wingedbeast

In the comments section of the blog, Barrier Breaker, link to the specific post below*, one ex-Christian commented on how they felt their life improved since leaving Christianity. That comment included a line likening God to "some invisible spy creeping around keeping tabs on every move I make." This, as you can understand, is not a view of God appreciated by most Christians (or by yourself if you're within my target reader). So, you can somewhat understand the following response.

Given what you wrote, I would be interested in knowing what exactly did you once presumably believe; the..."invisible spy creeping around keeping tabs on every move I make"...doesn't corresponded to any belief system that I'm familiar with, certainly not Christian theism,so...what are you talking about here?

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"A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament." This was said, recently, regarding politics of recent campaigns and adminstrations. It should have been applied, long ago, to Evangelism and Apologetics.

I haven't gotten into matters of logical fallacies. The internet is full of places you can go to see those. I bring them up because, as easy as they are to fall into by accident, they represent cheating. So can the bulk of the subjects of previous tips in this series.

For the most part, people who cheat don't cheat for its own sake. They cheat in order to win. In conversation and debate, often times, "win" takes on the functional definition of "not lose." And, the way to not lose is to organize your points and the effective rules so that your position doesn't have to be right in order to avoid losing.
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I've heard the following line once, but I've heard the basic idea more times than I care to count.

"I don't want to this to be a conversation, but..."

There are other ways to do this. To respond to things I say with complaints that, they'll later insist, are not about me but are simply universal to... groups that include me. Of course, it's my fault for responding to make what was once a simple statement of position (be it on topic of politics, religion, or other high-emotion topic) and trying to turn it into some kind of divisive argument. And, of course, there is the tried and true method of pushing back against someone who is trying to take away your freedom of speech by bullying you with their disagreement.

From your perspective, when you say something like that or engage in such a tactic, it seems like you're being quite reasonable. After all, you don't want to get into this huge debate. You don't want to have to deal with disagreements that will only raise tensions and blood-pressure.
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Last week's tip referenced someone who approached, nigh out of the blue, and asked me "have you found Jesus Christ as your savior?" Others have reported similar experiences with the message being the same, but the wording varies. "Have you been washed in the blood of The Lamb!?" "Have you been saved?" "Do you recognize Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?" "Have you been saved from the fires of damnation!?"

Each of these questions asks the exact same thing. "Are you a Christian?" But, they each communicate something else as well.
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Yes, I harp on listening skills quite a bit. It turns out more complex a concept than the initial focus on "listen". It has parts. It involves listening to what's being said, not over-relying upon a pre-defined script or formula, keeping context, both social and specific, in mind. It also involves being ready to hear what you don't expect to hear.

By example, some years back, in a conversation with a conservative Christian, I made the point of an issue I took with Christianity. (Christianity as I saw it at the time, to be honest. Though, my view of Christianity did, in case, match up with that of the Christian with whom I was discussing.) I took issue with a moral theory that reduced morality to rules that existed for the sake of rules. This, I felt, took all matter of actually caring about people out of issue of morality, leaving just a set of rules to be adhered to just because that's how one gets closer to "good".
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No, I'm not saying you're a secret Christian any more than I appreciate others saying that I'm a secret theist. I am asking you to examine what beliefs would make sense in light of certain actions and motivations. We, the non-believers, do that examination. And, it doesn't always work out like you want.

By analogy, imagine you're new at a job working under one of two supervisors. One supervisor, the supervisor everybody claims is the supervisor, is a great supervisor. This supervisor knows who's being productive, cares to get to know ground-level employees as individuals, plays no favorites and is not susceptible to smarm or flattery. This is the supervisor everybody talks about.

Then, there's the supervisor that everybody seems to respond to. Most everybody is careful to, at any moment, look busy. Your fellow employees actually take this as a priority over productivity. Your fellow employees are so careful to avoid being caught saying something critical or insulting of the supervisor that they even refuse to acknowledge that obvious abuses of power or failures of management would be such abuses or failures if the supervisor did them.
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At the end of the Nye/Ham debate, a few years ago, when the moderator was presenting audience questions, one telling question came up. What would it take to convince you that the other side was correct? In this debate, the question wasn't God versus not, but evolution versus Young Earth Creationism.

Nye, the proponent of evolution, gave a quick list of potential evidences that would contradict the evolutionary model of Earth's history. Ham, the proponent of Creationism, insisted that, being a Christian, nothing could sway him.
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This past Easter, Ed Stetzer wrote an opinion piece for CNN. The basic premise of this opinion piece was an explanation, to non-Christians, of what motivates Christians to proselytize. He's not alone in this effort or the mistaken idea upon which its based. But, to be clear, we know why you do this.

Stetzer's piece mentions the Great Commission. Others mention the desire to save souls, to help us evade Hell, etc. And, we get that part.
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This one's going to take a while to get to the point. Sorry in advance.

A while back, I talked about how, when you talk about non-believers in movies, books, magazines, and websites that are by and for conservative Christians, the rest of us are, effectively, in the room. We know what you're saying about us. We're right here and we can hear you.

That wouldn't be a problem if what you were saying was a part of an advancing conversation. But, from what I can tell, that conversation you have amongst yourselves about us isn't moving forward. It's stagnated.

In the late 90s, when I enjoyed the internet hangout of alt.atheism, we faced a number of Christians attempting to convert us. They would speak, often in very general terms as they wouldn't follow-up or even read responses, about how sorry they were for the tragedies that befell us to make us atheists. They would express empathy for our nihilistic depression. They would explain that our desire to sin without consequence would be for not and we should just admit that we already know that they're right and we're wrong. They would inform us that God would forgive us for hating him.

None of it was accurate. None of it was new or had been new for a long time. And, in the time since then, none of it has changed.
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A tactic that resurfaces every so often is the argument by which the apologist or evangelist claims that an atheist isn't an atheist, but actually an agnostic. This seems to happen more in popular theist claims of arguments they did make than in actual arguments, these days. The argument usually employs a dot and a much larger circle, representing total possible knowledge and total knowledge known by humankind on Earth respectively. The point of the argument is that one cannot claim to falsify a nonfalsifiable concept, like God, without knowing everything, therefore one cannot be an atheist.

This fails for multiple reasons, all surrounding how labels work, as a concept.

The first thing you should understand about labels is that they aren't magic.
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