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

[Rhyfelwyr]

This arguement was rejected 1500 years ago by Boethius (sadly now little read). To suggest God has forknowledge restricts God temporally, because it requires him to have knowledge before he acts, since God is timeless there is no before and no after. Therefore God would not have forknowledge, because he acts as he knows, simultaneously.

I tend to think of time as a little line floating in space, with God himself filling that entire space; before the beginning of time, beyond the end of time, and all around it in every dimension, all at once. God clearly does have foreknowledge, what about the book of Revelation, all the prophecies of the Bible?

He knows how everything will end (or how it wont), and with everything we do (I believe) we are just carrying out the inevitable.

To us, what seems to be foreknowledge may simply be due to the fact that God is timeless. At all times, He knows all things, according to how they appeared at every point in what we regard as time.

If God is irrestistable then you cannot refuse to be saved. To suggest that God chooses based on those who would accept him is to sidestep the problem of those who would resist him. This is to limit Gods power, it's actually saying, "He knows he can't, so he won't try."

God could easily save us all if He wanted. But God chooses to act as the enabler in salvation - cutting us free from Satan's chains so that those who could have faith will have faith.

Salvation remains unconditional of what we do on this earth, God acts as the enabler for those chosen before they entered this lifetime.

I'd like to posit one more question to you regarding this. If the "elect" are God's chosen instruments, not merely those he saves, what effect does that have on those passages, if we take them as referring to those especially made to enact God's Will?

People can be elected by God for many things. Salvation is only one of them. Take for example Israel, it was chosen by God as a nation, yet not all Jews will be saved (at least not in the conventional way), as we are told precisely 144,000 will be saved at the time of the second coming.

What I am asking you to do is to try to step outside Calvinism.

Well I'm defending Calvinism here because it's currently what I believe in. That's not always been the case - I can't see how any Christian could at first hold Calvinist views, they take a lot of time to come to terms with and understand.