Indeed, in my experience, even when the opposing side does hear you, the debate becomes a tribal matter. The ideal of honour-bound debaters discussing a matter in platonic fashion, with perfectly open minds, ready to agree with whoever makes the best argument is rarely instantiated. We commit to our clubs and our cliques, and we exercise our fallacies and biases in the name of protecting what we secretly hold as sacred.

Sure, in this case exoteric Christian theism is laughably irrational, hypocritical, obsolete, but as I show in the other half of my writings, secular society is rife with different kinds of irrationality too. The most admirably rational worldviews aren’t likely to be the most popular because they’d be opposed to the noble lies that make happiness possible and that make the social world go around.