Is it possible that some people are born damned, and inherently incapable of being “saved?”
Or that some people don’t have souls to save (as with animals), or even that their souls are “tainted” in some way so that they can’t form a bond or covenant with God?
I’m not so sure. But to go to one of your other posts, the Christian whose beliefs meant people were either damned or saved from the beginning would almost certainly belong to one of the Calvinist “Reformed” churches - Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, or any of those with the word “Reformed” in their title.
I used to be Presbyterian myself, but my first and most influential pastor was a Methodist by training, so he did not have the Calvinist outlook, and as a consequence I was never very Calvinistic in my thinking. One of the problems with the Calvinist “Elect” doctrine is that it can lead to spiritual arrogance, to the point where they think they can lie, conspire and exploit and still thing they’re 'saved. I’ve seen it happen, There’s one particular pastor who is a prime example in my experience, but that’s a digression. Aparthied in South Africa for example was very much a product of the Dutch Reformed Church. Mind you I generally found the people quite reasonable.
Having said all that I have my doubts. Christ said, “I chose you. You didn’t choose me.” He also implied that He was only praying for those the Father would “give him”, and not for the world. Peter didn’t choose the role of the first “Pope” so to speak for Himself - God the Father revealed the truth to him. Why Peter? Why not Tom, Dick or Harry? How many other Galilean fishermen does history record? If it hadn’t been for Christ, Peter would have turned to unremarkable dust long ago. He was chosen by another.
I also have a couple of personal experiences to deal with as well. The night my father died he appeared in my room. During the ensuing episode, at one stage he blurted out, “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!” I argued back, saying that couldn’t be "right’. He replied, “Oh, it’s right all right, you can see that from here.”
But later, in the same exchange, he also said, “I was willing” (To do the cruel, stupid, vindictive, and bad tempered things he did. He also said he did these things deliberately.).
The other issue is that at the time I became a Christian, I was getting this rather strong impulse to go back to the same Presbyterian Church where I’d had a bit of Sunday School when I was a kid. I resisted it a bit, but it was rather insistent. And that was how I met the old pastor mentioned above. Rest assured the “impulse” didn’t come from me.
LIkewise when I changed to Catholic, I had a similar sort of push. Again I resisted it for a while, but eventually I made the move, after an argument with a Protestant pastor. Again the “impulse” didn’t come from me.
So what happens to those people who never experience any “impulse” to move towards a church, or towards Christ? Is that their fault? Does God think they’d simply be unresponsive? Or does He ultimately pick the people He wants? And as somebody else said, what about psychopaths, people who basicallly don’t have a conscience, or whose conscience seems to be under-developed, or undeveloped?
I don’t know. What I am pretty sure about is that both predestination and free will are involved. CS Lewis thought the same thing. But he commented that he thought free will was the deeper mystery.
There are a number of mysteries in Christianity, and the reality is that we’re not going to solve them here and now. Like Paul, we see through a glass darkly, and will only understand the truth when we face God Himself and see things as they truly are.
