No secret here, just a gross misunderstanding of reality.

You think the universe is deterministic, it's not. We have free-will and choose what to believe. If you want to reject God when presented with every opportunity to accept Him, well, you get what you deserve. What we all deserve. Your main problem is your deep misunderstanding of sin, of the nature of God, and of justice.

You could right now choose to earnestly seek out God or simply choose to believe. You probably won't because you think you are smarter than your creator, but that is as always your choice.

The problem is you ignore what people are saying to instead argue against the made up Christian in your mind.

I initially said you can't save yourself, yes, but the meaning here which is commonly understood (except by you) is that you can't save yourself through good works. This is what Christians are talking about when debating between salvation through faith and "doing something" to save yourself.

I absolutely do not agree that choosing to believe is a work. How is sitting in your house, and one day deciding to believe, a thing that you do in the world that is good? It's not. Going to your local soup kitchen and feeding poor people is a good work. But you will never save yourself no matter how much you do that. The only way to be saved is to accept the gift of salvation from God. In the most literal sense, yes, that is you saving yourself. It is done by accepting the salvation provided by Jesus Christ. No one disagreed with this. You simply don't know what is being discussed and are therefore ignorant of the topic. All the while pontificating on the illogicality of the people you ignorantly bash your head against.

And relating to your other comment about not being an atheist, you certainly come across as one. You act pompous and vain like you are better than the people you speak with because you think you know something they don't. You aren't here to learn or to convince, but simply to "win" the discussion and put those "dumb illogical Christians" in their place. This is the result of a lack of faith in the Lord. Anyone who has faith in Him sees Him and the Truth He presents in the Bible, which you flippantly dismiss because you think you know better than God.

Let me guess, 'muh personal relationship' and you "don't need no church"? Nor do you think you need an objective measure to base your belief in God on, and instead you somehow think you will come to the truth all on your own using your fallible eyes, fallible ears, fallible brain, and the rest of your fallible capabilities as a human?

If at a base level, you cannot understand the concept of free will, then the road ahead will be paved in difficulty for you. You will use reductionist "logic" to slow-walk the entire concept back to a single point, that the act of making the choice about anything at all must be evidence that since you had to chose, you were not free to do so. You taking that stance is instead, evidence that you are actually arguing for your own enslavement within the idea of free will that you would refer to it yourself as a "trap". You are fine to argue this, but it does not make you right, and a true righteous God would be justified in his ignorance of you. He does love and care for you regardless.