Many things to disagree with here, just a few:
1. Any plain reading of Acts 22:16 shows Pauls sins were not forgiven until he was baptized. If his sins were already forgiven, Ananias’s statement is nonsensical. The plain meaning is consistent with Acts 2:38.
2. The statement that baptism does not effect salvation is completely refuted by many verses, with 1Peter 3 the clearest refutation.
3. The statement baptism is a symbol of faith is completely without support from any Scripture. Baptism is never referred to a symbolic. The Scriptures teach we are baptized into Christ and therefore baptized into his death. No hint of anything symbolic, this is the effect of baptism on our souls.
4. Lastly, we know this post has a false view of baptism because we can read the writings of the earliest post Apostolic Fathers and we do not find this symbolic view of baptism anywhere. The Church ( not some denomination ) has taught and believed one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. This symbolic view did not appear on the world scene until the 16th century.
It's right there, and a hundred other places...You can not get into Christ by getting wet...It's a spiritual operation...
Baptism does not mean water...Baptism means immersion into something...
When you get baptized 'with water' then baptism is water baptism...When you get baptized with the Holy Ghost, then it is spiritual...No water involved...
1. Any plain reading of Acts 22:16 shows Pauls sins were not forgiven until he was baptized.
The plain reading shows there were two events...
Act 22:16 And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, (1st event)...
and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.( that's the 2nd event)...
The clincher is the and...Washing away thy sins is connected to 'calling on the name of the Lord'...
You still haven't answered my challenge for you to tell me how, where, by whom, and for what purpose Peter was baptized.
2. Your interpretation of 1 Peter 3:20-21 is so warped that it neither admits that Noah's spirit was in communion with God's Spirit, saved by faith long before the flood came; and that when the flood did come, Noah's soul and body were saved from physical death not in the water, but kept out of the water. "In the like figure" means this is a figurative expression with water baptism being symbolic of the flood waters, and if you are not a dunce, Peter's language there is not literal, it is figurative-literal.
3. Unless you were different from anybody else, your body and spirit did not leave your body during the rite of baptism. The one baptized dos not literally die, but is subjected to a rite that figuratively exhibits the pre-baptism spiritual rebirth of the believer by comparing it to the literal truth of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it cannot be plainer that baptism is symbolic. And if your baptism was not immersion, it wasn't even a New Testament baptism. Come on, wake up! The literal fact, of which the reborn child of God is intimately familiar, is the new life imparted by the Baptism of the Holy Spirit upon the believer at the moment when conviction, repentance, and total commitment to the Risen Christ, Lord, and Eternal High Priest join to produce a new-born Spiritual man-creature, all things being new, forever belonging to the Lord, and neither the believer's soul and spirit and faith ever to be seized from nor escape out of His grasp.
This is symbolized by the figure of death, burial, and resurrection of the believer in the conduct of the ordinance of the Disciples' Baptism into service to the King. "Baptism into Christ" is an expression where "Christ" is a metonomy representing the sense of "the service of Christ." It means "baptism into the service of Christ." That also is figurative-literal language.
4. Your church relying onthe writings of "Apostolic Fathers" (who are not the real, literal students of Jesus who saw, heard, and touched Jesus before death and after His resurrection), products of the false teaching of apostolic succession, is a denomination, and I would say a false one, an apostate from The Faith of the Bible, claiming authority over and above the Written Word, but not faithful to it. In fact, the whole failed hermeneuutic of that errant denomination is based on allegorical methodology deriving from worldly Platonic philosophy and introduced subsequent to the accession to influence of Gentiles who introduced catholicism, and not the Scripture-based literal, grammatical, historical, contextual, cultural hermeneutic displayed by Jesus and His Apostles. Paul himself, trained both by Gamaliel and later by Gentile scholars, stayed far away from the your kind of interpretation. THis hermeneutic was literal, pragmatic, and needed no translators to deliver the faith to the Greek-speaking population of his day. The reliance of your dogmas on fallible, errant men, many of whose actual heresies are recognized, are not the footing that I want to choose upon which to base my journey into eternal life with The God of the Bible and His Only Begotten Son.
Summary: Your enumerated points here are not only illiterate and unproven, but actually nonsensical. You look at a rite that is not only ripe with symbolism, and claim it is not, just like other rites and rituals invented to explain away secrets of God to which the denomination has never had access, but which are open to the regenerated believer-disciple through the Word of God and spiritual discernment (1 Cor. 2:13-16).