The Anti-Calvinist Rant

Totally just for fun... Something to tide you over until the next post (next week or the week after)!😁 I'm sorry, but I have to postpone this week's Alana 5k post.  I've been too busy shredding and freezing zucchini (or making zucchini bread and zucchini fritters) and canning homemade pickles and tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes... and then busy cleaning up all the zucchini-pickle-tomato messes all over the kitchen... not to mention, giving away bags of fresh cucumbers and green beans because we're getting too many and can't possibly eat them all (I find it crazy that three of my kids hate fresh green beans - where'd I go wrong?😕)... and then doing it all over again just a little while later.   It's been like the movie Groundhog Day , endlessly repeating the same day over and over again, except with vegetables! And because I'm so swamped, I'm going back to posting every other week.  I thought I could do all the 5k posts weekly, but I had no idea t...

This series  is based on this 14-minute video from Alana L.:   5 Signs Your Loved One is Becoming a Calvinist   Point #5 still :   K (part 7):  "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."     Robots? As I said in the last post, I believe that  God gave us free-will and an awful lot of room to make real decisions that affect things - because He wanted real people, real relationships, not robots.  "Oh, but we don't think people are robots controlled by God," says the Calvinist. Oh, really?  Then I must have misunderstood:  John Calvin   ( Institutes of the Christian Religion,  book 1, chapters 16-17, bold added in all quotes ):  " ...  the counsels and  wills of men are so governed as to move  exactly in the course which he has destined ....   the devil, and the whole train of the ungodly...[cannot do any evil or even move a finger] unless in so far as [God] permits - nay, unless in so fa...

This series  is based on this 14-minute video from Alana L.:   5 Signs Your Loved One is Becoming a Calvinist   This is the last of the "conflations" posts, but there's still a few more 5k to go. Point #5 still :   K (part 6):  "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."       Natural vs Moral On a slightly different track:  If you listen closely when Calvinists talk about God's "sovereign control" over things, they'll often emphasize His control over nature, even bringing up verses about it.  And since we agree that God caused/controlled something like a storm or famine or illness at some point in biblical history, Calvinists will then make us think that we must also agree that He causes/controls human decisions and moral evils too.  That if we accept one, we must accept the other. Vincent Cheung  ( The Problem of Evil ):  " God controls not only  natural events , but he also controls  all human affa...

This series  is based on this 14-minute video from Alana L.:   5 Signs Your Loved One is Becoming a Calvinist   Point #5 still :   K (part 5):  "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."       This is not technically a conflation (or maybe it is), but it's a sidenote triggered by this sentence in the last post: "[Calvinism]  truly makes God the author*/cause of all sin and evil, despite a Calvinist's insistence that it doesn't." *Bonus Note: Author vs Author When confronted by the fact that their theology makes God the author of all evil, the cause of all sin, Calvinists will inevitably refer to the Westminster Confession:  " God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass:  yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin ." [As if that answers anything!  As if the Westminster Confession is the Bible!  And as I sai...

This series  is based on this 14-minute video from Alana L.:   5 Signs Your Loved One is Becoming a Calvinist   Point #5 still :   K (part 4):  "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."       Foreknow vs Foreplan "Oh," the Calvinist replies, "but God needed Assyria (or anybody, for that matter) to be/do evil for His plans, and so He foreplanned they would be/do evil.  They had no ability to do anything else or to choose to be good because God planned to use their evilness.  And so it had to be that way."   My reply to them: "No, I think God foreplanned to  use  Assyria's self-chosen evilness to discipline Israel, but He did not foreplan them to be/do evil.  Assyria had a choice in who they were and what they did.   And God foreknew they would be/chose evil, and so He found a way to work their evil into His plans.  But  if Assyria had chosen to be good instead of evil, God would've for...