YOU WERE NEVER A CHRISTIAN!!!

Someone read my recent post "The "Good News" is not Good News" and decided to comment. You can follow that link to see the exchange. I have run into the type of response this individual renders in the past. His response completely ignores the content and criticisms I leveled in the article and instead, he attacks me. This kind of argumentation is known as "ad hominem" and it is a recognized informal fallacy. In spite of that fact, I have encountered this enough times that I think it is worthwhile to post the exchange here and my final reply to the assertion that I was never a Christian.

I will provide the initial interaction to give background and context and then I will provide a final response to this commenter's argument.

Unknown: Uh, anyone can claim to be a Christian.
Truth is this; a person can either be a Follower of Christ or not.
Christian means the person acts or performs in a Christ-Like manner, which means zero about beliefs. 
Also, the use of the term is slur toward Followers of Christ. So, you once were a Christian/good person; does that mean that now you are an evil hazard to our society? Not accepting absolute truth would cause that to e true.

Gavagai: Hi there Unknown. You haven't addressed a single point that I have raised in this post. If you would like to address the issue of whether or not I was ever a believer or Christian or whatever, that's fine, but it isn't the subject of this post. Would you like to have a conversation about the authenticity of my claims to previous belief?

Unknown: Well, you have said nothing worth commenting to in the post.
Many who were forced into Pentecostalism have come to your conclusion.
You may have displayed yourself as a good person, but being a Christian is a cliché. 
From what I have read on your site, you have never truly Believed in God or his Word.
If God had chosen you as a part of the Elect, you would not have come to your conclusion.
You claim to have committed apostasy. 
That cannot occur with the Elect, but it can with someone that either has been forced into Pentecostalism, or made a "decision" based on what friends had done, or accepted the gospel but not ever been regenerated (saved).
You were never of the Elect.
If you displayed the actions of a "Christian", then you can say you were a "Christian". But, not a Christ Follower, which is a person of the Elect.
So, there isn't a need to argue with you since you have never been a part of the Elect, because God has not destined you for that.
Therefore, you don't really have a "beef" with Christ Followers or with The Bible or with God.
There is nothing for you to argue and nothing for you to try and tell anyone that they are wrong.
All that you are is just a person not destined by God to be of the Elect.
Therefore, you have nothing to argue or laugh at or discredit.
Sorry dude, but you're wasting your efforts.

Gavagai: Unknown, have you ever had a doubt about your religious beliefs?

Unknown: No. One who doubts his religious convictions is an unstable man who can be easily persuaded by others.

Gavagai: Unknown, Should people who believe in other gods doubt their beliefs, or should they reject any question that might cause them to doubt or question?

Unknown: Well, Gavagai, if someone worships a god, which the small "g" means that it is placed ahead of Jehovah, that is because, like you, they are blinded and not a part of the Elect. 

By you question, it is easy to see that you truly do not understand The Bible and never have. Until God calls you to Regeneration, you will continue being confused and will never "have a leg to stand on" in tearing down/mocking Jehovah as you are in fact doing. 

You will never be convinced of the truth. Why? You have not been chosen by God to be of The Elect. You'll never understand the Scriptures without a personal relationship with Jesus the Christ. Your "questions" prove that you were never a true believer and by the world's standard you were never a Christian as you claim. Claiming to have been a Christian as you are doing is a lie. You are a hypocrite and a liar by claiming to have been a Christian when all you that you probably did was attend a church because your parent forced you to do so. Hypocrite! Liar!!! You have never committed apostasy, so stop claiming to have been a Christian and now you are not. That is a LIE! You are a LIAR!!! 

If you had truly been a Christian as you claim, you would have experienced Salvation, and the Scriptures teach that we can not ever lose our Salvation. If we could lose our Salvation, Christ would have to be continuously dying on the Cross as the ultimate sacrifice for sins, and that isn't happening.

You are believing a LIE, a Fairy Tale, and being a hypocrite by claiming to have been what you never were!

YOU ARE A LIAR!!!!

My Reply Beyond the Comment Section

Unknown, the "other people's god(s)" are always small "g" gods to everyone else who doesn't acknowledge those gods and goddesses as legitimate real entities. Your god, Yahweh, is no different than any of the other gods and goddesses that have been claimed throughout human history to me in that I don't think any of them are real. Your disposition toward gods like Thor or Aphrodite or Ahuramazda is the same as mine. The difference between you and me is that I now perceive Yahweh in the same light as those other gods.

You are running away from the issues I am raising and you would rather challenge the question of whether or not I used to be a genuine believer. You have no idea who I am or who I used to be. I'm perfectly comfortable and I know my history. I grew up in the church. Christianity was all I knew. The idea of not believing that the Christian god was real seemed preposterous to me 20 years ago. I did have some doubts and questions, but I trusted that the things I had been taught my whole life were Truth, with a capital T. My questions and doubts grew. The answers I got from pastors and my fellow believers were less satisfying all the time. Little by little, things I believed eroded: the Christian god is necessary to explain the existence of the universe, no; the Bible is inerrant, no; miracles, no; infallibility of the Bible, no; the Christian god (as described in the Bible) is good/just, no; there is evidence for the miraculous events described in the New Testament, no; the Bible/Christian god is needed for moral realism, no.

Again, I walked this path. I doubt there is anything I can say that would convince you that I was once a believer. For what it is worth, I chose to be baptized when I was 12 or 13, I played my saxophone in the church worship band in the youth group and in the orchestra for the adult services. I chose to stop playing in the jazz band in school because it conflicted with youth group on Wednesday nights. My "relationship with Jesus" was the priority. I went on a mission trip to Russia my senior year in high school where we gave testimony and handed out Bibles and literature in the schools. I chose to go to a Christian college when I graduated because I wanted to be in an atmosphere where I was among fellow believers and to avoid temptations of a secular campus. When I married my wife, I committed to pay tithes to our church in spite of the fact that we were barely scraping by. We raised my sons to believe. We took them to church. I celebrated when they chose to be baptized. Here is a photo I posted on my Facebook page the day my sons were baptized.

I addition to that, I have Bibles that are filled with notes and highlights, and notebooks filled with prayers and my efforts to square the theology I believed to be true with the world I experienced that didn't always align. I wrote in those notebooks and in emails to my family about the grief I experienced when I discovered that my younger brother disclosed his disbelief to the family.

However, I doubt that any of those facts are likely to persuade you that I genuinely believed most if not all of the same things you believe about the Bible and the god of the Bible. The problem for me came when I began to genuinely care about whether those beliefs were true, and when I began to wonder about how I could tell if they were not true. My doubts grew and multiplied until one day I realized that I no longer believed. It was a similar experience I have had with other beliefs I once thought to be true. When I was little, I believed that Santa Clause was real. I began to wonder and doubt, and eventually, those doubts lead to disbelief. I held onto my religious beliefs for a lot longer because I had strong beliefs about those religious beliefs related to the consequences of doubt and disbelief.

That is part of what makes religious beliefs so difficult to question. We are taught that doubting our religious beliefs is a moral failure and/or dangerous to our well-being. But being told that doubt is dangerous or that you are somehow guilty if you don't believe something doesn't make the claim more true. Someone who is raised to be a Buddhist might worry that if they don't believe the teachings of the Buddha, that he might be trapped in an endless cycle of death and reincarnation and never attain nirvana. Does his fear of samsara and desire to attain nirvana make those things true?

To turn the subject back to the question I posed to you about people who believe in the other gods and goddesses, if those people adopt your same mindset, refusing to ever entertain a single doubt or allow themselves to question what they believe, how will they ever discover that the things they believe about their gods are not true? If the things you believe are not true, how could you figure it out?

Cheers,

Gavagai