Near death experience of Howard Storm

[Mister Agenda]

Lol, the no true skeptic fallacy? 

Well, he was kidding, as I'm sure you are too, but it brings up a point that probably needs to be addressed. When we doubt Storm's claims about what a big atheist he was, are we committing a NTS fallacy?

Obviously, assuming he's not faking his conversion, he's not an atheist now. Was he an atheist before? There's a pattern with many people who claim to be ex-atheists where they seem to base their notions about atheists on stereotypes of them. You would expect someone who really was an atheist to have a better understanding of atheism than Christians who were never knowingly atheists.

So what we have is doubt about his claim. I'm not so much doubtful that he was an atheist as doubtful that he was as big an asshole as he's making himself out to be, though he fits the profile of someone who attempting to spice up his previous sinner status by claiming to be an atheist. You're probably not familiar with this as a Catholic, but in evangelical circles it sometimes seems to be a competition between religious speakers as to who was the most awful before they were born again.

I think we're not making the fallacy because we're not saying he wasn't an atheist because he was an asshole. We're saying that him being an asshole has no bearing on whether he was actually an atheist. The NTS is usually invoked when a member of a group does something that doesn't reflect well on the group, like committing a murder. If he murdered someone and we said no true atheist would murder someone, we would be committing that fallacy. I don't regard converting to a theistic religion as something that needs to be excused or explained away, particularly since they stopped being an atheist the moment they converted. On the rare occasions when it's been someone I've known online, I've always been interested in finding out what convinced them, only to be disappointed to hear things that aren't particularly convincing. I'm always a little interested in hearing about it though, you never know when someone might have something fascinating to offer as their reasons.