Michael, what you just posted is amazing. In summary, you seem to be admitting (now – years after the fact) that maybe you were actually visited by a “lying spirit” instead of a divine messenger. Your spiritual discernment is so poor that under the guise of religion you may have actually been doing Satan’s work. This radical redirection is because of the arguments from a YEC apologist – not a divine apparition (whether evil or good), but just a fellow who is rather effective at defending his view of what scripture says.
Maybe indeed 6days is right. But it behooves you, Michael, to take as long as necessary to really examine this whole issue in a depth that clearly you have not done before. If I had just gone through the theological about-face you are admitting to, and felt deeply about these things, I would be concerned not only about my own lack of qualifications to guide others, but about the numerous souls that I must have led astray over the past few decades of preaching and publishing false doctrines.
I do think this might give you a primo way of backing off from the fulfillment of your end-of-year rapture prediction. I can’t fathom that God would use someone who has been (unknowingly) a minion of Satan for decades as one of the two witnesses to usher in the Second Coming. That whole imminent rapture shtick is just as likely to be another evil delusion as was the multiple creations and extinctions fable.
If the messengers you saw were “lying spirits” then that is 40 years of false testimony.
Trying to have your cake and eat it too? If “there were men and women on Earth before our Adam and Eve”, then what does that do to your newly-adopted YEC stance? What you are really saying to 6days is that you will pretend to be a YEC for now, but just maybe 6days is actually the one that has it wrong after all.
Up until your recent conversion to YEC, your claim was that you carried a message from God that was different from the written one that you now have signed on to. Don’t blame me for (as it says it your Holy Book) being driven to and fro by every wind of doctrine and tossed.
Pascal’s Wager has been discussed before in this thread. But for me, there is a much more fundamental reason for me to not follow your advice. I expressed this to you a month or two ago – if I accepted Christ and professed a belief in God, I would thereby dishonor God by lying to him, I would be lying to you, to my family and friends, and most importantly, to myself. Would God rather I pretend a belief that is insincere, or would He prefer that I live an upright life unstained by that fake belief?
