(August 1, 2015 at 4:47 pm)Rahul Wrote: Being raised Southern Baptist and then slowly realizing it was all make believe as I got older the mindset of salvation has seemed more ridiculous the more I think of it.
I was considered "saved" by pretty much everyone who knew me growing up. But I unintentionally committed the sin of thinking too much about my religion and being objective in evaluating the uncomfortable truths about it. As a result, I was no longer able to believe. I didn't want to stop believing, it was just what I found to be the obvious truth.
Other Southern Baptists would now say that I was never saved, ever. But here's the thing. Everyone would say I would be in Heaven right now if I had died at 25 before I started deconverting from my religion. Saying in retrospect, based on my life after that age, that I was never saved, really destroys the ability of other Southern Baptists to know with any level of surety that they are really saved.
If you told me at 25 that when I was 30 I would be an atheist I would have been pretty pissed at you and told you not a chance in hell.
No matter what, I couldn't simply decide to believe in god today. No matter how much I wanted to. I could no better force myself to believe in god than I could force myself to believe I was a squirrel. The facts simply prevent me from believing in absurdities.
If the wages of be incredulous based on the facts that reality shows to you is eternal torment in hellfire then I must find fault with the concept of a supposedly loving God that I was raised to believe in. That would be an extremely sadist way of creating reality for humans. If you are truthful about it (which Christians can't seem to be with themselves about) you have to admit a loving god would simply not do that.
That's exactly what a loving God would do and has, justice is a great part of love, you probably can't realize it but it's true. I do not know how someone can say they were saved if they in turn reject any belief in God. Someone who's saved should have had a relationship with Him and with that relationship should come knowledge of God. So how can one who claims to once be saved deny the God he had a relationship with, seems impossible to me. Then there's the thing of lying to one's self. I do not believe in once saved always saved, I believe one can give up their salvation, what I do believe is someone who professes to be saved and rejects their salvation, deny the existence of the God who saved him. My opinion you were never saved if you do not believe in God's existence, sorry that's my opinion.
GC
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
