Quote from Maverick1:
You were not born again, I assure you not.
You illustrate the problem quite nicely.
The possibility that an intelligent person could fall in love with the Christian God, and then fall out of love with same--going so far as to cease all belief in same--is wholly reasonable. Nothing exceptional about it.
People fall in and out of love all the time. (If you divorce your wife, it doens't mean you never loved her.) People also get duped all the time, or otherwise grow out of previously held beliefs. People switch worldviews, philosophies, political associations. Some element of previously unrealized or undiscovered truth slips in and the foundation of the old view is irreparably cracked. Those who are intellectually honest find themselves compelled to clear the debris, focus on rebuilding, and start again. Those who are intellectually dishonest stick their fingers in their ears and cling for dear life to their shattered foundations, willing with everything they have that reality would just go away and leave them be.
For you to assume lkh was not actually born again is the height of arrogance and possible evidence of vacuity if not stupidity. How do you know lkh did not love God?
How do you know it is impossible for a human being to truly 'love' the Christian God in all the qualifying senses, and then to cease loving same?
You can't know such a thing. It is arrogant and ridiculous to suggest that you do. The possibility that lkh had a 'heart for God' and then lost it is quite reasonable, if one considers the question from a simple, logical perspective.
But it's the theological imperatives that muck things up.
There's the rub. Your theology forces you to go in a weird loop-de-loop.
If you are Arminian, you have no problem with people falling away b/c Arminians believe salvation can be lost.
But if you believe in the Calvinist doctrine of 'once saved always saved,' you are forced into a self-defeating pattern of irrationality. This loop-de-loop is necessary to deny the dangerous possibility that
you are the one who is deluded.
To preserve your theological structure, you are forced to assume that anyone who no longer loves God never actually did... an assumption that is patently irrational but required by the theology handed down to you. (Assuming here, of course, that you are indeed of the 'once saved always saved' school. Either way, you are making a classic 'once saved always saved' argument in response to the challenges of an ex-believer.)
How would you respond, I wonder, if you were presented with compelling evidence of a Calvinist who absolutely once loved God, but no longer does? What if this hypothetical Calvinist not only had all the teachings and knowledge you could ask for, but a vast body of God-glorifying writings testifying to his lost love that no longer exists?
Could you really say that this person was never born again in the personal sense, never truly loved God? If you could say that smugly and confidently, even when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, that would make you a fool. (In the rational / logical sense, not the backwards biblical sense.)
Such a creature--a man who clearly, compellingly once loved the Calvinist God and yet clearly, compellingly no longer does--is like a zero divisor in the 'once saved always saved' equation. He jams up the theology; the theological response does not compute.
He is like Douglas Adams' Babel Fish:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
The ex-Calvinist in question does in fact exist. He is me. Any idiot can tell me I never truly loved God, but I know undoubtedly in my 'heart of hearts' that, for many long years, I deeply and truly did love God. The biblical, omniscient, omnipotent, once saved always saved God.
In retrospect, it is clear I actually loved a powerful constellation of aesthetic qualities and virtues that I ascribed to the biblical God as source. At the end of the day, though, it is the same thing, just as six and one half dozen are the same thing. My love for Yahweh back then was quite real--as real as real can be, wholly demonstrable and measurable. My love blinked out because Yahweh blinked out, not vice versa.
It's a funny thing, this predicament I'm in. If my old 'once saved always saved' theology is correct, then I am still saved at this moment, even though I have wholly abandoned the doctrine and faith I once held.
An Arminian could pop in at this point and say perhaps salvation is perishable, that the Calvinists are wrong, but that produces no quandary for me because I know, and have always known, that Arminian theology is rubber-room bullshit. Those guys threw out logic from square one; their position is not philosophically tenable and never has been. One might as well say satan is chocolate cake and elvis is the virgin mary to believe in a non-omnipotent God. Arminian theology is an embarrassingly silly kludge to paper over the problem of pain.
So anyway, here I am with my own personal theological Babel Fish, forcing the vengeful Christian God in question to wink out in a puff of irreconcilable contradiction. And there is no recourse for me to bring him back, because I would have to use logic to do so, and logic is the solvent that dissolved him in the first place.
Of course, none of that keeps me up at night, because I realize know that it was all a bunch of bullshit. In reality, theology is little different than
fictionology.
If you don't understand much of this, don't worry; there's a lot you don't understand if you go around throwing accusations at people like the one you threw at lkh. Suffice it to say it's not inconceivable to love God and then stop loving him, even if you don't believe my personal testimony; the fact that your theology requires absolute belief otherwise--that it forces one into the box canyon of silly acid tests--is testament to its logical bankruptcy.
And that's a real sticky wicket for defenders of religion in general--not just logical bankruptcy, but philosophical bankruptcy.
You have the mystic defenders who promote salvation-as-experience, and the evidentialists who drone on about this blah blah text and that blah blah historical reference; but there is no one to defend the gapingly irreconcilable
philosophical contradictions that dissolve all popular religions and wash them away.
It's kind of funny -- the truly crushing blow for popular religion is such that non-thinkers can't grasp its trajectory or its force.
It's like trying to explain the impossibility of perpetual motion machines to someone who doesn't grok basic physics--and refuses to learn.
