Key points are that Christ only died for the sins of some, not all, and that God grants (not offers, for no one to whom He grants can can resist) salvation to some but not to others. Thus all whom God chooses to save are saved, and all the rest, who are not offered the grace to accept salvation, are damned.
A general attitude is that we all deserve to be damned, and it is none of our business if God chooses to save some while letting the others remain damned.
My reaction to Calvinism is pretty well summed up in this quote by a Protestant:
*Theologian A.M. Hills on
Calvinism, the God-dishonoring Scheme
“…Such is Calvinism, the most unreasonable, incongruous, self-contradictory, man-belittling and God-dishonoring scheme of theology that ever appeared in Christian thought. No one can accept its contradictory, mutually exclusive propositions without intellectual self-debasement. For a theologian to flounder about in the morass of its opposing doctrines and assumptions, in a vain attempt to make them harmonize, and then admit that ‘these are only feeble attempts to extricate ourselves from the profundities of theology,’ is nothing but self-stultification. It holds up a self-centered selfish, heartless, remorseless tyrant for God, and bids us worship Him. King Theebau of Burmah, some years ago, ordered seven hundred young men and women to be buried alive that his majesty might have better health! But such a pitiless human autocrat is as gentle as a ray of early morning sunshine compared with the God of Calvinism, -who is represented as creating countless billions of men and angels on purpose to send them to a hell of eternal torment, ‘as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creature!’ He sits on His throne and, ‘according to the good-pleasure of His will,’ causes them to pour like a niagara tide of life, into the yawning abyss of hell, with as little compunction as we would kill a few flies, which we have not even created!
“We do not wonder that this wicked caricature of God, was called by Henry Ward Beecher ‘a horrid nightmare of human reason!’ The sentiment of the missionary, Bishop Wm. Taylor, of holy memory, was infinitely more Scriptural when he wrote:
‘At the funeral of every lost soul the procession of mourners will be headed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’
“It is a historic fact that Calvinism has been a fruitful mother of infidelity. In its womb were born Universalism and Unitarianism, the twin sisters of unbelief. By the natural reaction of the mind they arose, as a mental protest against the monstrosities of the reigning theology. One extreme follows another. Nothing is needed but Calvinism and Carnality as parents, with evolution for a wet nurse to produce the modern drivel of New Theology.*
