Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
No, I dont think so, but I have been DM'd by one or two people who weren't participating in the discussion, they were reading or just following along; my (and other similarly minded folks in said discussion) arguments apparently got them to at least somewhat reconsider what they believed. It was only ever a handful of times over the years, but I think it still fits the premise of your question.
Now granted, this was mostly on like 2010's "Christian creationist verses basically all of science" rage-bate Facebook groups (as was the style at the time). I have no way of confirming these people were being genuine, but also no real reason to doubt them. Most of the messages I got were people learning for the first time that Evolutionary Theory wasn't "anti-Christian." That the vast majority of Christians and Christian denominations weren't actually Young Earth Creationist or necessarily against the concept of the theoretical foundations of academic biology. Heck, one or two of them didn't even know that the overwhelming majority of Chritstians are not biblical literalists. They had been taught that most of the fields of science were basically a (insert boogeyman here) plot to destroy Christianity or god or something.
Again, these weren't the people I was "debating" but rather just curious onlookers watching me, an insufferable 20-something edgy-atheist (again, as was the style at the time), dunk on people who had absolutely no intention of doing anything other than move the goal post to protect sky daddy.