I find my most productive conversations with theists are either why they believe or why they should stop persecuting atheists.

I’d give the same advice that I wish theists would follow when talking with atheists. Do not tell them what they believe. Tell them what you believe. Listen and respond to what they say, not what you think they secretly mean.

I talk about the need for separation of church and state…

I wish that were true. Fundamentalist (and other?) Christians tie themselves in all kinds of knots to establish articles of their faith in laws that affect all of us. I don’t understand.

Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language.

and

Neither side is going to compromise on beliefs.

I don’t agree with either of these statements. At all. I’ve had more than one person tell me that they became atheists, in part, because of things I wrote. And I became an atheist, in part, because of things other people wrote. Most atheists were once believers… and we had our minds changed by something. Our numbers wouldn’t be increasing if that weren’t true.

I do think that, in one-on-one conversations, we need to shift our expectations. We can’t expect people to change their minds overnight. People tend to be very attached to their religious beliefs: we need to remember that letting go of those beliefs is emotionally hard, and that simply making a killer argument isn’t going to do it. We need to shift our expectations from “make the killer arguments that will change this person’s mind” to “plant the seeds of doubt and give them the tools they’ll need to re-think these questions on their own.” (And we also need to do a better job of making atheism a safe place to land once people do leave their religion.) We’re not dynamite under the foundations: we’re water on rock.

You might be interested in a survey I took and a piece I wrote (sorry for the self-linkage, but it really is relevant): What Convinced You? A Non-Belief Summary… and an Atheist Game Plan. I did an informal survey of non-believers in my blog, asking, “What changed your mind?” — and then summarized the answers into a game plan for what is and is not actually helpful in getting people to question their faith. Short answer: Yes, we can make a difference. It just takes time.

There are some folks with whom that’s just not possible. Both Ray Comfort and the RRS come to mind. But these conversations are important, particularly if we can approach them with open minds and hearts.

Knowing 1) how to listen and 2) how to speak so that you’re comprehensible to the other are essential here. Even if y’all might not buy into our Easter Bunny Sky Daddy God, there are plenty of things that we still share. If we’re just being trolls to one another, we get nowhere.

It isn’t how we treat those like us that matters, but our ability to be welcoming and gracious to those who are different…even to the point of being an “enemy.”

I think several of the commenters here have it exactly right: It’s crucial to have the arguments out there for those who’ve reached their teachable moment, but as Jonathan Swift did or didn’t say, you can’t generally reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into. Direct argument rarely accomplishes even a fraction of what we can do by being both out and normal.

Losing faith is a slow process. If we keep beating stuff with the reason stick, something’s got to give.