Hmm... I'd like to hear you elaborate on this topic; I can't say that I agree with you, but I'm not completely certain that I disagree with you either. Given that, I'll act as an argumentative foil providing three examples of Dark Art Atheist arguments that I believe are at the very least justified, and maybe even necessary.

1 Santa Claus: as a child I believed in him to an embarassingly late age. Though my innate curiosity drove me to set 'cunning traps' so that I could catch him filling the stockings, I never doubted the cached wisdom that he actually existed. I was testing the hypothesis, but regardless of the outcome I believed in the hypothesis. When a schoolmate finally told me that Santa Claus didn't exist it took me less than a second to reorient the data - of course he didn't exist! Heck, even a five year old possesses enough reasoning skills to figure out that it's a ridiculous concept, but few of them ever bother to crunch the numbers. With my own children (one day) I plan to use Santa Claus as an object lesson demonstrating how a million people can believe a foolish thing.

It is not intellectually honest, however, to equate Christianity to Santa Clause. [Insert Christian apologetic explaining that it is possible to be a rational Christian for reasons A, B, and C - I can write this if you wish, but I hope you'll grant it for sake of argument.] Comparing a silly story that every child - even the particularly thick ones - sees through by puberty, to a body of intellectual and moral consideration going back at least 1600 years, is certainly not apt. However I would tell it to my ten year old as if it were, and I would not bring it up in later years unless he specifically asked. The month spent lecturing about all the fine details could be better spent in teaching him how restore a DeLorean. If he goes to his cryogenic cylinder believing Christianity to be comparable to Grimms Fairytales due to my use of Dark A.. ahem a White Lie, I'll stand by the decision.

2 One of the criticisms levelled recently at Richard Dawkins (and others) is their willingness to debate Creationists. Over the past few years it's become evident that the Creationists are intellectually dishonest (they'll continue arguing points to their followers, which they admitted to be false during debate), and when you get down to the bones of the matter [see what I did there?] they don't even have a coherent... anything! Some people argue that debating them gives them undue prestige, incites public interest in pseudo science, and the smarter policy would be to ignore them as the cranks they are, and just write books about real science - not books disproving pseudo science.

But once again, this is a Dark Art using social stigma and ridicule to marginalize this group; it's not an intellectually honest response.

3 The Great Unwashed Masses: personally, I like to hang out at dive bars; the people there are the salt of the earth, and it's an environment I feel comfortable in. But as much as I love these people, most of them don't have the capacity (or the interest, anyway) to understand relativity, evolution, economics, and the importance of science. And because they don't really understand any of these things, they're equally susceptible to quackery... which matters when you consider that there's more of them than there are of us.

Sometimes (if it comes up) I'll cheerlead for science, just dropping some neat little factoid that will catch their interest; if they express interest in some sort of pseudo science then I'll offer a sneaky (and overly simplistic) argument that, while not embarassing them, allows them to laugh at the pseudo scientist; and if they ask something like "How do you know that dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago?" I'll look them straight in the eye and say "Well, carbon dating..." even though I have a High School understanding of how it actually works.

I am not going to give them my Bayesian probability estimate of the truth of some statement, I'm not going to go into detail about the nature of light cones and FTL travel, and if the 'fact' that I don't know as well as I like is closer to true than the 'fact' currently in their head, I'm going to state it as if it is the truth from on high.

Dark Arts? Absolutely! But when most people hear "the Big Bang probably happened" they think to themselves "Well, I guess that still leaves room for A Wizard Did It." If they pursue these topics they'll eventually get to science, but I can't teach them science in a five minute conversation. If I try, I'll just turn them off of it. What I'm doing is triggering their emotional/signalling responses to implant an idea in their brain that will hopefully blossom. It's the equivalent of telling children that "Math is Fun!" even though it clearly isn't for the first ten years.

Whew That was a lot of typing. I hope you have a chance to respond, Nerzhin.