Interesting. I'm involved in the skeptical movement, and while I've encountered a few similar to what you describe, my impression is that most skeptics don't fall into that category. Skeptics are generally proud that they update based on evidence. Indeed, the most prominent exceptions help drive this point home. PZ Myers has said repeatedly that nothing would convince him that there's a deity and he's been repeatedly hammered by most of the skeptical movement over this statement.
Good on them! In my experience, whenever I sneak bayesian updating into the conversation, it's well received by skeptics. When I try to introduce Bayes more formally or start supporting anti-mainstream ideas, such as cryonics, AI, etc, there's much more resistance.
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
The Four New Members
Annie