So, what's Elaine Ecklund's religion?

Religion has absolutely no place in science. When religion gets the chance, as has been shown again and again, it tries to tell us unscientific facts about the world.
To say that religion doesn't make any claims about the physical world is either false, or produces a religion with nothing in it.

Can't we just outgrow fairy tales as a way to explain the world already?

Heard of BitTorrent?

Debate is in no way a subset of logic.
You could call it a subset of rhetoric (from wikipedia: Rhetoric normally explains the three arts of using language as a means to persuade.), though.

I wonder if the debate classes usually taught in US schools actually harms students' logical and skeptical thinking? A winner of a debate need in no way have the facts on his/her side, he/she just needs to be more persuasive and a better speaker.

Yup.

That's what I thought the article was about when I read the headline...