocking to hear sincere justifications from people who agree with you that are insanely wrong.
While taking the ideological turing test I had a hell of a time fighting the urge to label people giving bad arguments for atheism as Christians. It turns out that many atheists have very bad reasons for being atheists. Not all skeptics are rationalists.
There’s also the effect of topic selection. I’ve seen an example on an atheist forum in which users were astoundingly adept at refuting creationist arguments, but as soon as anybody posted a silly economic conspiracy theory, the posters seemed to take it at face value. It turns out that, politically, you can predict most people’s opinions one one thing by their opinion on another thing (e.g. opinions about abortion correlate with opinions about gun control). Try prodding around with people who agree with you on one issue and see how quickly they become insane when you bring up an unrelated issue.