My premise was that there are more atheist debaters in religion threads in the SDMB than theist. Voluntary polls can give us a pretty good idea, and counting posts a definitive confirmation/refutation of that premise(if one is willing to count enough posts).
Counting posts/votes in a poll isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans if someone thinks it is useless to post/vote. Not all religious people are evangelists trying to convert others.
People who think it’s useless to post/vote don’t matter for the purposes of this discussion.
But you said most people here are agnostic at least. John Mace said that may not be true. I see that you said “vocal debaters” but that little distinction could get lost.
Especially because the “vocal” debating goes on in GD and the polling takes place in IMHO. I’ve been posting here for almost a decade, and just started posting in the latter forum fairly recently.
[Not as moderator, just as a poster:]
I think that in this, as in many other areas (like politics), most people have their minds set. There is no pure objectivity in religious or political questions, although many people pretend there is. Everyone starts from a set of biases – for instance, the notion that the scientific method is the only valid approach is itself a bias. Lots of things (such as what makes great art or great food) are not analyzable through a scientific approach.
In short, I’m saying that rarely – very, very rarely – does “debate” change someone’s mind on these issues. Yes, I suppose that there may be some college-age or teen-aged persons who are still open-minded, and may be convinced by your arguments. But basically, going to a pro-religion website and trying to argue is like hitting your head (and its irresistable logic) against an immovable wall. Just as those religiosios coming here are unlikely to convince anyone. At least they have the somewhat justifiable rationale that they’re trying to save our souls. We have no justifiable rationale for trying to destroy their faith, and we wouldn’t succeed anyway.
As an aside, it saddens me horribly that political debate has entered that same arena as religious debate: no one comes with an open mind, everyone comes with the “logic” and “science” that proves their political point of view.
Libertarianism is the primordial discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts, it must return to this fuel source.
I sometimes visit a GD thread to see what the main arguments are. That can be helpful.
On a few occasions my position has shifted a little.[1] Typically though, if you want to move the ball, facts and argument alone are not enough. They may be necessary (I’m unclear on that) but they are not typically sufficient. Persuasion is a subject of active study: I understand that one aspect involves making someone uncomfortable with their own position while simultaneously prepping a soft landing spot. That process requires some empathy. A cruder method involves flattering the disposition of the listener: the new right excels at that: the old left once did the same.
It’s possible to have a useful policy discussion, if the participants seek to show their intelligence and mastery of the subject matter. That’s one method of trumping ideology. For myself though, I think the Republicans have gone too far off the deep end: I suspect that a reasonable conservative could have had a mirror-like complaint with regards to the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
[1] eg I used to thing the Jesus-myth story was ludicrous, whereas now I only believe it to be unlikely, probably highly unlikely. Also, guns.
ETA: IME, atheists frequent religion threads, but my WAG is that theists+agnostics make up a majority of this board. I see the IMHO result contradicts this… Atheists and Anti-theists make up a bare majority of IMHO. Huh. I woulda thought that theist+ agnostic would be larger…
I wanted to put the poll in GD, but the option to do that doesn’t exist. If you prefer, I’ll get around to counting the number of posters supporting atheist/theist positions in the last 5 religion threads and get back to you. Gimme a couple of days though. Busy time.
I quite agree that people who actually make the effort to debate this stuff will rarely change their mind just because of the debate. Think of the ‘audience’ though. Intelligence squared, for instance, polls their audience to check positions on the motion at the start of the debate, and then again at the end, to see if they changed their mind. Lurkers on religious message boards and those reading may be much more open to having their mind changed than the people who debate. At the very least, exposing people to a viewpoint from the other side of the fence is useful.
Yes; a complaint I’ve heard repeatedly over the years from skeptics (including religious people who just disagree with some point of doctrine) is that disagreement with dogma on such boards generally gets you banned immediately, and sometimes your posts erased. Same for politically partisan boards, for that matter. I think that’s part of the reason why there’s a pattern of religious/political extremists who show up and post some dramatic assertion, and then either vanish or turn out to be absolutely terrible at arguments; they’ve spent all their time in an echo chamber where agreement is enforced from on high, and they don’t know how to deal with people who are allowed to disagree. They don’t know how to defend their position, and that position tends to be full of holes since no one has been allowed to critique it.
Here’s a poll from October in which a clear majority of the people who responded were non-theists. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how many people saw the thread and didn’t respond…
Count me as one who has changed his mind. A number of years ago I was stuck vacillating between atheism and agnosticism because I didn’t have a good enough handle on the arguments for either side to be able to take a clear stance. But I spent enough time reading those arguments and following up on my own the cites made by both sides that it became clear to me that I am definitely an atheist. (Oh, and I was brought up in a fundamentalist christian home – my father was an evangelical preacher – but I can’t say that I ever was a actual believer though, even as a child.)
This is true for woo in general.
For example, one anti-vaccination site regularly bans posters who support immunization. It explained its actions on the basis that antivax posters are looking for a supportive atmosphere, and compared the expression of pro-vaccination opinions to atheists crashing a religion site. 
ISTR that the thread Tamerlane linked to had to do with a series of battles in which some fundies made repeated efforts to witness on this Board. They were eventually worn down by a united front of both non-believing AND believing Dopers (Polycarp was one of the leading figures) who told them basically that this community didn’t want to play those games.
You have it backwards. A couple of Dopers went and poked them first, I believe.
Certainly, the proportion of open non-theists here is significantly higher than the population as a whole. To someone who is accustomed to the general population proportion, such a different proportion might reasonably look like a majority non-theist, even if it’s just a larger minority.
Not in a while. I used to debate on various christian forums, but not for a few years. I occasionally debate on debate.com, which I think is geared up to be a pretty good website for such things.
Perhaps we would attract more of the religious persuasion if we had an image of an angel in the top right corner, an image of a rainbow in the upper left corner, and made the background a light pastel blue?
Does your favourite one have that or something? Otherwise, I don’t get the joke.