Out of Egypt:

I spent some time this evening on the "One Body of Christ" discussion board, of which I am an (erstwhile) admin. Once again, I was struck by the large number of atheists and agnostics who hang out on the board and set up logical traps for unsuspecting evangelicals.

At first this puzzled me: Why would atheists join a group called the "One Body of Christ," which clearly targets Christians, when there were plenty of atheist groups out there? Then I realized: the atheists need theists, in a way that theists don't need atheists. Debate-loving atheists need theists to debate; otherwise, their (ostensibly) ontologically parsimonious worldview could simply be taken for granted.

A brief look at the Facebook "Atheists, Agnostics, and Non-Religious" board bore this theory out. All the posts that weren't attacking or ridiculing theists were incredibly trivial, things like "Post your status messages here." The group defined itself strictly negatively - as opposing belief in a god or gods, not as advocating anything else in particular. Thus, if theists all vanished in the night, debates would get boring rather quickly.

Atheist #1: I don't believe in God.
Atheist #2: I don't either.
Atheist #1: Yay! Let's go get ice cream.

Christians, of course, don't need atheists in order to have good debates. We do just fine debating other Christians :)