Okay…so, the title may or may not be hyperbolic.  I’ll let you decide.  For me, I find the subtly of the tyranny the most disturbing.  It is soothing in its delivery.  We think these people are merely preaching the love of Christ.  In reality, the conclusions of their dogma are anything but loving.  For in their understanding of the world and their faith, there is no room in the equation for you and me.  Not really.  We are shells at best…illusions.  Shadows of forms.  Tossed to and fro by the dualism of Evil Nature and Sovereign God.  On one side of the Calvinist coin, neither can be distinguished from the other, for the equality of the control of each over humanity is demanded by the doctrine.  On the other side, God is in control of all of it.  Your sin nature, and sin in general, is just as much a direct function of God as your salvation. The doctrine also demands this.  The coin contradicts itself.  It is a valueless coin.  A NO-sided coin.

And how is that interpreted by the Calvinist despots at the podium?  Why, as absolute and divine truth, of course.  You see, the best way to control people is to preach a theology which makes God unable to convey even the most basic of common sense to His children, and then tell the children it is their fault, and that they are going to hell because they are too stupid to understand what God has designed them purposefully to not be able to understand because apparently He couldn’t figure out how to design them with the ability to understand.

Er…makes sense?  No?  Good.  If it made sense, they’d call you a heretic and burn you at the stake.  How dare you pretend to understand God, you worm.  Only PASTOR has that right.  Somehow.

So, see?  Where are YOU in the doctrine?  Where are you and HOW are you able to even BE you?  You are nothing!  You don’t exist…for your very thoughts are merely the direct extension of God’s will which has already determined you.  So, I ask:  Will the real YOU stand up?  If you see yourself–your life, and your will and your choice and YOUR reward or judgement that YOU earned–please let me know where to find him/her.  I’ve been searching in this metaphysical coffin for a long time, and so far all I find is more coffin.

But we fill the churches with the best and brightest, so many successful and rational minds, do we not?  But under the veneer of intellectual empiricism and stoic common sense “values” is where you so often find the worst kind of evil.  Because it is precisely in those places and in those minds where you find the search is not for how to elevate the individual to a place of moral value and perfect truth by allowing him/her to actually BE themselves–which is how God made them and how they will approach the judgement throne–but rather, the search is to find the panacea for all of the ills the individual human being creates.  There are constructs and paradigms and doctrines and philosophies and Standard Models all proclaiming or hoping to proclaim one day that they are THE solution for the UNIVERSE…the cure for nature’s most malignant and destructive virus:  the free thinking human being.  For his removal is truly the answer when all the pretensions are removed and exposed for the impossible contradictions they are.

The idea then is to remove man from himself by hopefully finding, one day, sooner rather than later (for you must understand the urgency of the matter…after all, the earth and the animals and the minorities and the vegans and the communists and the “unsaved” and those without healthcare are simply dropping like flies in the face of the virulent disease of individual human freedom)…yes, one day soon man will be cured by finding the right universal equation OUTSIDE of himself that he has just been too stupid or too blind or too stubborn to find yet.  And if man then can just take this equation and plug it into his asshole like an electronic hose from the Matrix, he’ll be set on the right track to perfection…to morality and truth and all manner of peace, and everyone will be able to fill in their proper place like a cosmic game of Tetris, and all will be taken care of and you won’t worry about all the the things you lost and your soul which is now a condom for the altruistic government, or religion, or culture, or society, or whatever primary consciousness in consideration, to use while it rapes you in order to save you from your own existence.

And so the real search is revealed.  It is not the search for how to make man better, for that assumes an individual can be a solution; that an individual has worth.  No, no.  Again, man, himself, is the problem.  So the search is not for how to improve man but for how to remove man from himself.  To put him into a law that exists beyond him in order that he may become the law, and only then is he “perfect”.  Perfect existence is actual or functional non-existence, so the premise goes.  Which makes sense.  How is man reconciled to an absolute (infinite) truth outside himself?  By getting the fuck out of its way, that’s how.  Man is closer to fine the further he finds himself from himself.

In other words.  Death is the panacea for LIFE’S ills.

So…what else is new?  It’s the same argument given by every psychopath and tyrant from the Lenin to Lucifer.  And yet we send our kids to university after university, pursuing degree after degree, in search of ways to make this universal “truth” both more palatable and more subliminal to the barbarian masses.  We think surely the next evil dictator, the next Platonist philosopher, the next reformed protestant mega-church demagogue, the next atheist scientist, the next professor of political science or linguistics, the next collectivist President, the next warmongering monarch will find an idea that demands the death of the individual (mankind) and proclaims the final solution as the the most obvious one and yet…well, without it being obvious at all, and hopefully without the actual death part.  Because ignoring the death part is what makes the Platonists/altruists/collectivists/Marxists/Calvinists/etc. seem so loving.

From Islam to Communism, from Marx to Kant to Plato to the Gnostics, from Calvinism to Roman Catholicism, Augustine to the Reformation, from Manifest Destiny to the Cold War and the Arms Race and racism and the oppression of lesbians and gays and minorities, to white teenagers who happen to wear a shirt with a Confederate Flag on it , to black teenagers who happen to have a shirt with Tupac on it, to the Standard Model of physics which refuses to concede its own obvious circular and infinite conclusions which can result only in a complete collapse of ALL of its presumptions…

Well.  Go back to school kids.  No one has dodged the “death is life” contradiction yet.  Good luck.  See you at Burger King.

Ah…but kids, wait!  Perhaps there is hope!  For here is Cal Thomas, speaking at Wade Burleson’s Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Oklahoma.  And he has thrown his hat into the ring!  It seems he thinks he has found the equation which man can jump right into and see God’s good times abound in America like a ho-down in a whore house!  Without the fornication that is…gotta be sensitive to “God’s chosen people”, those good old Southern Baptists, who don’t go for that sort of smut.  And they define smut as whores and any translation of the bible other than the King James…though, in some places, the ESV is growing as an acceptable alternative.  It seems even smut can be less smutty if the doctrine is “sound”.

Let’s see if Cal Thomas can succeed where all other violent overlords have failed.

Returning to the subject of Cal Thomas’s sermon at Wade Burleson’s Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Oklahoma, posted on September 1, 2013 on http://www.wartburgwatch.com, which can be accessed here http://thewartburgwatch.com/2013/08/31/echurchwartburg-9-1-13/, I would like to address only a portion of what is both wrong and terrifying about the assertions and assumptions of Cal’s sermon.  This is not Christ in the true sense…for it is impossible, within the confines of Cal’s wholly Calvinist interpretive construct, to find any room for humanity.  And if humanity cannot be included in the salvation equation, then man cannot be saved.  Because man cannot functionally exist.  Which is why Calvinism is nothing more than a cult of death.  It is a world view that finds TRUTH only in the DEATH of humanity; only in man’s literal or psychological erasure. It is obsessed with and worships not God, but the primary consciousness of Bible and Cross, because as absolutes, these become effective instruments of war.  Their only purpose is to bludgeon and hack humanity either into utter submission to their “divine” standing as God’s appointed authority, or to death in service to the absolute TRUTH of Bible and Cross, which can NEVER, by definition, being declared wholly and utterly true only apart from man, suffer any human being as a SELF of his or her own.  And thus, the only way truth can reign, as Cal will clearly explain, is by a.) the wholesale rejection of man and his rational thought as the source of metaphysical and epistemological value, and by b.) the compelling of humanity into right behavior and thinking by either witnessing their “conversion experience”, that is, their acceptance of of “God’s” divine absolute ecclesiastical authority (Cal Thomas, and whatever pastor of whatever neo-reformed church declares it) without any appeal to reason or consistency of ideas or human context or worth at all…or, well, by the most obvious and expeditious method:  violence…granted by God to those he has divinely called to “lovingly” “shepherd”, as His divinely sanctioned punishment for the rebellion and wickedness of the non-conforming, stiff necked unbeliever.  Unfortunately for humankind, it is power these mystic despots assume simply because certain of their fellow human beings who do not conform to the spiritual caste system have decided on their own (the nerve!) that the notion of “agree with me before you can understand me” is no moral basis for conceding an opposing idea.

And the Calvinists have the audacity to call the “unsaved” blind to the “truth”.  They wouldn’t know truth if it appeared to them in a flash of light on the Damascus road.  And, no, I’m not exaggerating.  These people have put their senses and reason so far away from themselves that they do not and cannot possess a doctrine which grants that they can judge anything correctly.  They can’t “see” a road, or a light, or Damascus.  They are blind guides, leading blind financiers.

Here are a few of the more salient excerpts from Cal’s sermon.  Like I said, you can access the entire sermon for yourself by clicking on the link provided above.  At Wartburg Watch, you can enjoy the onslaught of moral horror in its commercial-free, unedited entirety.  If you are sartorially  creative, perhaps the sermon could make an effective costume for this year’s Hallows Eve frightful festivities.  You’d sure scare the shit out of me.

“We have a vacuum in the world, and do you know what it is?  We have turned away from God and God has given us over.”

“…it behooves us, then’ he [quoting Abraham Lincoln] said, ‘to humble ourselves [as a nation; with respect to an assumption of a widespread, national rejection of God]  before the offended Power.  And to pray for national clemency and forgiveness.’”

“All of these things we are seeing [terrorism, economic downturns in our country] are not the cause of a decadence, they are a reflection of it.  We have forgotten God.  We have made idols and we are worshiping them.  Oh…not the kinds of idols that the ancient Israelites did…not of wood or stone.  But we have our own idols.  Some of us worship America.  Some of us put in so much time trying to fix what is wrong with America…maybe we’ll elect the right leaders, and they’ll be able to fix what is wrong with America.  Republican or democrat, liberal or conservative…they can’t fix what is wrong with America because they can’t fix what is wrong with Americans.  The problem isn’t in Washington, it’s right in here [taps chest…indicating “heart”].  The problems aren’t economic or political, they are moral and spiritual.  And if the politicians can’t even solve the economic and political ones, how are they ever gonna touch the spiritual ones.  I’m mean it’s just…it’s impossible.  So, God has brought us to this point.”

And I want to talk about the idol that America has become.. Now the question before us this morning is…can and should followers of Jesus of Nazareth seek to produce righteousness behavior in our land through politicians and through the unredeemed by political activism alone or even by political activism mainly. Now I’m not calling for withdrawal…surrendering or giving up.  I’m calling for an enlisting in a new army with better weapons.  We’ve seen in recent years certain religious political movements under different names—the Moral Majority, of which I was a part for a while.  The Christian Coalition.  One defunct, and the other not much more than a P.O. Box.  How much has improved culturally?  Are there more politicians acting more uprightly in their lives…?  The expectations inherent in political/religious activism rest on a false premise.  It is that unsaved people can be forced to embrace righteousness through politics and government and that they will accept laws based on such principles.  Now, ask yourself…when you talk to an unbeliever, do you persuade them on the correctness of your position on abortion, same sex marriage, whatever it may be?  Probably not.  That’s because they’ve not been transformed by the renewing of their minds.  So this is kind of futile to expect righteous behavior from the unredeemed. “

Break for a minute.  Look at Cal’s assumption:  reasoned discussion with “unbelievers” is impossible, because at their root they are unreasonable.  They are animals.  They function only by the instincts of their depraved nature.  Therefore, there can be no efficacious exchange of ideas with them, because only God can GIVE them the truth (against their will, just like their “sin” is against their will, because both virtue and vice, Cal firmly believes, is utterly outside of human beings); truth cannot be learned.  This is the single greatest assumption you must, must, must understand is a foundational assertion of all who preach an ideology of collectivist altruism.

This is the most base form of spiritual tyranny and horror.  The root problem of Americans is that God hasn’t seen fit to grant them en masse the “wisdom” and “understanding” that He has given to Cal Thomas…for whatever reason that Cal cannot explain and so he NEVER goes there, nor does any other reformed teacher.  It is assumed in the faith that this falls under the category of cosmic, divine “mystery”.

And so what then can be the only course of action?  What then can be the only logical assumption Cal can be making on how to deal with the depraved animals that run this country and live in it in the fullness of their vicious God-rejected flesh?  What do you think?  What does history teach us happens to human beings when they are thought of in such terms?

There is NO peaceful return to God-glorifying values from Cal’s philosophical frame of reference, I don’t give a shit how they talk of a non-violent and gentle political transformation of America.  A cursory look at history and the bloodshed of Europe during and after the Reformation proves that notion to be a rank farce.  There can only be one course of action.  Spiritual terrorism, culminating in physical terrorism and murder.  Give the barbarians a chance to convert.  If they refuse, destroy them or banish them.  There can, by definition, be no effective argument to convince the mind of someone to your ideas when their root ability to comprehend your message is dependent on God’s arbitrary divine revelation.  And further, that revelation can only be observed by them agreeing with you before the debate even gets off the ground.  So, it is simple.  Convert or die.  There is no discussion.  Like I said in my last post, Cal Thomas unblushingly  declaring “radical Islam” the greatest threat to the world is  jaw-dropping in its hypocrisy.

What Cal is insinuating here is that he doesn’t  want to argue his ideas effectively with anyone because he will never concede that he must argue his ideas effectively.  He is right simply because he is Cal Thomas; and God, for some mysterious reason, has decided that Cal Thomas gets to be right, always.  Period.  Full stop.  Convert or die, infidel.  God told Cal Thomas that He likes Cal Thomas better than you.

Finally, notice the recurring theme in this sermon and all sermons by neo-Calvinist preachers lamenting and bemoaning the debauchery of modern American society and the mass exodus of free thinkers from their churches…the bastions of God’s “truth” and “authority”.  Notice how it is never their fault.  It couldn’t possibly have to do with their flat-out refusal to discuss the epistemological rationality of their doctrine.   It is never that they cannot provide a consistently logical assumption that an individual human being can practically apply to their life.  Nope, it’s never them.  It’s never Cal Thomas.  Never, never, never, ever.  The problem is simply and always YOU.  Not your ideas, really, or your opinions or even your depraved, “worldly” actions.  The problem is just that you ARE.  You exist.  And that’s the root of America’s moral decline.  And so how do you make people conform to your moral code when the roadblock to their conformity is their rank existence? Well…you certainly don’t bother with arguing, for starters.  Only a raving hypocritical lunatic argues that life is evil while speaking with lungs full of fresh air.  So they don’t argue.  They invent false doctrines which declare them exempt from reason and debate and defending what they believe in the arena of ideas.  They invent false doctrines which provide them divine license to torment and terrorize with licentious theology and threats and violence while they pretend to speak for God.

And this is nothing new.  I’m sure Cal and Wade think they are just something special in their Daddy’s eyes.  So full of kindness and mirth and winsome callings.  I’m sure their fame and wealth in their eyes is God’s favor shining down like a blessed mountain mist.  They are hearing “Well done, good and faithful servant” a hell of a lot earlier than the rest of us debauched slobs, wallowing in the filth of our constitutionally protected democratic freedoms.  In our stench of Enlightenment, individualistic thinking (well…some of us, anyway).  They are just cute and fuzzy and peachy as far as God is concerned.

In truth, what they are is history repeating itself in a terrible and bloody way.  Nothing more.  They are their evil doctrine’s forgone conclusion.  A footnote in a future cautionary tale.

[Next: Part Three]

The Apostle Paul.  Sigh.  What can I say? Heretic?  Gnostic?  Apostle?

The guy takes a beating.  If nothing else, the fact that his name is awash in confusion and fisticuffs, beloved by tyrants and saints alike is proof that there is much more to his message than can be deciphered in a “five week series on Romans” (thanks, old SGM church!  They were big on series’s…so damn boring, I got a lot of daydreaming done).

This is a relatively short post.  Here, we will take a deep look at the concept of “Law”.  It’s not an easy thing to unwind.  The Platonist thinking that anthropomorphizes abstract notions is tenacious to the point of being almost impossible to separate from man’s existential understanding in TOTAL.  How many people here would acknowledge that the “laws of nature” are not merely a construct of man’s conceptualizing mind, but are ACTUAL.  That is are THE cause of the effect of all actions of nature, even though you have never seen a law of nature, you have only seen nature?

Yeah.  Pretty much every hand in the room.

Some days I’m convince that I could spend my time better in a bar.

When discussing the concept of “Law”, in this case, we’ll say a moral Law, as a standard measure of value (which I define as a combination of truth and morality (moral GOOD)), before we can jump right in to building a philosophy around the idea of “Law” we must first answer very specific questions. These questions will form our foundational presumptions and thus define the entirety of our metaphysical and epistemological approach to not only what we consider the standards of truth, but also how to enforce them…upon ourselves and, more importantly, upon other people.

This is good to understand. Whole nations of people have been wiped out because of how certain other people decided to answer these questions.

The understanding which forms the crux of any moral law is simply this:

Doing this thing (x) is GOOD.

So what are the obvious (or perhaps not so obvious) questions which must follow? The first is, of course: WHY is it GOOD? The second is, of course: WHAT is GOOD? Meaning that any idea which presents itself as a law must have a standard by which it is measured in order that doing it, whatever IT is, can be called “GOOD”. In other words, the act of doing it (A) must be in service to something (B), and that something then must be the root of WHY doing that thing is GOOD. A (the act) is GOOD because it is in service to B (the object). So we must define what exactly B is, which gives the law a right to declare that doing A is GOOD.

If B is the Law itself, meaning if the standard of GOOD is the Law itself, then that means anything NOT the Law is inherently and totally antithetical to GOOD (the root of the doctrine of Total Depravity). Which contradicts the notion that anything else NOT the Law can act in service to the Law. For the Law itself is the standard of value, and as such, anything else can only exist as a contradiction to it. If the Law itself is GOOD, and GOOD is absolute, then nothing else can be GOOD, and nothing else can DO GOOD, because GOOD cannot by definition proceed directly from that which is not GOOD.

So remember, the first question is WHY is doing it GOOD? The answer in this first example is: because the Law itself is GOOD. The act of obeying the Law is GOOD because, and only because, the Law itself is GOOD.

But that is a contradiction in terms. It is senseless. Because if the Law is GOOD itself, then any act of any outside agency (not GOOD) is redundant and irrelevant. The Law, being GOOD, does not need man to act in service to it, because it is already utterly and completely GOOD in and of itself. Bringing man into the picture can only ever present an offense to the pure GOOD of the self of the Law. Man cannot act in service to that which is already perfectly GOOD without him. Therefore, man can never do GOOD, for GOOD is not man, it is the Law. Man can do no GOOD because man is by definition outside of GOOD. All of man’s actions stem from a place which is NOT GOOD, because the Law is GOOD, and as such, any action of man, regardless of what it is or if the Law (contradictorily) says to do it cannot possibly be GOOD because any action will be in service to that which is already perfectly GOOD without him, rendering the Law itself a hypocrite, demanding GOOD but being GOOD without such action. So, crazy as it sounds, this is precisely the argument those who claim the Law as the source of God’s judgment upon mankind. The Law saying “do x or y” is the beginning and end of goodness. Man offers nothing to the Law. And thus of course the only way man can be reconciled to the perfect GOOD of the Law is to die. Non-existence is man’s only way of “existing” in peace with the absolute Law.

Now, alternately, if we say that doing A is GOOD because B is MAN…that is, humanity, then the perfect standard of GOOD is not the Law, but human beings. And if human beings ARE the standard by which the Law can be declared GOOD or not, then the Law itself as any source of self-derived morality becomes moot. It cannot in fact be a Law because a Law, in the moral sense, presumes obedience to IT as the prerequisite for moral behavior. Moral GOOD. But man, if man is the standard, cannot act in service to a Law in order to be GOOD (which he already is) but can only act then in service to himself, because HE is the standard of all GOOD. Making the Law itself as a LAW, again, moot. The Law may be instructive to man…it may teach him efficacious ways of affirming himself as the standard of GOOD, but it can no longer BE the standard which binds man. Which means that man is not declared righteous or unrighteous by how well he obeys the Law, but by how well he affirms himself and others for HIS OWN sake, for the sake of his LIFE, which is the standard, not the Law. Thus the Law now becomes “law”…for if the Law merely points to man as the standard of WHY obedience to the Law is GOOD, then obedience to the Law itself as the source of reward or damnation becomes moot and irrelevant. Behavioral actions become relative to the LIFE of the individual human being…actions demanded by the “law” now become contextual to the human being. Which again means that the law is NOT absolute, but MAN is. And thus all actions can only be observed as GOOD or EVIL insofar as they affirm that MAN has the right to his LIFE in any given context because his life is THE standard of all VALUE (morality and truth).

This, I submit is Paul the Apostle’s point, and as you can see, it is a difficult one to articulate. Those who might be quick to judge Paul for his confusing epistles would do well to offer him the benefit of the doubt. The good news is that he does, eventually, make the right argument. Salvation cannot logically be of the Law…it must be of Christ, because Christ represents the reinstatement of humanity as the plumb line of value by God, Himself; a removal of the Law which can only logically condemn men/demand their death as payment for its moral perfection. The bad news is that the argument in light of the juggernaut of Platonist thinking which so pervades Western thought to the point of it almost being utterly fused with man’s entire understanding of his own categorical existence, means that false teachers like Calvinists, James Jordan, and other gnostics will swarm to exploit the tedious argument to serve themselves like Yellow Jackets swarm trash cans. Given the difficulty of Paul’s task, I submit that Jesus had him pay for his crimes against humanity both physically and psychologically. In addition, he gets to go down in history as the most misunderstood, misrepresented, and exploited Christian in history, beloved by mystic despots everywhere.

This is a response to James, who has made his true position unequivocally known in the last thread.  That James rejects Paul the Apostle’s epistles he has certainly made clear to us here at unreformingtheology.com.  However, recently revealed is that James rejects Christianity as a whole.  He does this because, I submit, he concedes that reformation protestantism interprets the faith correctly.  As such, he denies Christ categorically.

And that is fine.  No one gets criticized by me for engaging their brains and drawing their own conclusions.  James raises valuable questions.  James correctly identifies the weaknesses of the Christian argument in light of its thousand year whoring-out of itself to Greek mysticism.  James rejects the Calvinist mystics without a blush of shame; without the slightest concession of their vile premises.  That we should all do this, is my dream.

But here is my brain.  Here is my conclusion regarding the rejection of Christ:

James’s position is a mistake of reason.  A return to Judaism as THE source of ultimate moral restoration is impossible.  Why?  Well, put simply, the Apostle Paul is right.  NO law…no external, abstract standard of good and evil can do anything other than enslave man to sin.  Because ANY good man does will ultimately and only be defined by the SIN which declares good, good.  And so again, Paul is right.  You cannot do good without sin being “right there with you”.  Right there with you, DEFINING your good for you.

There cannot ultimately be salvation in that idea.

This is the inevitable truth of any morality OUTSIDE of man’s physical, individual self.  And this is precisely what Jewish law does…and this is why Christ came.  Either Christ comes, or the Law is an endless cycle of sin and “atonement”, going nowhere, leading only to the conclusion that moral value is constantly beyond man’s reach.  Man is the horse, the Law is the carrot.  Man moves in the right direction, but he never actually gets anywhere.

I know a lot of us don’t want to acknowledge this…that Paul the Apostle is right. This is understandable…our reticence to embrace Pauline theology is certainly due to the way he has been utterly bastardized and his theology dragged through the filth of Platonism by countless false teachers.  But understand this…this is by design.  This is Satanic.  Jettisoning Paul is THE single most dangerous thing any of us can do aside from denying Christ.  Paul, for all his faults and his dearth of talent in the art of clear communication, is the loudest voice in the entire canon of scripture, apocrypha or not, translation–no matter; yes, the loudest voice concerning the restoration of MAN as the source of his own moral worth.  Yes, even more so than Moses.  I might even add, more so than Christ, Himself.

You reject Paul, you reject yourself.  You reject SELF, and you reject value (morality), knowledge, love, and ultimately God, by whom SELF can exist.

This is my response to James, in post form:

(NOTE:  After this, I will move on to the posts I have in mind to print.  And to the focus of this blog:  NOT surrendering my faith to the physical and moral and intellectual horrors of Calvinism.  This subject (Christ versus the Jews) can quickly consume a conversation.  I won’t let that happen to me.  Nevertheless, I am compelled to answer.  Because, as for me…no, they (the neo-Reformed hordes) will not get away with their rational theft…the murder of the SELF.  Their hypocrisy will not be an excuse for denying the only source of moral value.  ME.  And YOU.  And PEOPLE. )

James,

I would love to go through the looking glass with you on this topic, because I think much can be said.  Alas…I am pressed to make a decision, and I need to get on with the posts I have lined up to write for the blog.

I think you raise some excellent points in your criticisms of Christianity.  I think you illuminate many problems the theology has…ironically (or maybe there is a better word), the arguments you use to attempt to dismantle the legitimacy of Christianity are some of the exact same ones I use to dismantle the legitimacy of Calvinism and basically Protestantism as a whole.  However, in the end, this becomes clear to me:  you have accepted that the Calvinists actually DO interpret Christianity correctly, and therefore, you reject Christianity as nothing more than the fatalistic determinism the Calvinists preach and teach.

You need to do better than this.  Rejection of Christianity is the easy way out.  It is merely another way of ceding the Calvinist interpretive premises.  That is running away from them.  They don’t care if you leave the faith.  All the more room for them.  One less thinker they have to deal with.  In the end, you argue from not from reason but only from retreat.  If you choose not to accept Christ, I have no problem with that. But if you do it because you accept their interpretation of the faith, then, as far as I am concerned, THAT is where our disagreement lay. Let’s put away Christ versus the Jews and debate what is relevant to the whole damn argument: your reformed assumptions.

You are going to argue that Judaism without Christ is more rational??? Really…that’s your play?  To claim that TRUTH is found APART from man in an abstraction called the Law?  Obeying God?  Easy as that?  According to what standard?  Exactly…it’s not man, it’s something else.  It’s outside of man.  Well, if TRUTH is outside of man, as it is in Judaism (really?  we are going to find peace in a religion that is as awash in bloodshed as any in the history of the world…I mean, have you READ the OT? It is wiping out whole cultures and societies of human beings in service to TRUTH; which I get why from the historical context, but THIS is THE answer to PEACE?)…if truth is outside of man then you’ve got nothing with which to dismantle the Calvinist despots.  You concede the SAME idea:  obey your priests, for real truth is beyond your understanding anyway.  YOU don’t get to say what is true and what is not because TRUTH is outside of you.

This is a mistake, in my opinion.  If you truly understood the OT the way you say you do, I do not believe you can actually read the NT in its and Jewish historical context and come away withe the conclusions you do. You are doing nothing more than conceding the Calvinist interpretive assumptions and then rejecting the whole of the Christian message as an evil farce.  However, this only becomes possible if you conveniently jettison the first two or three hundred years of church history before Augustine, up until which point, Christ was understood much differently than He is today…thanks to the systematizing of Augustine’s gnostic message by Luther and Calvin, which is the bedrock for ALL of Christianity to this day.

The conclusions you draw about Christianity are the exact same ones I would draw about Judaism apart from Christ: that it is ultimately a dualistic paradigm, which perpetually places man OUTSIDE moral value, and thus makes the reconciliation of man with GOOD impossible.  Unless man becomes THE standard of moral value by a physical reconciliation with with “himself-as-good” (Christ), then man can never claim any goodness at all, and thus is perpetually exclusive to God’s standard of moral perfection.  By pursuing any abstraction as TRUTH, man places truth always outside of himself.  This must result in death, oppression, and destruction for man…for the only “good” man can do then, is to die.  To not exist.  And you can only mitigate this with animal sacrifices for so long before it becomes clear that the whole ceremony must either lead to Christ (Messiah) or lead nowhere.  It is precisely the perpetuation of this dualistic external Good and Evil construct which those rejecting Christ want to perpetuate.  And yes, I would include Judaism apart from the culmination of God’s TRUTH in Christ.  Christ is the only way man becomes THE singular source of value in the universe.  Any other way places man outside his own value.  We can thank Adam for that.

This is not a rejection of Judaism.  Of course not…for without the Law, Christ could not be understood.  But Judaism without Christ is incomplete.  It is the “form”, but it lacks realization because without Christ, man cannot BE the Law, He can only DO it.  And doing (works) the law cannot restore moral value, it can only express what it is supposed to look like.  The law looks like man is suppose to look, but only man is man.

You greatly misunderstand Paul, by the way.  I get why he is easily misunderstood.  But this does not change the fact that you interpret him falsely.  And it is painfully obvious you do this in rank service to an ideology.  You form an idea, then twist Paul to fit that idea.  This is easily seen.  And easily done.  The fault is both his and yours.

All truth proceeds from man, and because of this, the Law cannot save, because the Law is not actual, only MAN is actual.  Truth proceeds from man…it is not the other way around.  A rejection of Christ in favor of ANY law is an exchange of man for an illusion…an idea.  An abstraction.  The law is an abstract standard.

Jesus Christ was a human being.  THIS is the difference which makes man MORAL versus enslaving man to SIN.  Because by the law, any GOOD is ONLY defined by the SIN by which it is known.  But with MAN, there is no SIN by which good can be known.  There is only man, and he is GOOD.

This is a fact that cannot be circumvented in the end, which is why Christianity will never actually find itself extinguished.  The TRUTH of man as VALUE is as plain as your face in the mirror.  Sure, we constantly reject this, but unless man is utterly wiped out, all truth must return to man’s physical self.  And man as MORAL TRUTH is proclaimed by one faith and one faith alone:  Christ.

With regularity this question pops up.  Thankfully, for now, the question is merely hypothetical.  However, the assumptions behind the question have been taken to their logical conclusion many times in the past, and the bloodshed and murdered babies–along with a goodly and commensurate amount of adults and all persons in between–have been decidedly NOT hypothetical.

The last time I looked at this question, many posts ago, it was posited by an atheist, and so the tact I took in pointing out its rational failures was quite different.  Back then I was arguing that to murder based on the wholly abstract idea of “chance” was madness.  And that if we were to act literally upon probability all the time, we shouldn’t bother leaving our houses.  We might ALL as well drink from Bob Jones’s faucet, not just babies.  Because the “chance” of anything which an atheist would find malicious and unpleasant happening to a dead person is zero, by definition.  In short, I was saying that since “what could happen” could never actually be seen until it happens–since what “could happen” is literally NOTHING, because reality can only be truly defined by what DOES happen–it makes little sense that humanity should make decisions of life and death based on actuarial tables.  Again, if that is the case, let’s just let the nukes fly and be done with it all.

There is no way to say what will happen.  There is only assumption.  And chance and assumption is not causal.  It is cognitive.  Chance washes nothing in the actual truth of the event.  At the end of all the equivocating, all you’ve really done is kill a baby.

Of course, when an atheist poses a question like this on a Christian forum, it is really nothing more than a “gotcha” question designed to undermine the entire theist argument at its root.  And…it actually does a pretty good job of it.  Sure, you can destroy their own assumptions and argument by pointing out the falsity and contradictory ideas inherent in their “gods” (the mathematics of probability and the actuarial tables), but for Christians, the question should give us pause.  Well…it should for non-Calvinists, anyway.  For Calvinists, they can only have one answer, regardless of how much shit I will get for saying as much, and how much many of them are so comfortable hypocritically denying their own doctrine when it suits their own moral sensibilities (as IF somehow, on this issue THEY get to decide between right and wrong).  But if they are consistent with their doctrine, they will assume–as good little sheep–John Piper’s belief that since salvation is based upon God’s arbitrary election alone, there is no reason why a baby, born as totally depraved as the next human pig, should have a get-out-of-jail free card with respect to eschatology.  Baby or not, if you are not one of God’s elect, before the foundations of the world, then your ass is going to burn.  Age hasn’t a thing to do with it.  What makes babies so special?  Because they are cute?  But aren’t they, as my old SGM pastor used to say, just cute little vessels of depravity and sin?  And God is no respecter of outward appearances, after all.  Besides, a baby’s wailing, as those of us who have had them understand, will most certainly make hell that much more unpleasant.  Which is the whole idea.

But for us non-Calvinists, it is a question that poses a dilemma.  Looking past my argument concerning the nature of “chance” and “probability”, let’s look at the weakness in our assumptions this question identifies.  For if babies all go to heaven, and if beyond that, hell is a very real possibility because of choice, isn’t it actually more merciful to kill babies, rather than take the chance that some of them will not believe on Jesus and spend eternity perfecting their teeth gnashing, begging for a finger dipped in cool water?  Shoot, some people out there might even agree that, for the misery they have endured or are enduring in their own life, they might have even preferred infanticide. Maybe that is an act of mercy even in the eyes of some Christians.  It’s not that far fetched.  If you end up in hell, what might you think if someone asked you if you should have been killed as an infant?

Yeah…it’s actually a pretty good question.  It’s sick, true.  But it is effective.  And most of the time, I have noticed, the answers are seriously wanting.

This question was posed by a Christian, attempting, I think, to argue in favor of the idea of “election”.  That we let live because we don’t know who God will elect and who He won’t.  And that?  Is a pretty good answer ostensibly.  And one my wife said she would give if she were a Calvinist.  It is the most sensible…but then you run into the whole election debate, again, and the injustice of God sending someone to hell just because.  And the obvious reply of “well, if salvation is by election, then what difference does it make when a person dies? As a baby or an adult?”  To which she said “only a living person can spread the message of God”.  To which I said, “There you go, being all NOT Calvinist again; to think that spreading the message somehow effects salvation.  I thought you just told me that salvation is by election, not “the message”.”

Finally, there is the most effective way to dismantle the Calvinist response concerning “who will get elected and who won’t” assumption, which has to do with the fact that Calvinists first and foremost assume that ONLY the destruction of the individual can bring him or her to a place of moral purity.  So the only real difference is what this “death” will look like in the end.  YOU can’t possibly be saved, according to Total Depravity.  So salvation is only in spite of you…ever.  And that being the case, the question proves itself yet again too formidable for most Christians.  In the case of Calvinists, since the very doctrine demands that YOU die in service to the God’s “truth” by hook or by crook, there is little reason to argue against killing babies beyond “well…it just seems like a bad idea”.  After all, better to be in hell has a non-cognizant child than a fully aware adult.  Wouldn’t that be more “merciful”?

But getting back to the assumption in the question.  What is it?

And this is really the crux of the issue.  The crux of the issue isn’t the assumption the question makes about death, but what it assumes about life.  The driving idea behind the question is this:  That human life EQUALS evil.  That moral corruption is a DIRECT function of human physical existence.  Full stop.  And that being said, all that is GOOD then–truth and salvation and prosperity and peace and heaven and God–is only to be ultimately found in the death of the human being, and never in the life of him or her.

This of course means that the primary point of human existence is not life, but death.  For death IS GOOD.  Death of the self is the pinnacle of human moral achievement.  For only in death can human goodness be found; only in death can the human be reconciled with God.

This idea is the implicit assumption behind the question when posed by Christians, particularly non-Calvinists (for consistent Calvinists would never ask such a question because they understand there is no surety of heaven for anyone):  Shouldn’t we just kill babies in order to ensure people go to heaven?  Would not that be the most merciful solution to the problem of evil?  Again…there it is, in all its wicked glory.  Human existence IS the problem of evil.

And so what is really being asked is a prime example of a.) Calvinist doctrinal hypocrisy/inconsistency; which we have touched briefly, but which will be elaborated upon.  And b.) The Christian presumption in general of death as the panacea for humanity’s inherent total moral failure, beginning at conception.

Now, with respect to the first:

A. Calvinist doctrinal hypocrisy/inconsistency in denying the what should be their own acknowledged implicit morality and “mercy” of infanticide.  

The idea that there is a certain point in time after birth, where God will arbitrarily elect a human to either salvation or damnation flies in the face of Calvinistic assertions in the frankest of ways.  This implies that God’s will, with respect to those He damns or those He justifies, is somehow dependent on the notion of a human being “coming of age”–that point in time where they can properly gauge the morality of their choices against God’s standard.  That is, if the child does  not “come of age”, then God has no choice but to save that child.  And this, again, ultimately contradicts the sovereignty of God over salvation/damnation as taught by historical Calvinistic orthodoxy.

The idea that God is somehow obligated to save the infant means that salvation is rooted not in God’s will, but in humanity–or at the very least that humanity must play a role in deciding its fate.  God’s “sovereign Will” becomes subservient to the human time table.  And this notion denies every single point in TULIP (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints), and I am pretty sure that no Calvinist I have ever met would concede that humanity gets to ever, under any circumstance, be the final arbiter of eschatological decisions.  In other words, if man is Totally Depraved, then there is no reason to supposed that God won’t or shouldn’t damn babies to Hell.  By definition, their moral corruption is as complete as yours or mine.  There is no such thing–no such addendum to absolute sovereignty–as “coming of age” in the Calvinist construct.

Calvinism, and I dare say pretty much all of any school of Protestant orthodoxy, presupposes that the only real way for humanity–being perpetually morally defunct and estranged from God by virtue of innate catastrophic failure–to be reconciled to God is for humanity to be destroyed.  To cease to exist.  To die.  And this can only happen, within the Calvinist ideology, in one of two ways:

One:  God kills and sends people to hell, where humanity’s eternal moral failure is condemned to eternal purging in the everlasting flames; and that this torment is rightly and logically and mandated to be preceded by violence and pain inflicted upon the unbeliever at the hands of God’s priests, proxy’s, and elected ones.  Death is truth, period.  Whether in physical life, or in the unquenchable burning  pyres of perdition is irrelevant.  They both mean the same thing:  the moral failure of man, and his just torment for merely existing as one of God’s unforgiven.  The un-elect (and really anyone…more later) must suffer in atonement, regardless of where or when, in any time and in any place (“the wicked will have no rest”) for their inherent dearth of any efficacious value.

Two:  God’s “election” of a chosen one is revealed (i.e. earned) by the effective, for all practical purposes and assumptions, death of the individual as he or she sacrifices him or herself–mind, body, and property–to the orthodox collective (religious, intellectual, political, etc.) which is the only place that absolution for a “living“ individual can be found (i.e. earned).   Often times, the individual is conscripted by a person in some form of “authority” into the collective, who uses his divine mandated of FORCE to compel that individual, by any means necessary, into the subjugation of the Consciousness Prime, which is governed in part or totally by that authority.  This other person could be a spouse, parent, church officer, teacher, guardian, overseer, slave master, prophet, civil leader, political officer, “accountability” partner, etc..

The authority of the collective’s elders, leaders, officers, etcetera…is generally rooted in a systematic philosophy organized into a formal “canon” of creeds, confessions, manifestos, constitutions, articles, or volumes of political/philosophical schools of thought.  These ideas are generally considered to be “inerrant” and therefore not subject to any outside interpretation beyond that of those authorities who have been somehow granted the right of all interpretive conclusions.  Namely, the very authorities which compel the masses by “divine” mandate (i.e specially dispensed, somehow, according usually to some subjective interpretation of the canons of “orthodoxy”).

So what we are talking about is more than simply a figurative or symbolic death of the individual.  It is a functional and utterly practical and efficacious death of the SELF at the root, where an individual is no longer and by no means defined by the physical person which exists as the tangible SELF and occupies its location, but is now nothing more nor less than a purely abstract idea (and thus inexorably hypocritical…for an abstraction can have no actual power).  The human being is not figuratively, but literally, sacrificed to the abstraction of “collective”.  The collective may be the “church”, the “body”, the “masses”, the “workers”, the “government”, the “clan”, the “group”, the “nation”, the “party”.  And the death of the SELF may not by physical, but it is no mere semantic exercise either.  In fact, the death of self so real that identification with the collective utterly defines the person in literally every facet of their lives.  At the very least, this is precisely the idea behind the doctrines of Calvinism and the Reformation in general.  You only actually exist insofar as you are identified with the collective.  Apart from it, you are dead as far as they are concerned, and thus, are no one to be concerned with, except in disciplinary measures (i.e. violent and/or abusive).  Excommunication from the group doesn’t sound so bad in a free society where enough people who make the world go round still laugh at Calvin’s rational larceny, but in a society which is governed by a deified theocracy, almost always headed by a deified autocrat, the life of the unfortunate excommunicated soul is horrifically painful.  Ask any Muslim convert to Christianity who remains in his/her community what it is like for them.  It is hell on Earth.

And that is precisely the idea.  Anyone not “in” with the group, goes to hell.  And it doesn’t mean after the grave, either.  It happens in an instant.

In short, humanity itself, which is the SELF, is in some way killed off when it is exchanged for the lie known as the “collective”.  And so the Calvinist axiom remains firmly in place, whether one dies in infancy, or whether one lives to the age of Enoch: Death is that which and only brings reconciliation with God.

That being said, I will repeat.  There is no reason whatsoever why the Calvinist should ever concede that there is some inherent moral crime in the murder of infants in the name of “mercy” and moral purity.  For which is ultimately better:  to live a life of misery  only to face conscious torment in hell as God’s un-elected forever after all of that; or, as an elected “saint” to feel the pain which is the plumb line for “truth” in Calvinist doctrine as you daily nail yourself to the cross in service to the “group” which owns you?  Or is it better to simply take your place as an infant, with only the scarcest of conscious realization, in the realm of your elected purpose: to burn in hell forever or to live in heaven with God, according to his arbitrary whim?

Well, you can answer that whatever way you like.  It matters not.  The point is that since the doctrine election stands, and absolutely no moral accusation can be brought to bear against anyone acting in the “stead of God” in service to his absolute and wholly exclusive-to-man TRUTH in his position of divine authority, then the murder of children in the  name of God is neither doctrinally forbidden nor should it be considered morally repugnant if you are a Calvinist.  The only real moral repugnance is the life of a human being, not the death of one.

B.  The failure of even non-Calvinist Christians to effectively answer in the negative the question “Should infants die as a means of securing their salvation?” based on the exact same assumptions as Calvinism. 

Their is a ubiquitous assumption in practically all of Christianity, and it is the Reformed one.  It is the idea that death equals moral purity, period.  The immediate and literal death of any human being is the most logical, most efficacious, most efficient answer to the problem of evil in Christian doctrine today.  The axiom is DEATH is GOOD rules the theological day.  Not that I am saying that everyone believes this consciously, I am merely pointing where the theology goes when you stop equivocating and put the pieces together in a way that does not make you a raging hypocrite to your own “absolute” truth upon which you have claimed monopoly ownership by nothing more than your irrational and subjective opinions on the matter.

DEATH is GOOD shall be your mantra from this day forth, Christian, when moral value is outside the human being.  You believe, by your very own creeds and declarations and statements of faith that human life is the direct source of evil; of moral failure.  That the reason we have sin and evil and thus hell and torment and judgement is a direct function of life itself.  And thus the single greatest, most effective way to thus destroy evil, to confront the moral affront, is to remove life.  To kill human beings in service to the only real GOOD:  whatever Consciousness Prime we happen to be considering at the moment (God, in this case).  Death then leads to inevitable GOOD, just as assuredly as life leads to evil, which must and will be destroyed.  Life always leads to evil, inexorably.

And so then what about the murder of infants?

Well, according to the assumptions It is quite simply the quickest and easiest, most painless way for man to fulfill God’s righteous requirement: the destruction of evil.  If life is always evil, then the sooner man can be put to death the better.  It is the Final Solution…the end of all doctrine.  The utter destruction of humanity as God’s moral purging.

Now, a cursory look in the Bible with our neo-reformed blinders off will show us that this is not the objective of God, but the objective of Satan.

So, the only way to concede that all infants go to heaven is to place an objective and inherent moral value upon human life.  Individual life becomes THE plumb line for morality…it is the only objective moral good man can recognize.  For the SELF IS GOOD.  The SELF is the source of moral purity.  LIFE is GOOD by virtue of its simple existence in a simple child.  This is why murdering infants is wrong…because it violates the singularity of moral truth:  LIFE.  The destruction of life is EVIL.  And this is why murder of any kind in service to a moral standard outside of human life cannot ever be equivocated by any appeal to morality…because outside of human life there IS NO MORALITY; and thus, there is NO MERCY to be found.  Mercy is ONLY found in the perpetuation of human life, never in its death.

The destruction of humanity denies the very truth which declares God to be God.  For God is not God without the SELF of mankind by which God recognizes Himself to be God, and by which man recognizes himself to be man, and thus a moral equivalency and objective GOOD can be established between man and God because both are life.  God is known as God by humanity…destroy it, and you destroy God in a manner of speaking.  There is no claim by which God can declare Himself God.  Destroy any recognition of God, and you destroy God.  This is the devil’s rationale, I submit.  This declaration will shock and appall some of you.  So be it.  If you cannot declare that your own life has as much inherent moral value as any other, including God’s, then you must deny humanity at the root.  If this offends you I submit you have an incorrect assumption of who and what God is.  He is the Father…and the children of the Father are co-equals in inherent existential worth as the Father.  They do not replace the Father, but they are not LESS THAN the father on the level of objective value; and they have no less inherent right to self-affirmation and self perpetuation.  Our worth is realized in the fullness of our self, not in our subjugation to some external self; and yet we can only affirm our own self when we affirm that of others, starting with God.  This is hardly contra-biblical thinking.

So, if you concede that infants to do heaven, you concede that humanity is inherently morally good, NOT depraved.  And that evil and sin then is a choice man makes.  The choice to either affirm life or deny it.

That choice starts with children.