How to debate a Christian

[NoGodaloud ?]

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Hello, I am an atheist, and I love to challenge the faith of some people around me with the hope that maybe with a successful debate I can help some of them see how useless and harmful the religious institutions are. I had some success stories but most of the time religious people avoid conversation about this topic and just change the subject. This is one problem, I understand that for some people changing their beliefs is useless and harmful, if the stories from religion help them in their life and they can function like this without troubling others, okay, I leave them alone and try to understand them.

Some simply don't want or can't understand new ideas related to religion, there is mostly nothing that can be done about those.

But some people don't benefit from belief in a god, and makes them in general more inefficient and more dangerous in their daily lives, and they have enough intelligence to grasp new ideas and maybe transform themselves for the better but are jamming themselves, making religion a sensitive subject and want to avoid it. I want to know some methods on how I can penetrate this shell they made and maybe succeed in actively debating their point of view. Once a debate on this subject starts there is a chance of success.

And another problem is the text they use to close the conversation. Most of them are ignorable, but there is one that I don't feel that I can answer efficiently yet, and that is :"You didn't read the Bible so you can't talk about this subject". And the truth is I started to read this book a couple of years ago especially for this but I couldn't even finish Genesis, because its so silly, cruel, and simple that I didn't have the patience and stomach to continue, all that killing, incest, and that cruel, not so intelligent god were too much for me. So how can I answer to this statement so that I can continue on this subject?

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Instead of starting with the bible, you might start and ask questions based on scientific facts.

Questions for example about the origin of the universe, its finetuning, abiogenesis, evolution etc. and how the answers of these questions are better supported through atheism, than through theism.