How To Have a Religious Discussion

My first instinct is to tell you this answer: Don't do it.

My second is to tell you to find a way to make it a discussion. Nobody is converting anyone nowadays - unless its a Christian proselytizer and someone young, guilty or dying.

I've toyed with the idea of setting up an "argument" booth in a big University square, in the same way the religious kooks set up their "discussion/guilt" booths. Some of them yell at you for being gay at worst and some really want to just discuss, at best, though their goal is still to convince someone. My booth of course would have a different tone.

Do I set up a booth to discuss how atheism is not a belief? I could just make placards and try to convince everyone that a criticism of a belief (God-guesses) is not a positive belief. Because an atheist doesn't belief in your god doesn't, in fact, tell you what he DOES believe, if anything. We could go on all day and discuss how atheism is merely a response and then, from there, we could talk about why it has become so popular.

I was a talk-show host in the early 00s on an online "current events" show. We partnered with Rational Responders, an atheist show. I learned pretty quickly that nobody is convincing anyone. I also saw that there were no winners or losers. The main guy on our partner show went up against the kooky Kirk Cameron (see article in Wiki, 2007) and attempted to discuss topics like evolution. This ended badly, as one might have imagined. Cameron went on to write and distribute literature that, as far as I can tell, disputed Darwin's findings. He also made the news each year since, some relatively good (awards for being right-wing) and bad (backlash for his and his side-kicks views on homosexuality).

My booth then would look much different. What if I just offered people the stage to discuss anything that bordered on "thinking" and "reason" in relation to a subject. I could remain somewhat dispassionate and unbiased (in opposition to the booth preachers who yell at the gay people).

I could just ask what you believe. That's always a good start. And then, following the rules of thought (can't be two things at the same time, for example), I could orchestrate a discussion not that different from what I usually ended up doing with the God-guessers in an Intro to Ethics class. I'm in Texas, so a lot more God-guessing than God-denying. But I am in Austin, which is where modern atheism was invented (look it up).

It isn't the worst idea. If you see me doing it in the next few years, you saw it first here.