<@kuyohashi> #124512
I’ve never actually heard that detail of Calvin’s daughter— do you have a source?
The thing about Reformed theology is that it pretty much takes the worldview of the Bible to its logical conclusion.
God created mankind, who he designed as being unable to obey his arbitrary moral standards. He then declared that they all deserve to be, quite literally, tortured beyond anything we can imagine forever because of the failings he designed them with.
None of these creatures could come to God on their own, since God designed them that way. So God, apparently arbitrarily, decided to love a very small percentage of them and “save” them from the punishment that he created for them because they were acting the way he designed them to. He arbitrarily decided to send the rest directly to hell.
Why did God decide to do this? Because he chose to. This isn’t something theologians came up with, either, Romans 9 lays it out pretty clearly. We’re all God’s cosmic playthings. He predestines some of us to eternal damnation, and then some of us he predestines to totally destroy our previous sinful natures and fill us with God’s will. The Bible literally compares it to a potter destroying some of his clay and saving some of it. Why did he do it? It’s his clay and he felt like it.
I think that’s the only explanation for the existence of a being that is all-powerful. There’s no room for free will or human choice. Morality is meaningless, just God’s decrees. We have no value, except that value that God gets out of making his clay into something neat.
Frighteningly, in light of this… I understand the authoritarian allure of monotheism. When the Inquisition prays over their victims as they torture them, they’re just trying to get them to repent and save them from a far, far worse fate. Similarly, why bother sending food or medical supplies to impoverished countries, when getting the religious dogma out to people is far important in the cosmic scheme of things?
Agnosticism isn’t been hopeless— it says we’ve all got a choice, that the meaning of life is whatever we find it to be, and that morality is something for us humans to discover and contemplate. When we die, we are free. I could never go back to Calvinism or Christianity at all.