Saturday, March 12, 2022

The Calvinistic Deity

Some of the contradictions of Calvinism, both the philosophically inherent contradictions and the ones that arise from ascribing to the Bible what it says the opposite of, are so obvious upon rationalistic analysis that only a fool would think it is logically or Biblically possible for such a thing to be true.  Nevertheless, many fools of various kinds populate the world, so it is not out of place for Calvinism to have such a hold on some Christians that non-Christians react by mistaking it for genuine Biblical theology.  The Calvinistic deity is one that the Yahweh described in the Bible would despise if it was an actual entity; the only similarities between them are that they are both uncaused causes.  The latter does not cause deterministic behaviors and then blame its creation for what is beyond its control.

Most importantly, it is possible to logically prove to oneself that one has free will without even thinking about science, theology, or anything other than reason and introspection.  The fact that it logically follows from having any true knowledge of reason or anything else that free will of some kind exists, or else knowledge would be impossible to achieve because one would only be reacting instead of autonomously reasoning in accordance with logical truths [1].  This makes Calvinism false no matter what the Bible says.  However, the Bible does not teach Calvinism--it says that God wants every person to become reconciled to himself (2 Peter 3:9), and yet the Bible itself predicts that most people will reject him (Matthew 7:13-14).

These two ideas contradict Calvinism, since only one of them could be true if Calvinism is true, and yet the Bible includes both.  If God controls all human thoughts, desires, and actions instead of merely permitting them, then there would be no resistance if he wanted everyone to be saved, and that is setting aside the heretical notion that a morally perfect deity literally causes all sinful beings to forsake reason and justice for miscellaneous sins.  One does not even need to think about how both ideas together relate to Calvinism to realize that in merely saying that God wants everyone to be saved, the Bible is already affirming that God does not forcibly keep them in a state of unrepentance.  That the concepts of Matthew 7:13-14 cannot be true simultaneously if God directly controls all events is an additional error of Calvinism.

Not only do all of these points disprove Calvinism either as a philosophical form of theism and as a doctrine derived from the Bible specifically, but Calvinism also even makes God the ultimate sinner, as he is the one who is actually choosing for sin to exist, yet the moral problems within the framework of Christianity do not stop there.  The Calvinistic distortion of Yahweh resembles a thief or rapist in that this version of God forces its will on others, removing their autonomy so it can break into their lives, even forcing people to choose things God himself condemns as evil.  This means that just as God makes every predatory and selfish person remain in their sin, he would not allow people to use reason and experience to navigate their way to grand metaphysical truths.  He would be solely responsible for every injustice and irrational belief that any humans (and demons by logical extension) are "guilty" of despite having to betray his own morally perfect nature to do so.

For all their pretenses of honoring the true doctrines of the Bible, Calvinists have nothing but a handful of verses isolated from their context and many other verses and concepts that cannot be true if their own ideas are.  Calvinism is never about reason or the contents of the Bible.  If it was, it would not contradict the concept of divine justice (which it does in two ways by having God punish people for evils he makes them commit, yet anything God does cannot be evil), nor would it conflict with the passages of the Bible saying God himself wants all to be saved or deny the logical provability of one's own free will, the latter being knowable through pure reason and not the Bible.  It would be perfectly consistent with itself, reason and experience, and the rest of the Bible if it was even possible for Christian fatalism to be true.


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