I used to occasionally receive challenges to debate belieers, Christians to be exact, although there wwere a couple of times I was invited to debate a Muslim, and, believe it or not, a Hindu. I sometimes accepted the challenges from Chriostians because, of course, I am more intimately familiar with that belief than I am with any other. But even within the Christian belief universe, there are many different interpretations of that belief. We normally call that dogma because it is the interpretation/practice of one group that another group many not agree with of follow.

That makes it difficut to debate Christians in general because it’s not known which particular dogma the other person follows, until they are standing behind the lecturn (formally) and defending or opposing the stated proposition. Of course, it depends somewhat on the proposition, but if it’s to resolve something biblical, the answers will vary depending upon the tradition.

There really is no reason to debate such a controversial topic, though. It really doesn’t matter the specific proposition, those that are be;ievers will walk away still believing, and non-believers will do the same.

There might be a small number in the audience that are not convinced one way or the other, but the idea of a debate is to convince the audience, not just those few but at least an overall majority, that one position prevailed over the other. And you can’t win a debate if you don’t know the subject of the proposition, like Christianity. Not that anyone has to memorize the bible, but having a working knowledge of the Christian sacred text is helpful. I’ve actually seen debates where the person attempting to show something doubtful about Christianity, failed completely because of a lack of knowledge of the bible.

If anything, I’ve had to defend non-belief more than I’ve ever had the opportunity to debate the truth (any truth) of Christianity. These discussions (not really debates) have been from unfriendly to downright hostile, the latter because my opponent discovered that I was fairly well versed in his bible and most of thee time, because the arguments are dogmatically presented, easily refuted using their own book. Atheism is just a non-belief in god(s). No text to read, no messiah’s to quite, just a simple statement, ad it’s not that difficult to refute someones challenge to that non-belief.

Most of us, well at least the few atheists I know fairly well, aren’t concerned with anyone’s belief system with the exception that no one’s belief system should take precedent over any other. In other words, no, we’re not meant to be a “Christian nation”, but also, we were not meant to be oppressive to another’s belief system.