The Five Points of Calvinism or TULIP

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I don’t deny that heredity and that the environment can affect people’s actions to some extent. That these two things necessarily produce a particular kind of character is not consistent with the facts. Man’s reason gives him the ability to recognize the evilness of certain instinctive tendencies and to recognize his dignity, personal worth, social standards, and moral values which all neutralize or counteract original influences. Man’s free will, however impaired, still retains the ability to make a free choice of evil or a free choice of good which are not affected entirely by outside forces.
Anti-Theist said:
We are shaped by our environment, by our parents and relatives, by our friends… we are the products of our environment which perfectly explains the slave-owning Christians of the Civil War era, etc.
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Those Christians who owned slaves were definitely affected by the terrible beliefs of the times, regardless of what natural law said against slavery. It would be a mistake to say that they owned slaves solely because of outside influences. No, there definitely has to be a free act moved by a discerning intellect that recognized the ability NOT to choose to have slaves.
 
Anti-Theist said:
but statistically, you could make bank on betting who the more successful was going to be.
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But statistics alone don’t prove that the individual has the ability to recognize courses of action and choose an action. For example, we might be able to make a probable conjecture of how many murders will be committed next year. This does not prove that individuals who commit murder will do so out of our conjecture of what must happen or that they will commit murder out of psychological compulsion. Say you know a guy who has been working for 10 straight years at a certain office. You can thus form a good conjecture that this man will be at work tomorrow or something. However, this does not prove that he cannot choose NOT to go to work tomorrow. Hope this makes sense. My head hurts. 😣
 
You know, you couldn’t pick your parents, and you couldn’t pick where you were born. The set of friends that you could make in life was determined by your location and theirs. Of the friends you did choose, there were certain characteristics that you admired over those whom you opted not to befriend. I’m guessing because you are here in this religious forum, that your parents or guardians were probably concerned enough to ensure that you got a good education. Had you been born in Saudi Arabia, you’d probably be having this same conversation in Arabic extolling the virtues of the Qur’an. If I ask you whether or not you’d like to help me rob a bank, your schooling and religious knowledge, and your threshold for risk, and your visceral reaction which is dictated by the matter in your brain will form your answer. Your immediate need for cash won’t even figure into the equation… but for a desperate man, it will! You think there is an eye-in-the-sky recording your thoughts for Judgment Day, so even I can see all the causes and effects that’s going to result in your refusal.

Your free will, however, is AT BEST a narrow wedge of possibilities. Your belief in God narrows that wedge a lot more. I double-dog dare you to write a blasphemy in your next response! God knows your heart, so, don’t worry, you can do it and get away with it! On the other hand, there is something so revolting about it, you could NEVER bring yourself to actually doing it. It would be as if I was the devil on the temple roof telling Jesus to jump. There’s a lot of biblical precedent in that apocryphal story for you to justify telling me to go fly a kite. Therefore, being the decent sort of anti-theist that I am, I won’t really put you to the test. I think it’s a good mental exercise for the religious, though: Does your belief in God liberate you because God knows you have faith in Jesus, or does it confine you because, if you truly believe, you won’t ever consciously do anything to offend?

Again, as elsewhere, I point to our Muslim brethren for examples. Their religion is even more intense than Catholicism. The diversity of their behavior is of a much narrower scope than Christians, which I believe is much narrower than that of atheists. There are those fundamentalist types who don’t drink, don’t dance, don’t shoot pool or play cards, don’t get tattooed, don’t gamble, don’t drink coffee, don’t cuss, don’t eat pork, don’t own or operate machinery, BUT they do observe Passover, Lent, Easter, Good Friday, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, St. Valentine’s Day, All Saints’ Day, Hanukkah, Ramadan, self-flagellation day, and Lord knows what all else.

Bottom line, it is better for us as humans to live as if there wasn’t a god. Let us live as though each of our lives was dependent upon each other, not upon deaf deities who dare not show their faces, impotent holy spirits who allow mass disease and starvation, failed prophets who are the literary inventions of no one knows whom, and scores of predatory priests (preachers, parsons, reverends, rabbis, imams, etc.) who hide behind their “holy” robes to satiate their lusts with impunity
 
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm never.
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~Mark Twain~
 
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Thank God for atheism… original sin is, pardon me, one of the silliest doctrines in the Bible.

Does my cat sin when she kills a mouse? No, she has no sense of morals, and if she did, she’d starve to death thinking about it. In like manner, Adam and Eve allegedly had no sense of good and evil. God might have told them not to touch the tree, but how could the threat of death even mean anything to anyone who’d never seen death… who had no sense of right and wrong. The story should have had them eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, AND THEN have God give them an injunction against eating from some other prized tree in the garden. That way there would be guilt and accountability, etc. No, as written, it’s a silly story and deserves no serious contemplation. What surprises me is that such an obvious fable is still being sold as relevant.
 
I love religious debates! I’m not sure, but I suspect I’ve seen most of YouTube’s offerings. Neither name here sounds familiar, so I will enjoy spending my morning watching this! Thank you very much for the link.
 
You’re welcome. There’s a lot out there. Hopefully I’ll post some more later.
 
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