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This is an interesting point. I think a lot of people who are lovers of objectivity, science, and accuracy tend to fleer the generic religious worldview since it often incorporates absolutes and dogmatic affirmatives. This tends to "get the missionary in trouble" with the more educated, and analytical "proselytes" since they perceive the religious message conveyed to them as a threat to their worldview (how can you be so sure that I will go to hell, or even if there's a hell???), or simply irrelevant to their worldview (who cares, I'm going to have fun when I'm alive...we'll cross the bridge when we get there)--the more indifferent people tend to take this stance.
Of course you are failing to consider a very important point here. What if the missionary is "in trouble" because he can't provide adequate evidence that his "absolutes" and "dogmatic affirmatives" are even likely to be true ? Or even worse, what if he is dealing with somebody who has actually investigated the evidence and found out that some of the missionary's claims - so confidently put forward - are false ? What if the "skeptic" simply has an honest concern for the truth ? Can you admit that that is a real possibility ? Or is it too much of a threat to your worldview ?
Let's take an example here:
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Eyewitness testimony is evidence.
Topic for a different thread but......and yet, the 4 Gospels are treated as fairy-tales by some skeptics. They don't even consider them as viable evidence, let alone whether they support the hypothesis or not.
In reality the evidence is against ANY of the synoptics being an eyewitness account. And we can't be certain of the fourth Gospel either. We do know that John is taken to be the last of the four to be written and that it is heavily influenced by the theology of the authors. If the best you have is something that at best MAY be eyewitness testimony, written many decades after the fact and heavily influenced by the author's biases then you haven't got very good evidence (I should not that while eyewitness testimony IS evidence it isn't especially GOOD evidence, being unreliable at best).
So if you try to put the four Gospels forward as eyewitness testimony the informed skeptic will realise that you know even less than he does. Why should he accept you as an authority if you confidently put forward falsehoods as facts ?
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