What does /his/ think of Calvinism being comfy? I personally

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I sincerely believe that Calvin was an atheist who decided to make a religion that was basically atheism with the pretext of Christendom, for a gaff

>>3092617
It reverts back to the mindset of the OT. The whole having material success in life being considered a sign of grace seemingly stands in conflict with the attitude espoused by the NT.

>>3092670
But thankfully has the effect of making people literate, industrious, and chaste, which is better than many other religions and denominations.

>>3092646
Yeah I don't see how Calvinism is comfy. It takes everything that could be comfy about religious experience and ruins it.

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>>3092617
>Implying the crucifixion wasn't the nadir and the second coming won't be the zenith.

>cause and effect
Mechanistic heresy. God is not 'rational', He is senseless.

>>3092617

It took away the prime psychological benefits of Christianity( community ritual, belief in "magic", cathartic confession, and redemption from sin), and forced men to become their own personal priests, without any real hope that their actions could actually lead to salvation, forcing a kind of hyper rationalized, yet ultimately futile discipline, as they desperately tried to prove their predestination to themselves by pretending that their industrious disposition was a sign from God, and not their own secret attempt to silence their own worries about their salvation. It fosters self deception and the destruction of all modes of human life outside of one's role as a worker or business man. There has never been a form of the faith so destructive to European civilization.

It is also steeped in logical inconsistencies, and unnecessary conclusions about determinism and the like. Stuff dealt with sufficiently by smarter theologians than him hundreds of years earlier.

>>3093438
>psychological benefits
Fuck off, heretic

>>3092617
>There are no accidents, there are no tragedies nor zeniths to be inevitably followed by nadirs, only cause and effect.
Which is something you never got from Calvin or any orthodox Calvinist theologian. It's pure caricature based on the faulty notion that predestination and determinism formed the central dogma(s) of Reformed theology (it does not), the excessive introspection of some sects of 18th-century Puritans, the unconfessional musings of the "Young, Restless, and Reformed" evangelicals who read an exposition of Romans for the first time and think they've found the hammer to beat every nail, and pure scapegoating.

Not only does predestination not apply to any act or event in history other than salvation, but until Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinists held to fairly traditional Christian Aristotelian views on providence and causality. All traditional Reformed theology up until 18th century philosophy and the followers of Edwards held to a contingent world order.

Predestination is a fairly small and non-central part of Calvin's Institutes (the 1536 edition of the Institutes didn't even have a treatment on predestination), and usually one of the mid- to late chapters in the major Reformed confessions. Go into any Reformed or Presbyterian church and you won't find people milling about discussing predestination and causality, or attributing all the vicissitudes of their lives to the same.

The one thing that was incredibly comfy to early Calvinist believers was the fact that you could have assurance of salvation. The Christian life and prayer was not the realm of monastics, but the realm of all believers in any vocation in their daily lives. The sacraments, including the Eucharist under both species, was available to the ordinary believer. Because of the Reformed doctrine of justification the believer didn't have to wonder whether he'd done enough to procure final salvation. Assurance was his in Christ.

>>3093438
T. Cathocuck

>>3093327
>I don't see how Calvinism is comfy.
Me, either. It's a form of religion which basically tells you that you have no say in whether you get saved or not; since God already decided at the beginning of time what would happen to you, all you can do is hope he was in a good mood. Someone's going to claim that I'm exaggerating, but that really is the basis of Cavinist predestination. I have no idea why someone would think it's appealing to get told "well, you might get saved, you might not; you can't know which, and you can't do anything about it." It's just unpleasant.

>>3093736
>"well, you might get saved, you might not; you can't know which, and you can't do anything about it."
is something you'll never hear in a Calvinist church. You'll hear the same call to repent and believe that gospel that you'll hear in any Protestant church.

I'm kinda split on Calvinism

On the one hand you find many of the insights shared by it on Ecclesiastes and in the Vedas, but on the other hand it misses an important part of christianity which was the mystical revelation, communion and the problem of evil/free will. .

Imo Calvinism is the natural progression of western history in which God becomes more and more abstract and makes way for science, reason and the Will as the sole determinants of life. But on the other hand the abandonment of the Catholic tradition of western europe, left a significant gap in meaning in Europe.Calvinism by itself is not a solution but a the theological explanation of why explanation why Catholic theology was abandoned.

>>3093769
It doesn't matter if your priest doesn't frame it that way. Of course no one in the present day is going to actively tell a congregation that, because they know no one is going to like it. But that's how Calvin said it works.

>According to John Calvin, predestination is God’s unchangeable decree from before the creation of the world that he would freely save some people (the elect), foreordaining them to eternal life, while the others (the reprobate) would be “barred from access to” salvation and sentenced to “eternal death (180, 184).”

http://www.theologian-theology.com/theologians/john-calvin-predestination/

>>3093788
Instead of reading an abbreviation, you could actually do a little reading from primary and secondary sources to find out how the doctrine is actually stated and used.

Or you could just make up how it works in Calvinist churches because you have an axe to grind and it's an easy target. Because that's how the best history is done.

The reason no one is going to say what you said they should be saying is because they believe that's bad theology, illegitimately speculative, bad ecclesiologically, and it isn't their view. Nor is it Calvin's. You also have to contend with the fact that predestination was already a teaching of the church long before Calvin and the Reformed churches. Most of the orthodox Reformed were drawing strongly from Thomism. Luther and the Lutherans also explicitly teach predestination. No one accuses the RCC or the Lutherans of saying, on the basis of the fact that they teach predestination, that their message is "haha nothing you can do go fuck yourself." Everyone knows that's not what they're saying. The Calvinists aren't either. Even the supralapsarians, for whom that might functionally be their theological perspective, don't talk this way.