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I was told that my decision to become an atheist was the result of me wanting to give up my responsibility to God so that I could sin and quote "do my own thing".
Christianity is really all about losing ones responsibility for sins. This person I was talking to had it entirely backward. Christianity states that an innocent man died for your wrongdoings so that all you need to do to be entirely forgiven is repent and believe. In other words you can murder, maim rape and kill and as long as you're sincerely sorry you don't need to pay a price, Jesus will wash away your sin. Jesus has paid the price, he's sprung you from a prison cell and set you free from the "law of sin and death"...
When I wanted to understand the Old Testament concept of forgiveness, I found it was mainly a study of the Book of Psalms. A good case in point was the life of David and his mistakes and subsequent remorse. The best I could come up with is that God takes the guilt upon Himself and transports it away from the sinner. This sin taken on becomes a burden and there comes a point where there has to be some sort of recompense to eliminate it.
. . .he could consciously project the guilt away from himself and onto Satan, or into the vast black hole of god's forgiveness.
How can we not love the one who saved us from eternal damnation?
Satan was the first as he rebelled in Heaven then there was war and he was cast out.
That, by the way, is a nice response to a Protestant debate opponent on another point that frequently comes up, and implicitly came up in your debate.
I think the term translated here as magician would apply to people who use things in a technical way for the purpose of killing people. Examples could be spraying chemtrails, putting microwave devices in airports and making people stand in them, creating genetically modified food in the supermarket with animal genes, allowing aspartame in diet soda, putting fluoride in the drinking water. All the people who die from them are murder victims.
Why does something like being a liar or a magician get people thrown into the lake of fire in Revelation?