Brainwashing? Christianity seems to be taking weird steps, here at least.

[Rhyfelwyr]

It's a binary. If God does not save he damns. The arguement runs thus.

God is all powerful.

Only God has the power to save, this comes only from God, salvation is determined by him alone.

God saves some and not others, those he does not save are damned for all eternity.

As I said before, you said God's grace was irresistable. If that is so then only those he forsakes could possibly resist him.

His refusal to save would be an act of damnation under that system.

You also said it is people's own nature that damn them, but their nature is detemined ultimately by God.

You also say that he works in their lives to save them, without which they could not be saved (so you have previously written). So then how can people have free will? How can anyone be saved if they are not free to choose? Worse, how could adam have sinned and condemned humanity without free will.

Disobediance requires choice. Calvinism removes choice. In effect it removes sin.

Yep, you're either a servant of God, or a slave to Satan. Of course I may well be wrong but that's what it seems like.

Maybe Adam was the only human to have free will - after the original sin everything that happens is the result of his sin, as humanity learns the consequences of rebellion against God. If you resist God, then you are vulnerable to whoever will enslave you.

Of course, we do not know why God created people who will be damned. However, the inevitability of events which arise as a result of the situation created by God do not equate to the predestination that Calvinist doctrine refers to. Calvinism only refers to one specific aspect of predestination - the certainty as shown throughout the Bible that God will not allow the elect to fail to come to salvation. The elect know that it is their purpose to come to salvation, but we do not know what the purpose of the others are - the Bible does not mention election to damnation as it does election to salvation, so we should consider why this is.

Maybe it's these Christian forums you use. A lot of the rhetoric you use is very much in the vein of the Evangelical Churches.

Link?

I'd rather keep the anonymity, however I will say that in a recent poll they held Arminianism received more votes than Calvinism when asked what the voter preferred.

Satan is pretty pathetic really. I've reffered to it before, but read the Book of Job (all of it) for a demonstration od just how powerless he ultimately is. Having said that, consider this:

If you had been decieved you would still have written the same passage as the one I am quoting. How do you know that the assurence you feel is not false pride?

Faith in God is not the same as faith in yourself.

It is a difficult issue, I know that. However, it seems that if God gives me understanding then it is well beyond anything my mind would be capable of itself. I don't see where pride in myself came into the equation though - if I've been tricked then its been out of my own stupidity and I've nothing to be proud about, if I've not then it came purely from God and so that's great - nowhere do I deserve any merit.

With a mind as small and powerless as my own, surely the only way I could tell between God and Satan is if God Himself gave me the necessary knowledge to know that? If it comes from God, to question it is to question God. How can I know it's from God? The only way is if He lets me know directly. Nowhere does my merit come into the equation.

Which ties into the larger idea of us being servants of God or slaves to Satan - so long as these greater powers are at work, how can we resist the one without shielding behind the other? Of course hiding behind Satan is foolish, since God will destroy him. Just not yet.

EDIT: Partly because of this thread, and also more generally, I decided earlier today that I would no longer think to much over the Calvinism/Arminianism/whatever denomination debate, and would instead focus on God Himself. So, I just hopped over to the forums, and the first topic, right at the top of the page, is on this precise topic! And I've never seen it come up before in my time there, is this coincidence... the answer is no because this kind of thing happens so often.