"Don't try to be an armchair psychologist."
"I find it all too common for proselytizers to attempt to psychoanalyze someone they have just met, or even someone they have never met, confidently speculating on the abusive upbringing, personal tragedy or bad experience with church that led this person to abandon belief in God and become an atheist out of anger or bitterness. It's a fool's errand to try to see into someone else's mind in this manner; not only that, it will usually be wrong. As already stated, the reasons people become and remain atheists usually have very little relation to the caricatures so common in apologist literature. Not only will this immediately cause an atheist to believe the person doing it has no idea what they're talking about, it will raise in their mind the suspicion that it is being used as a diversionary tactic to avoid dealing with their actual stated reasons for nonbelief. It is as if an atheist accused a theist of believing only because they were brainwashed in childhood, without responding to the arguments the theist actually presented. Would not a theist who was the target of such tactics be justified in believing that their adversary was trying to poison the well of discourse rather than deal with the facts?"
—Adam Lee, How Not to Convert an Atheist
