Best Argument Against Biblical Fundamentalism

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Oh, come off of it. You know that not every single church teaches perseverance of the saints, and that these different churches use their own proof-texts to that end.

I mean, seriously, here's a huge LIST that appears to contradict perseverance of the saints: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditiona ... al_support (And there is a list under that of scriptures the other direction)

Now, I am not saying that your interpretation is wrong, but we can't just blindly assume that you're right either if the entire matter is contested among Christians.

Very very true I am glad you brought that up. Yes as a Proestant' we do not have anything to do with saints. Nor do we pray to saints either that is a Catholic teaching' how ever we do view them as part of the martyrdom.

Another good post with out atheists in the world to help me better understand my faith. I think I would end up losing it they posses a great knowlegde of religoious teachings.

So why put faith in the bible?

I'm not asking you *if* you have faith, but why. It's a question that no Christian I've met can answer with anything that makes the slightest bit of sense.

Because we can't Faith' is the same thing as the unknown' no religious person or any faith can truly answer that. This is something all Theists will most likely agree on.

...and yet theists wonder why I have so little patience with them.

Patience is a virtue that only a few people have. I mean their is not one religious person that can answer this not even a non-religious person can give a answer to that question.

Joker, "perseverance of the saints" has nothing to do with the office of sainthood. It's the name of the doctrine "Once saved, always saved". So, if you say that being a Christian means one has been saved, and that one who is a Christian will never lose that salvation and never lose their faith, then you hold to perseverance of the saints.

Good point I'm afriad your right we do hold this belife. I thought you was talking about the sainthood.

Awesome videos. Thank you for sharing them, I enjoyed watching.

That statement is completely false. When I was a Christian, I was 100% Christian and I wanted to live for the god I believed in and be just like Jesus, but my own common sense helped me to realize that the god of the Bible was a hypocrite, sadist, and a narcissist, which is when my faith collapsed. It was not a good experience, it was a horrible experience. It was as if everything I knew to be true was a lie and it was a painful experience, until I managed to give up on my faith entirely.

There is only one possible way this statement could be true. If an omniscient being knows everything before it happens, and it creates humans that it knows will live the life of a Christian for a few years or a few decades, and then after all that time become worthy of Hell, then this means they never were saved in the first place. If a god that knows everything before it happens, creates people that it knows are going to Hell, then the idea of salvation is nothing but a sham.

When I still was a Christian, I also believed that if a person suddenly loses their faith or stops being a Christian, they probably never were to begin with. I realized how flawed this logic truly was when I actually lost my faith. A Christian just can not and will not understand what it was like for an ex-Christian when they lost their faith. Trying to explain the experience to them just does not work.

Perhaps that is because for a Christian to understand it, he would have to have experienced it for himself. If it is impossible for a saved Christian to lose faith, then the inability to understand what it's like to lose faith would seem to lend credence to the idea that faith that CAN be lost isn't a true Christian faith.

@Awesomelyglorious: Whether one can be identified as an authentic Christian or not really is irrelevant, though. What matters is whether someone really is, i.e. whether God can identify them as His own.

P=P whether or not P is known, and that's the logical issue here. Verification of something doesn't magically bring it into existence. Whether you are saved or not is a matter between you and God. Taking people at their word and judging them by their actions are all we have, and even THEN you can't say with 100% certainty whether one's faith is genuine. Personally, I believe in giving people the benefit of a doubt unless I have reason to believe otherwise. Maybe that makes me naïve or gullible, but I believe it does people more than their fair share of justice. That's the very least I feel I can do.

The Scotsman fallacy, on the other hand, is employed as a way of avoiding something that is seen as an unpleasant truth. You can't say that a "true Christian" will do or not do X or Y because even Christians at their best are still imperfect. So what makes a Christian a genuine Christian has to go beyond their actions. I wouldn't say that a professing Christian behaving badly is necessarily a false Christian, but based on behavior I might call the authenticity of their faith into question, or even that the evidence of their faith is unfavorable.

At any rate, a genuine faith is an unshakeable one, which I think is the real test. "Loss of faith" might be due to different factors. One might be that one never possessed a saving faith in the first place. Another could be that one might be saved but at some point fall prey to negative secular influences, whatever they might be, and struggle at acknowledging what they really do believe. They may even claim to be atheists or agnostic for a while. But if the work of salvation is already done, it is impossible to fully turn away from it. Saying "I'm an atheist" is more an attempt to convince oneself of a falsehood than it is to convince others, and given time it could very well be that the "backslider" could return to a public life of faith. But I do think having an actual experience would make this very difficult to do, to actually turn away from faith, so I'm more likely to believe that one was never saved in the first place.

Their faith and work that is what. Makes a christian with out the work. Then having just faith is not enough. At least that is what christian orthodox like me believe. Americans are so funny though. Being angered feeling appressed by what. They do not believe in about. That though in Russia atheists do not behave that way. Or provoke religious people into defending their faith.

Except that it is entirely relevant. If a person who is indistinguishable from other Christians later is found not a Christian, then frankly, saying "Christians never leave" is pretty much a No True Scotsman. I mean, you can say "scripture says", but you aren't actually tracking variables about the individuals in the first place. So, while I admit that it is not entirely ad hoc, it's also such a poor fit for the variables that it may as well be.


The issue isn't that verification of something brings it into existence, only that the label of "Christian" in it's usage has to be applied to known set of people. If you can't actually know who is a Christian, then the label really does get to be used in an arbitrary/ad hoc manner. I mean, if we live in some reality where we can't tell whether we've seen a Christian or not, then we haven't seen one. Why? Because there is supposed to be a difference so that people can see that difference and be drawn to the wonder of Christ. So.... if I can't see the difference, then we have some reason to suspect that there is no divine influence on those of faith, AKA, there are no Christians by your definition of Christian.


I recognize that. The issue is that in a situation like this is that you're either stuck saying that we really ought to be able to identify true Christians and yet really cannot, or we can identify them, but we can't know whether they are saved. Either one gets us in a bind.


Well, people with actual experiences still leave the faith and become very committed atheists. So.... yeah. The issue is then, what does the Holy Spirit look like? If Christians can't identify it, so as to allow intersubjective identification of who really is a Christian and who is not, how do we even know it's acting upon individuals at all, and that they aren't just having some delusions? I mean, if three different people perceive an object, we should expect all three of them to agree easily, and that any person who has not seen it to be unable to agree at all, or to be easily identified as a fake. But within Christianity, we have tons of people who say they've met God, Jesus, and all the rest, but... then they leave and were never identified as a fake while in there, despite perhaps even taking a pastoral role in the church or some other prominent position and exercising it with great devotion for years. I mean.... maybe they're just a really deceived individual about their faith, but.... the fact that this does happen seems very unusual if there is actually a legitimate faith experience.

Instead of using the term "True Christian," we could use the term "Lifelong Christian." That is terminology that we could all agree on, since it doesn't claim more it should. We can all agree that Matt Dillahunty was not a lifelong Christian. We can at least agree about that.
If, on the other hand, he had suddenly died as a child, before he could become an atheist, you theists would say that he was a true Christian. He would then be a "lifelong Christian." I would say that would be irrelevant to the question of being a "true Christian."

There could be one other factor. It could be that the god you believe in has already planned out ahead of time who will go to Hell and who will not, meaning there is no such thing as salvation or free will. If this being is totally omniscient then it knows everything that will happen before it ever happens, so free will can't exist. If there is free will then it can't be omniscient.