Doing skepticism and secular humanism right

Daniel Loxton makes Skepticblog a place still worth visiting, with a very good post urging a degree of kindness and nuance to people deluded by Harold Camping's rapture predictions.

The bulk of my comment:

Many people don’t give up old ideas, and, of those who do, it’s often a secular “leap of faith” from inside them as much as anything.

As Steve Gould noted in many ways and forms, life is massively contingent. Nowhere is that more true than inside the individual human psyche, in my opinion.

That then said, though, we never know how we will impinge on another’s internal contingencies and, the soft word is more likely to have an impact. It’s like nuclear fission — too energetic a neutron just bounces off the nucleus; a kind word may have the right “capture cross section.”

That said, how long before P.Z. or Jerry Coyne rip into this?