On December 6, 2006, I responded to comments Charles had made responding to a particular person who was responding to a post Steve had written. My response included the following:
I have more reason to believe he is an atheist pretending to be a Christian. He spouts atheist arguments on every single issue, and thus far has demonstrated no ability to grasp basic Christian concepts.Sorry if I don’t buy the whole: If it looks like a goat, sounds like a goat, eats trash like a goat, but says it’s a sheep, then we must believe it’s a sheep. So until [this person] can show me evidence that he actually believes the Gospel (a good way to start demonstrating this would be if he stopped attacking it), I’m going to label him as a non-Christian.
Nor was my judgment unique. Indeed, even before I penned the above, Steve had written of this person (November 22, 2006):
You’re a professing Christian on Sundays, but an honorary atheist on Mondays.
Who is this individual? Why, none other than Touchstone.
So imagine my shock when Jason Engwer informed me that the latest contributor to Debunking Christianity was…you guessed it: Touchstone.
Apparently, we at Triablogue knew Touchstone was an atheist almost two years before he did. Assuming we believe everything in Touchstone’s deconversion story. (Given his loose handling of the truth when he was commenting over here, my bias is to not believe anything he says.)
It is ironic that now Touchstone wishes to make it sound like he was a very strong Christian before defecting. Now he states:
In cases like mine, inevitably, there are questions raised and suspicions launched about the actuality or sincerity of my faith in the first place. For what it’s worth, I claim to be an atheist who was a deeply committed, “sold out” believer for decades.
… I was an avid student of theology, a circumstance which had faith-building and faith-destroying ramifications for me over the years. In any case, I was not a “lukewarm Christian”, one of those who slowly drifted out of the faith. My faith did not fade away, it came crashing down, quite unexpectedly, and frankly not of my own choosing (at least at the start). I was a cradle Evangelical fully immersed, well-read and fully on board. As a poster on a forum for (Christian) homeschoolers commented recent in a large “discussion” over my atheism: it’s the “worst case scenario”. Such is the dissonance for many who have known me, a good share of them have decided I’ve just been lying or faking it all these years, or I somehow just was never saved, never a Christian that “took”.
For those interested, in August of 2007 I wrote The Case Against Touchstone which goes into more detail as to why I never believed Touchstone’s profession of faith. Apparently, this “sold out” believer was so transparent that we had no problems spotting exactly who he really was, and we knew it for two years.
Perhaps Touchstone’s psychology is such that he really thought he was a Christian until recently…but I don’t buy it. You simply don’t make the arguments that T-Stone made, you don’t support the atheist argument in every discussion, you don’t actively attack Christians and promote atheist views if you’re a Christian. The signs were there for years. There’s nothing “recent” about his deconversion, except for his admission of it.
