I was recently watching an old interview of Richard Dawkins on you tube where he was in conversation with a reporter named Mehdi Hasan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-Y5NWV9kc
I somehow felt that Richard Dawkins was unfairly treated on the show by his host.
He kept on berating him like it was personal and was at times quite deceitful. towards the end Hasan asked Dawkins was he committing child abuse by teaching his daughter the quran and Dawkins inquired whether he taught his daughter that the universe was created in 6 days, Hasan replied that the quran does not say the universe was created in 6 days to which Dawkins finally replied NO he was not committing abuse. However the quran does state the universe being created in 6 days (it is after all a judaeo christian philosophy - by which I mean a flagrant copy).
There were many other instances of deceitfulness like when he polled about the question of which was a worse form of abuse indoctrination or child abuse by priests and did not adequately address that issue when it was shown to be in favour of the latter.
Basically what I was getting at is; Does it seem that these apologists are way too eager and deceitful in the promotion of their religious beliefs.
Is there any merit in confronting people like them (In my opinion he was very unethical and if you feel otherwise I am willing to listen)
Is it that they are blinded by religion or rather just con artists, used car salesman, etc.
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It depends on the apologist. Some are liars. Most seem to me to be genuinely as daft as they sound, so if what is said is believed then it (technically) isn't a lie, however wrong, absurd, or misleading.
I met my first Christian today who said they believed that Christ arose from the dead and in miracles (tears from a statue). I had never heard a Christian say that first hand, (I'd read/seen them on the Internet and TV). Usually, in my experience they waffle about the Bible being allegorical.
I was referring more towards the proselytisers who normally are more vocal in their arguments like Ken Ham, This Mehdi guy I have referenced above and so on. They seem to misrepresent the truth.
Plus Islamic apologists seem to claim that their book is scientifically validated and in their apologist arguments twist the verses to fit the truth and if that fails misquote it or out right lie.
I was reading an argument online where some islamic apologist was claiming that the quran spoke of the big bang which seemed to twist the verse to suite and in a more bizarre scenario they claimed that salt and sweet water don't mix and that was scientifically proven recently which was just absolute nonsense.
My argument is that these proselytisers have definitely read their respective books with some degree of understanding, so they cannot definitely believe what the books say outright and so they are left with no other option but to twist the obvious truth.
Of course I can't pronounce judgement on all apologists, but I have never met one that wasn't incredibly dishonest. I'll give an example of one that shocked my sensibilities:
One of my philosophy professors was a Christian apologist, and spent the semester trying to convince as many students as possible to endorse objective morality (he even took polls throughout the course to see which type of morality the students endorsed to track his progress). One day he presented a proof of objective morality by contradiction (a contradiction in subjective morality). However, I noticed the contradiction was formed by taking postulates from 2 different sub-level camps of subjective morality (cultural relativism, and moral relativism) then using them to reach the contradiction. If this was hard to understand let me explain. Lets say we want to know where Sue is, but we can't find her. Person 1 says he thinks Sue drown in the lake. Person 2 says she think she drown in the water tower. Person 3 thinks Sue was eaten by a bear. Now person 3 says that they have a proof by contradiction showing Sue couldn't have drown. What is the contradiction? That the people who think she drown told us she drown in a bathtub and in the lake, impossible! Anyway, I pointed out how silly this was after class and he sheepishly admitted that is exactly what he had done, but he never revealed this deception to the class. I suggest this is an example of a noble lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie).
Anyway, sorry for the rant.