You and David seem to get your point across so well (as well as other posters here) Some of the stuff I want to say when I get in to "debates" with other people, but end up stumbling over my words and forgeting what I was going to say or finding words. Is there any tips you guys have?:)
When I began to debate skeptics on the internet, I got an absolute kicking. The reason being that I became frustrated, which lead to anger, which fulfilled the skeptic's vision of themselves as fighting emotion with reason. It took a while to work out it had nothing to do with rationality, and everything to do with the use of logical fallacies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies It's worth familiarising yourself with some of these, forewarned is forearmed. A
lifestyle skeptic promotes the idea that the world is divided into true and false. On the true side there is science, mathematics, logic, on the false,
Woo-Woo, which consists of God, religion, superstition, survival, psi and pseudoscience. Their role is to defend science against superstition, which will overrun everything the enlightenment has provided and the world will enter a new dark age. There is no grey area of doubt, and everyone is on one side or the other.
To successfully debate with a skeptic you must first find out what he/she believes. This is difficult to achieve because if they're experienced lifestyle skeptics, they'll realise showing their hand too early can be disastrous. Generally speaking they'll want you to fit a stereotype they feel comfortable with, so they can exercise a few well rehearsed moves. For example they'll want you to provide physical evidence for a deity, or one laboratory proven example of psi, or a single NDE that isn't attributable to normal perception. The "best case" is important to skeptics, if they can debunk your exemplar the rest will tumble away. Remember, for skeptics debunking and disproving are synonymous, all they have to do is introduce doubt by whatever means to "disprove" your proposition. They are reductionists, they like things in the smallest bite-sized particles of data they chew on and they'll assure you the plural of anecdote is not evidence. Big picture data is anathema, the stuff of nightmares.
Skeptics are difficult to pin down because unlike self-confessed materialists, they do not have a single philosophical or ideological position. If things are getting hot they'll simply say they are "atheists", or they'll equate all ideas of a deity with one another (Thor, pink unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters), or they'll say they only disbelieve in the Judeo-Christian God, and possibly only in the English spelling. By comparison materialists are a push over. However I've yet to argue with a skeptic who does not resort to materialism as a trump card. Once they've built their straw men, resorted to ad hominem, played to a tame audience and even demanded your pity if things aren't going their way, they'll expect you to believe they have no conscious volition and arguments are what their genes make them do.
Above all it's worth remembering that you are on a quest for truth, whereas the skeptic is sure they already have it, and that's a massive thing for them to prove. Which is why the debate is mostly scorn, rhetorical devices and logical cul-de-sacs, instead of the open-minded enquiry it should be.