If you (Dan) think Jesus makes you a better person, who am I to try to win this argument?

You know, it’s funny you should mention spinach. Even though I am not a believer, I’ve acquired a reputation in the family as the guy who prays at weddings. At my sister-in-law’s wedding, I had everybody solomly bow their heads, gave thanks for the food, spoke some words of encouragement for the bride and groom, then ended with an invocation in Latin: Pater Noster, In dentibus anticis frustum magnum spiniciae habes, Amen.

And all the people did say Amen.

>>proverbs 27:1 — and while you’re there read verse 2 and meditate a little bit on Christian Humility and whether Jesus wants you to claim (falsely) that your fruits are true and mine were false.

You’re right. I was trying to use myself, as an example of a Christian, between just our conversation and that may have been wrong.

I fully admit that I am not ‘holier then thou’ at all and I may have come across arrogantly, for that I apologize. I just want to say that for this wicked and wretched man, God has changed me forever as evidenced by my current desires and lifestyle. If God could change me then there is a God. I was the worst of the worse atheists…that’s all I really meant.

Matthew 22:39, Leviticus 19:17-18 tells us how to treat people so that is what I do, and what you have done. It takes far more love to confront to ignore the situation, Perfect love is a constant confronter.

I believe that only a friend will tell a friend that they have spinach in their teeth. An enemy would not do that. You correct me in love and I do the same. (Ezekiel 3:20)

Thank you for being a friend, enough to rebuke me :7) Insert song here

Wes has spelled out the problem quite nicely. Since the Bible says that no True Christian ever deconverts, a Christian only has a few options when faced with someone claiming to be a former Christian.

1 – Admit that the bible is wrong.
2 – Speculate that the subject was never really a Christian.
3 – Speculate that the subject has not really deconverted.

I’m actually surprised it took so long for us to come to a version of number 3. Looks like these Christians don’t know their bible very well. (More signs that they’re stroking false fruits and will deconvert some day – but not Wes … or Peter, but Dan for sure because he’s offered no more proof that his fruits are real than I have.)

I’m done talking to Wes about this. He’s demonstrated his ability to hold contradictary thoughts by arguing a version of #2 for most of his last post, then suddenly switching to #3. After shutting down the computer last night, I meditated a bit on why I’m here reading this web page. I’m sure it’s not to debate Christians who are less committed that I was before my deconversion. It’s probably to find kindred spirits and common experience among the unbelievers.

For what it’s worth, the Church I considered home taught that when a True Christian deconverts, God has the option of “bringing that soul home” before his testamony becomes a danger to the world. I’ve forgotten the exact scriptural justification for this — possibly 1 Cor 11:28-30 which says that taking communion with an unworthy heart will cause many to die early. The fact that my life has become even more fulfilling after my deconversion and that God hasn’t brought me home early tells me one thing:

God thinks my anti-Testamony is unconvincing and I need to ramp it up. [Woah, I gotta lay off the Believe-in-God breathspray.]

Oops. Was that off topic?

Thomas – I like your style, dude. Welcome!

Dan – It does my heart good to hear your fruits- theory. I could not possibly agree more that studying the matter empirically is the only way to go! Im very serious! Bravo! I think your hypothesis is perfectly reasonable, and worth testing.

So, your suggestion is that “true” Christians will bear good, lasting fruit. So, what you need to do at this point is develop a measurement for this. Some test of “fruitiness”. You do this by demonstrating that twhatever you propose as a test is valid (really measures “fruits” and not something else) and reliable (multiple people can employ it with the same result).

Then, tool in hand, you will be in a position to evaluate a prospective cohort of Christians and see whether, in fact, those who score high on the Fruit Scale really are less likely to deconvert.

Now, to anticipate a potential protest, you may be inclined to think that such things as “fruits” in this sense are not amenable to quantitative measurement. And perhaps not. But the larger point remains: the issue is that you need to be able to identify **ahead of time** who has fruits sufficient to prove true conversion, and thus will never leave the faith, as distinguished from those who do not, and thus later leave. You can either examine the evidence and predict it in advance, or you cant.

After all, as Im sure youll agree, if you are suggesting that only in retrospect do we know who “really” had sufficient fruit, then you are committing a No True Scotsman fallacy. Your fruit claim is not telling us anything about what we will find in the world; it is telling us how you define the term “true” or “fruitful” Christian” — i.e., one who never deconverts. “No Truely Fruitful Chrisitans deconvert.”

And, of course, this is doubly problematic as long as “bearing fruit” remains such a loose metaphor. You yourself seem to admit it exists on a spectrum. So how do you know if you bore enough fruit to really be a True Christian? Why, if you never deconvert, of course!

But, empiricism — now youre talking my language! For Im sure you’ll agree, if you are not solving this issue by just *defining* it to suit you, as above, then by exclusion you must be hypothesizing an *empirical* association between fruit and deconversion. Those are the only options, no?

And that is, as I said,perfectly reasonable — as a hypothesis. But until you operationalize the terms and subject it to a test, it remains wholly speculative. Which means, right now, you really do not know at all whether it is true, or not, that those who call themselves Christians, and bear a certain kind of behavioral fruit, really do stay true to the faith.

Either way, though, it seems to me to suggest that you dont really know whether you are, in fact, a Christian or not. If you define it in terms of bearing fruit, which is manifest in never deconverting, then all you can say is that you have not deconverted *yet*. You wont know for sure until your deathbed whether you are a real or false convert.

Conversely, if you suggest an empirical association here, then we remain in a state of ignorance as to whether it is true or not, until such time as we perform these studies. Your current fruit in your life may indicate that you wont deconvert, but it might not, because the claim might be false.

Fallibilism, I think thats what we are suggesting here. We all once thought we were sure, too. No one in our lives could, or did, ever pick us out at the time, saying “hmmm.. your fruit doesnt look mature…. somethings wrong here….” Just like you, Im sure.

Feeling certain is just a feeling, my friend, not a guarantor of truth, much less Truth. Its a neural sensation; the mind’s assessing its own subjective confidence level. Nothing more. So, lets just all admit it: however painful we might find this, in the end we just cant be sure.