To debate is to engage someone in argument. According to the gospels, Jesus argued with the Pharisees, the chief priests, and the elders, typically by not falling into the traps laid by their rhetorical questions. He debates Satan as well in that sense when he’s in the wilderness. The New Study Bible labels a section of John (8:30-47) “Jesus Debates the Pharisees” (link below). For more, see Matt. 19:3-9; 21:23-27, John 3:1-13, and numerous other passages.

Jesus’s debates are brief and more rhetorical than logical, since the issues were religious rather than philosophical, and Jesus was supposed to have been the master at everything, so no one stood a chance against him. But the disagreements were argumentative in that they went back and forth, and Jesus was dealing with implicit or explicit objections and criticisms of his message and behaviour. He was engaging with those who disagreed with him by responding to their statements, not by ignoring them and mindlessly repeating talking points like a politician or a brainwashed cultist.

And Paul debates people left and right in his letters. He doesn’t just lecture or “state what reality is.” He answered objections and criticized certain interpretations of his theology or “gospel.” Those are written debates, but Luke in Acts says Paul reasoned in person with Jews, Greeks, and everyone in the marketplace (17:17; 18:4, 19; 19:8). The latter verse, 19:8, says “Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God.” Argumentation is the essence of debate.

So I take it you’d have no trouble calling Jesus and Paul “vain,” with the same sanctimony and condescension that ooze out of your reply to me. Or will you hide behind semantics, redefining “debate” like you redefine “religion” to harmonize with your twenty-first century, “born-again” interpretation of the Bible.

I wonder about the debates that must go on in your head when you deal with the cognitive dissonance that shows up as you’re talking about software with a mathematician, on the one hand, and as you’re making ludicrous presumptions about God’s concerns, on the other. By compartmentalizing the secular and crackpot (“spiritual” or “born-again”) sides of your brain, does the one side ever address the other? Don’t you find that the methods of computer science make a laughingstock of your Christian creed and of your anachronistic presumption that the creator of the universe tells us more about his nature by writing a book than by creating the universe itself, the latter being mostly amoral and perfectly hostile to life (i.e. in outer space)?

You say, “God isn't concerned about us using the reasoning capacity He has given us.” First, you sound impudent when you declare, with sanctimony rather than humility, what you think God’s concerns are. Second, assuming God exists, why wouldn’t he have given us the capacity to reason to enable us to figure out the truth when we disagree, by debating? Some debates may indeed be fruitless when they’re based on egoism. Often, we talk past each other. But arguments also reveal who’s being reasonable and who’s resorting to fallacies (such as your rhetorical redefinitions of “religion” and “debate”). Even if the debaters don’t change their minds because they’re too proud to admit they’ve made a mistake, others watching the debate can decide for themselves.

By the way, if you think debating is vain, why are you debating me right now?

https://newchristianbiblestudy.org/bible/story/jesus-debates-the-pharisees/king-james-version