My family is good friends with a rather powerful family here in California.  One of them was a Republican state senator until he got the boot.  His brother is a Baptist minister.  Neither of them are the kind of person any sane person would want to befriend.

I was getting ready to graduate from college and was really starting to question.  "Boots" (his real nickname...no joke) came to visit.  He was completely disgusted with a guy who used to be a local preacher and had become an atheist...some yahoo named "Dan Barker."  I knew of Mr. Barker 1) from a musical we had performed at fundy school and 2) because of his appearance on the Phil Donahue Show.  I had found Mr. Barker's points persuasive, but I kept my mouth shut...this time.

Somehow the subject turned to Jimmy Swaggart's sex scandal and my mouth did its usual tactless thing.  It opened (all on its own, I swear!) and said, "Jimmy Swaggart is such a hypocrite."

Boots looked at me sternly.  "Now, Laura, you know that if you say bad things about those in authority over you, you are inviting an attack from the devil."

My mind no longer believed that shit, but the guilt impulse hadn't caught up yet.  I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline that accompanied my state of permanent religion-induced shame. The conversation went on without me for a few minutes.

Then, getting an idea, I brightened: "So, Stuart,"--I could never bring myself to call him "Boots"--"what do you think about Jim Bakker?" 

Oh, it was so hard to keep my mouth shut as he expounded on the depravity of Jim Bakker.  I managed to wait until he had finished and said, "Now, Stuart, you know that if you say bad things about those in authority over you, you are inviting an attack from the devil."

Good ol' Bootsie turned purple and my family actually laughed at him.

PWN3D! 

Maybe I'm forgetting something here.

Jimmy Swaggart got busted for prostitutes.

Jim Bakker got busted for spending his money on air conditioned dog houses, etc. AND an affair/rape. 

So, according to your buddy, Bootsie, Swaggart is OK and Bakker is a jerk? 

I find this very confusing.

However, I loved both of these stories a lot.  I wish I were that quick thinking when confronted face-to-face with silliness like that.

Hmmm, I think my favorite moment was a day I was escorting at the local clinic and one of the fundy protesters was arguing with me.  Keep in mind this guy was a pastor of a church.  The topic was naturally abortion being at an abortion clinic.  I remember what I said was something like, "What's god going to do, kill all the first born of Wichita?"

 His response was, "That's not in God's nature."

 Apparently he was clueless about the entire book of Exodus and the plagues against the Pharoah.  When I brought that up he had the look on his face like he was instantly made an asshat and said, "I'll have to check up on that."  He didn't say anything the rest of the day.

Pwning a pastor, it's a Mentos moment. 

There were a couple theist idiots on youtube that thought they could actually outsmart the atheists on that site. Eventually, there were some like Violet Kitty who cowardly disabled all comments on her videos and made a video basically telling us that what ever pointy headed intellectual evidence and reason that we could present we knew in our hearts and souls that god was real and that we were using those arguements as an excuse to live without following gods laws. She said she wasn't going to listen to us anymore, no matter how well we proved her wrong. To me, I consider that to have been a victory.

My favorite pwning moment was when I brought up Malichi 2:3 "Behold I will coorupt your seed and spread dung on your faces"

The guy came back and said, "Thats not the correct interpretation" The NIV says "Refuse" not dung".

I said, "Ok, take your pick, trash or poop, would god spread it in your face?"

He said, "Its kinda like when dad threatens to knock you into next Tuesday if you dont shape up. It is not litteral." OF COURSE.

I went on, "Really, so God is willing to tourture you with unimaginable pain in hell for eternity, but cant or wont spread "poop/trash" in your face?"

Well if spreading poop/or trash is not litteral, then why would hell be? On the other hand if hell is horrible and real a simple slap on the wriste like spreading poop/trash in your face should be possible.

Mine happened over a few days back in 1999. I was working in a bank as security. One day a guy belonging to one of the christian denominations(a priest or something, not too familiar with the hierarchy of religious structures, but he had a congregation and was dressed in the priest-type clothing) approached me and asked me if I believed in god. If it had been busy I probably would have told him I didn't have time to discuss the matter, but the place was empty. So I told him I didn't. Over the next 3 or 4 days we'd have a 30 or so minute chat every time he came in over various portions of his belief system. It was the first debate I'd ever had on the subject in person. One or two online, but those were generally against trolls anyway. A week after the last conversation we had I was transferred to a different site because I pissed off a customer who happened to have a large bank account but thought he wasn't subject to law. I didn't see the "priest" for a month or two. But it happened to be my bank that I'd been working in at the time, and a couple months later I was cashing a cheque and saw the guy again. He was dressed in normal clothes this time, which struck me as odd. I approached him to talk and once he recognized me he told me that I'd convinced him to do some reading up on things and that he'd abandoned his religion. He thanked me for debating with him and said he felt so much better, like a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

I'm surprised he doesn't remember that musical - he has a picture of it in Losing Faith in Faith.

Wow, I had the same proudest pwning moments. Bod, and Mormons. Although, Bod was an easy target, and I think just about everyone he talked with pwned him. It was so funny to watch him try to justify his claim that you can measure both time and distance in lightyears.

For the Mormons, I went to a university with a lot of Mormon missionaries, and I kept getting approached by them. So I read the Book of Mormon, and memorized some of my favorite problems with it. One day, I was sitting in an open area on campus with a friend, and a Missionary walked up, and asked if we had a moment to speak with him. I said that we did, and so he sat down with us, and I made him open his BoM and go from verse to verse explaining all the problems I could remember. He had no idea what to do about that. He just had to follow along.

The irony was that I was in the latter part of my own Christianity, and episodes like this contributed to my abandoning religion. When the missionary walked up, he was interrupting a Bible study I was having with a 'friend' from the cult I was nominally attached to. I think that 'friend' was just about as confused as the poor missionary.

Thank you. It was one of my greatest experiences. It was also the moment that showed me it was possible to get someone to turn away from their faith with simple discussion. It's because of him that I started challenging belief more aggressively. Kind of snowballed from that moment.