Closet Cases – Republicans secretly love what they publicly hate So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact. Republicans love […]
In Calvinism, the ritual of confession is a man sacriligeously trying to play God. But Jesus stilll died for God’s forgiveness. That’s the fundamental premise of Christianity. It’s just that any priest who claims to intercede on your behalf is a fraud.
Here’s a website maintained by a Presbyterian Calvinist minister.,
Ministers can attempt to divine the will of God through the Bible, but they are as much authorities on the matter as physicists are on quantum physics. Ultimately it is your responsibility to understand the will of God, to live accordingly, and to reckon with when you don’t.
No person can grant you forgiveness; not yourself, not your religious leader, and not your peers, only God can. So yeah, you would see no confession and no forgiveness in a strict Calvinist culture. People can only be forgiven after death by carrying their regrets with them all their lives.
As I understand it, in Holland they also have a thing called predestination, where they think their lives have already been decided for them including any sins they might commit, and including whether they go to heaven or hell. So there’s nothing really they can do about it during their lives. I don’t know if this is a specific branch. It always sounded pretty grim to me, though on the other hand I would think like “hey let’s go wild because whatever I do it won’t matter anyway”. But I probably grossly misunderstand the idea. Friends from that community have assured me that it definitely does not work that way 😅
Community also plays a big role in it, much bigger than I’ve seen in Catholicism. As in more judgmentally so.
Choice and “predestination” are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that’s just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone “could have made” a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It’s just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It’s just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make “good” choices go to heaven and people who make “bad” choices go to hell. Therefore they choose “good”, or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it’s the sort of thing they’ve had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like “Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell”. When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can’t know God’s will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they’re doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God’s mercy, right? … Right?
In Calvinism, the ritual of confession is a man sacriligeously trying to play God. But Jesus stilll died for God’s forgiveness. That’s the fundamental premise of Christianity. It’s just that any priest who claims to intercede on your behalf is a fraud.
Here’s a website maintained by a Presbyterian Calvinist minister.,
Ministers can attempt to divine the will of God through the Bible, but they are as much authorities on the matter as physicists are on quantum physics. Ultimately it is your responsibility to understand the will of God, to live accordingly, and to reckon with when you don’t.
No person can grant you forgiveness; not yourself, not your religious leader, and not your peers, only God can. So yeah, you would see no confession and no forgiveness in a strict Calvinist culture. People can only be forgiven after death by carrying their regrets with them all their lives.
As I understand it, in Holland they also have a thing called predestination, where they think their lives have already been decided for them including any sins they might commit, and including whether they go to heaven or hell. So there’s nothing really they can do about it during their lives. I don’t know if this is a specific branch. It always sounded pretty grim to me, though on the other hand I would think like “hey let’s go wild because whatever I do it won’t matter anyway”. But I probably grossly misunderstand the idea. Friends from that community have assured me that it definitely does not work that way 😅
Community also plays a big role in it, much bigger than I’ve seen in Catholicism. As in more judgmentally so.
I’m neither but I’ve lived in many places :)
Choice and “predestination” are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that’s just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone “could have made” a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It’s just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It’s just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make “good” choices go to heaven and people who make “bad” choices go to hell. Therefore they choose “good”, or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it’s the sort of thing they’ve had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like “Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell”. When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can’t know God’s will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they’re doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God’s mercy, right? … Right?