If you’ll take a word offered in the spirit of kindness - this, this right here is where you lost this conversation. The goal should not be so much to “win”, as to truly win. By your own admission, you cannot save anyone, hence you are not responsible for even trying, only for representing what your faith has done in your own life.
And calling the other person a troll - even (especially) if they are one - cements their attitude against you. Then further calling their understanding as “preposterous”… well, you get the idea.
Do whatever you want, but I thought I’d offer that thought at least.
I wasn’t trying to “win” in the way you think I was yet. I was just trying to gather information.
My default assumption when someone claims to be saved is that they are until proven otherwise, but believing that the Church and not Christ is the source of salvation is a convincing proof otherwise from my perspective. But then my mind goes into “rebuke” mode and not “plant some seeds” mode, because people who consider themselves part of the Church should be open to rebuke (though of course I still try to be kind about it, that doesn’t come across easily over the net.)
For the sake of the rebuke, I wanted to understand what exactly they believe in so I could address it more directly, but that clearly wasn’t going anywhere. By their logic, I didn’t even have the right to ask because I’m not already part of whatever “Church” they’re a part of. Between their aggression and the fact that I’ve never heard of a belief system that lines up with what they were saying, I saw trolling as a likely possibility, moreso than I let on at this point. I suppose I could have tried for a little longer before bringing it up, but as you can see, I only asked, and then stated immediately afterwards that I didn’t want to assume ill intent.
So it wasn’t intended so much an accusation as a test of the waters, but I suppose it didn’t come off that way, and a troll wouldn’t answer that honestly, so the only purpose it served was to protect my own pride against the vision I had of someone laughing at their screen going “look how long I’m keeping this fool in an argument, and they don’t even suspect I’m trolling.” I’ll try to do better about that in the future.
As for the use of “preposterous,” I did add “to me” to soften it a bit, and this is clearly someone who’s able to handle that level of bluntness.
Thanks for your thoughts. I guess upon becoming sure that they were a troll, instead of calling them out to end it there, I should have shifted out of rebuking mode (since someone who’s pretending to be a Christian for trolling purposes is not going to be open to Christian rebuke,) and considered whether I was in a position to share my faith. In this case, I think I was, but it might be too late now. I’ll take another look tomorrow to see.
You do not owe me - an explanation or anything else. You stand before God and yourself, not me.
As for trolling, the best resource I’ve ever seen by far is The Alt-Right Playbook by Innuendo Studios. He’s an avid atheist, which is not relevant in the slightest even for discussing trolling on religious topics. Though I will add that a lot of atheists seem to see more clearly than the vast majority of “christians” I have ever met. As Jesus said: “But you are only warm—not hot, not cold. So I am ready to spit (vomit) you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15) And as CS Lewis said, you have to have a certain amount of character - either good or evil - before you can be truly called either of those things. i.e., someone who shows up to services on Sundays ready for a good hour-long nap is not following Christ, though oddly an atheist who opens their eyes to the foundational principles of the world (see e.g. Romans 1:20) is closer to that than such a “christian”. The former abuses the word “God” while denying its power - thereby telling lies (that they “love” Him, that they “follow” Him, etc.) - while the other tells the truth as they yet see it in part, that there is no god (that they can see). Anyway don’t let that hold you back from learning from him, if he can see more clearly in this arena - I definitely learned a lot from watching that series:-).
