Re: A Reprobate Mind

[Skeptik]

I was recently invited to take part in a religious debate. I was talking to a Christian acquaintance about this and she informed me that I needed to be very careful about this. It seems that after a while God will turn you over to a reprobate mind and separate himself from you. I looked at the definition of reprobate and I do not fit the description. So that can only mean that to the believer and to God, simply not believing renders your mind reprobate. If you raise a million dollars for cancer research this year. Doesn't matter. You're a reprobate.

In my extremely conservative christian upbringing, we were threatened with this a lot.  The premise was that if you continued to sin even after salvation, committing the same sins over and over, god would turn you over to a "reprobate mind, to believe a lie and be damned".
So in my case, yes they believe that is what has happened to me since I used to believe and don't anymore.

Even when I was a believer, I would use their own teachings against them when this argument came up.  They would always say that once god forgave your sins, he forgot them.  Well, if he forgot them, how does he know that you've committed the same one x-number of times?  They never seemed to have an answer for that one.  Imagine that.