*Matthew enters*

[Matthew]

Hi Zen Badger,

This is not the Christian understanding of "becoming a Christian". To become a Christian, God must accept you. A person becomes a Christian because of what God does, not because of what they do. God cares very little about whether human beings believe that He exists.

I would like to know how you have arrived at this conclusion since the bible and every other christian we've had on this forum thinks differently.

It is the view that "regeneration precedes faith" (monergism). To see what Scripture teaches about this, just look at the conversions in the New Testament. Look at Paul (Saul): what is it that he believed or did that led to his having faith? Or how about Lydia (Acts 16)?

It is also refreshing to see that with all the death, pain and misery on this planet that god consistantly ignores,he was able to find the time to convince you to be a christian.

It was my being convicted of the fact that I am responsible for pain, misery and death that began the whole process. Perhaps you would think it better that God simply wiped out human beings to prevent our evil; in which case, I am thankful that you are not God.

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My speaking of "wrestling with something outside of myself" is referring to the feeling that my thinking was being guided in a particular direction despite my willingness to go in another

Everyone has the experience of wrestling with competing desires or courses of action. I regularly struggle with the feeling that part of me wants to go in one direction, while another part is holding me back. There is no reason to attribute this inner struggle to a god or anything outside your own brain.

I am not attributing the struggle to God - the struggle was my own - but the direction that the struggle took me in. I was certainly not in control of the direction, and there are different available explanations as to why my thinking led to the conclusions it did. But importantly, any explanation can only be made in the light of prior beliefs - the naturalist must interpret in the light of her naturalism, and the Christian in the light of her Christianity.

my interpretation of that as being God's guidance is made in the light of my new-found beliefs after the fact.

This reasoning is a bit biased and post hoc, don't you think? If you had converted to a Hindu belief system instead, you would no doubt have interpretted such past experience as guidance from Vishnu.

No more than any other explanation we accept is "biased" by our worldview. I don't know much about Hinduism, and it would depend on whether "guidance" is a Hindu category of thought (I have no idea).