Sarcasm overload

I know the feeling, we all do. When you're confronted with a typically prejudiced, logically defective, stunningly uniformed or otherwise ridiculous statement or question ("atheists only care about themselves", "what do atheists have to live for?", "what do you celebrate'?) from the faithful, it's hard not to counter with sarcasm. How can you help but make fun of people, who as Lewis Black says, "watch the Flintstones as if it were a documentary."? (See, I just did it!) And it's frustrating, I'll grant you, to have the same insults, logical fallacies and outright lies re-scrambled with some new spin and thrown in your face again and again.

Yes, sometimes, sarcasm is warranted to make a point, to give people that whack upside the head they need to jump-start their reasoning engines again. But I think that too often my fellow reasoners and non-believers go way overboard with it. As I opined in my last post, I think many times it's best not to engage the closed-minded, the belligerent and the just plain stupid, especially if your tone is just as mean-spirited and insulting as theirs. Reason, intellect and rationality are the high road. We might get a better hearing with people if we took it more often.