Calvinists tend to hold that everyone would have made the same decision that Adam did: that God chose the best representative of mankind that could have been selected, but even he fell.
@Nathaniel FYI, I tried to make the same basic edit previously and Yuck rejected it for some reason. Obviously, I agree it is correct to add those tags.
@ThaddeusB I saw your comment but wasn't sure what had happened. It seems pretty obvious that these tags apply. I guess we'll see if he reverts it back.
@LeeWoofenden in regards to the bloodthirsty God. How many years and people passed between Adam and Jesus? If original sin is true, then all of them would be burning in hell with the exception of Enoch, Elisha, Abram (?), and a few others. If Revelation is more literal than figurative, that would mean that Satan's army is far larger than God's.
@TRiG We're supposed to respect people's beliefs. I simply find nothing to respect about Calvinist predestinarian belief. I can hardly imagine a more horrible theology. In my own theology's understanding of human spiritual history, it is a major part of the final corruption and destruction of Christian theology prior to the final dethroning of a corrupted Christianity as it had existed from the fourth century onward.
@DanAndrews Heh. Yeah. Good thing Original Sin is not true.
@LeeWoofenden another tangent of this discussion is the power that some Christian denominations give Satan. If God has heaven and Satan has hell - a place where God does not exist and apparently allows all evil to be created - then Satan under what definition would Satan not be considered a god?
@TRiG At least salvation by faith alone (another utterly false belief) gives at least some people a choice about where they will end out. In Calvinism, all of creation is a vast farce put on for the pleasure of an omnipotent, self-absorbed madman.
And if I'm stepping on some people's toes in saying that, then I'm sorry, those toes should be stepped on. It is a horrible, evil theology that should be abandoned by any decent person. And it will in time be abandoned, along with faith alone, and eventually the original heresy that led to all the rest: a trinity of persons in God.
@LeeWoofenden I think a good Blog entry (Christianity.SE's defunct blog) would be a listing of known Christian denominations and which believe in original sin
@DanAndrews I used to think it was only a Catholic error. But it was adopted largely untouched by Protestantism, along with most of the rest of the errors of Catholicism.
@DanAndrews What day people worship on is a minor issue--at least, for Christians, who are no longer bound by the Mosaic law. I find it odd that Christians actually argue about the proper day to worship.
Quite frankly, I don't think God much cares what day people go to church.
@TRiG @LeeWoofenden There is a reason a harsh predestination doctrine mostly died out - it is not compatible with most people's understanding of God/free-will
@LeeWoofenden I agree with you. I believe you should worship God everyday by revealing in your own life, the compassion of the eternal. I was just pointing out that worshiping on Sunday is a Catholic holdover for preotestants.
> It is a cruel heresy to believe that any member of the human race is damned by predestination. It is cruel, that is, to believe that the Lord, who is love itself and mercy itself, would allow such a vast number of people to be born for hell, or that so many millions would be born damned and doomed, that is, born devils and satans.
> It is cruel to believe that in his divine wisdom the Lord would not make sure that people who lead good lives and believe in God would not be cast into the flames and into eternal torment.
> After all, the Lord is the Creator and Savior of us all. He alone is leading us, and he does not want anyone to die; so it is cruel to believe and think that such a multitude of nations and people are by predestination being handed over to the devil as prey under the Lord's own guidance and oversight.
> -- Divine Providence #330.8. Written and published by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) in 1764.
@LeeWoofenden Some people believe that God should be loved; some people believe that God hates humanity. As far as I'm aware, only Calvinists believe both of these at once. It's a profoundly disturbing theology.
@ThaddeusB That is a good thing. It dug its own grave. Faith alone will also mostly die out over the next century, I believe, as people realize that it is contrary to common sense and to the entire message of the Bible, which is summed up by Jesus as loving God above all and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
The Trinity will take longer, because it has deeper and broader roots. But it, too, will die out over the next few centuries, as its inherently contradictory nature and its lack of any Biblical basis come together to dig its grave and write its epitaph.
Traditional Christianity has already lost its place as the leading intellectual influence in the Western world. Over the next few centuries, it will lose its place as the leading spiritual influence on the Western world as well. That's because centuries ago it abandoned the plain teachings of the Bible, which are all about loving God and loving the neighbor, in favor of false doctrines invented by human beings.
@LeeWoofenden A lot of Catholic scholars believe that Africa and South/Central America will provide most of the future leaders of the church. That idea does make a good deal of sense - the Church is much stronger in those places than the US and especially Europe. Obviously, Protestants will think otherwise (since those places are VERY Catholic), but it would be broadly compatible with your view...
I'm not so sure. In the US, at least, the churches that seem to be the strongest/gaining and are mostly of the very conservative Protestant variety. A possible explanation is that more liberal theology is too compatible with "the world" and thus adherents to such views see little value in retaining their Christianity.
@ThaddeusB I suspect that evangelical Protestantism has already peaked in the U.S., or will peak soon. Third world countries where evangelical Protestantism is booming will likely follow the same bell curve, only a few decades later.
The greatest antidote to fundamentalism is education and achieving middle class financial status. As those things advance in the world, fundamentalism will decline.
@ThaddeusB Catholicism is big in Central and South America. But I believe Protestantism is bigger in sub-Saharan Africa, and in southeast Asia.
@TRiG What's the Catholic/Protestant mix there in general?
@ThaddeusB If anything, I'd say conservative theology is more compatible with "the world", in that most evangelical churches tend to de-emphasize the teachings of Jesus and focus on snippets from Paul's letters that seem relevant to today's life. At least in my experience. I belong to a mainline church, but wife is evangelical, and we alternate weeks attending each others' churches.
In my church, we're guaranteed to hear a reading from both the Old Testament and the New Testament every week, following the Revised Common Lectionary. At her church, they sing praise songs then go right into the sermon. Any Bible reading is used in support of the sermon, rather than the other way around.
@LeeWoofenden You are right - my bad on Africa, Protestant groups enjoy a majority there (there are very few Christians of any type in Northern Africa). Asia is fairly evenly split.
