Am I too lost to be saved?

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My God, my tourniquet,
Return to me salvation!

My wounds cry for the grave,
My soul cries for deliverance.

Will I be denied Christ?
tourniquet
my suicide

(this should not be interpreted as me being suicidal nor my desire to worship any deity)

Being convinced of the Arminian position, and of grace, while I have NO idea of where you sit, I will say I hold out hope that even my father, a serious atheist all his life and currently heavily Alzheimered up, may show up saved.

I find this hilarious. Talking with Orwell earlier, and he stated that he believe Arminianism(the position he wanted me to argue) actually had outright contradiction to it.

That being said, Christianity does not admit to the unsavable people.

It's kind of funny though, I remember feeling great distress once I recognized that my intellectual evolution was leading me so far away from Christianity that I recognized that it was unlikely I could ever be a member of a Christian congregation again. Y'know, now I was too lost to be saved.

they're just song lyrics.

Besides, IF god exists, I've openly taken the blasphemy challenge.

Awesomely Glorious - when I get fired up I will argue AGIN the Arminian stance.

"
That being said, Christianity does not admit to the unsavable people"

I think some creeds will disagree with you on that.

Philologos, I didn't know you were an Arminian. That could be an interesting discussion at some point.

Yeah, I really don't take Arminianism that seriously as a theology, and I'm genuinely curious as to how it has survived so long and why people believe it. Granted, it is a pretty nice intuitive way of tackling the predestination issue (in fact, it's pretty much the stance I took when I went through Confirmation, though I didn't know its name at that point) but it seems to break down under closer scrutiny.

Although possibly for different reasons, my deal is about the same. The pastor down the street and some other folks do not visit me in my time of affliction, and they would likely just sound a bit like Job's friends if they did. With all of their "Yes, but ..." comments considered, I suspect many of them are actually quite willingly deceived. One of them wants me to send a "family picture" they can use for reference during their morning "prayer time", but I just could not do that to him.

We will discuss - I am gearing up for the great debate with Awewsomely Glorious advancing the Arminian cause and me arguing agin it.

Of course, thanks to the limitations of binocular vision in an atmosphere and the Double Blind Elephant principle [that is where even the testers don't know if what they are feeling is really an elephant], all formulations break down outside a limited radius. See years of critique of linguistic theory - or actually don't.

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And here is a possibly distinct discussion topic: resolved, the deeper in the spectrum you sit the more reasonable a strict Calvinism will seem. Be interested to get some readings on that one.

If such a God exists who is the entire universe plus some, where everything is of him and he has omnipotence/omniscience through that - there is no possibility that anything ever goes wrong according to his will. There is also no libertarian free will. Meaning: if you're a strident atheist, you're exactly who he meant for you to be my having the world interact with your parents in the way that it did, bringing them together in the right time and place to make the right egg meet the right sperm and leave you a devout atheist at this point in your life. Life is a pre-written play, whether by divine or by an explosion simply generated by fluxes in the space time continuum. The past is history, now is the play point, and the future is simply linear fixed history yet to be enacted. In that sense there is no accountability and no regrets.

In other words, you're exactly who your supposed to be, I'm exactly who I'm supposed to be, and you couldn't stop being exactly who you're supposed to be if you tried as no such variables make that possible. Thus, if taken in that light, any notion that this life is a salvation/perdition battle seems vacuous at best.

You might find it rather easy to win that debate. AG has already expressed doubt over whether he can even make a cogent case for Arminianism.


Quite possibly. Calvinism seems relatively emotionless and matter-of-fact.

Though the attempt, if made, would also be part of the divine plan, as would any change that does occur in a given individual.

The alternative is of course open theism, which I think is actually a relatively popular idea among liberal Protestants nowadays. Within the framework of open theism, more intuitive ideas about this life deciding salvation or damnation do hold.

Precisely.

I think you should be pretty careful when making statements like that. Not to sound overly gerontophobic, but many great minds in old age have been known to revert back to an infantile, rigid, intellectual simple-mindedness of childhood.

Edit: Nevermind, understood it now.

And many sophomores [literal sense] have wised up.

Well, the real reason isn't the lack of problem so much as the intuitive fit. People can create rationalizations to deal with the problems of Arminianism by avoiding the larger point of God's creative choices. However, bad intuitive fits are things that people really really don't want to deal with.