They use free will as an excuse for everything ( hell, evil etc..) but actually it's a concept that doesn't make any sense because none have the absolute truth to choose accepting or refusing it.
What do you see happening here Chris in Deuteronomy 30:
15See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
17But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
I don't know what you mean. God created all of us in His image and God has free will so He created us with free-will also.
For example, God will call us to be saved because it is not His will that any should perish but that all should come unto repentance, but He won't force us to be saved. Many people say "no" to salvation and die never having been saved. That saddens God but He doesn't want robots. God wants those who love Him to follow Him because they want to not because they have to.
When Jesus preached to the rich man and told him to sell all that he had. The man went away sad because he had many riches but Jesus didn't get His skates on and run after him begging him to come into the kingdom of God. Jesus let the man go.
I don't see any scripture which indicates God forces men to be saved.
To John Calvin, every single human -- even embryos, fetuses, babies, the retarded, the mentally ill -- is thoroughly evil in all of his or her parts and deserves eternal damnation in Hell. In other words it assumes that every human being is damned by his or her very nature. This is an extreme view of human nature. it is not really normal. While every adult has moral faults (and some are really vile) to claim a priory that all humans are damnable is assuming facts not in evidence and in fact denies the cherished view in American law that every person should be assumed innocent until pr oven guilty.
This dark view of human nature is in fact very common among PSYCHOTICS who often think they can read minds or are so clever that they can tell that everyone is evil and out to hurt them. There is a cluster of symptoms of this disease including ideas of reference, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, etc. which PSYCHOTICS manifest as part of their disease.
It is one thing to say that all ADULT humans are actual sinners and that immature and impaired people are virtual sinners. This is common sense. But Total Depravity assumes much more than this. It actually postulates that evil exists in all humans below the level of conscious moral agency and that everything we humans do as humans is damnably evil. In the Calvinist view, to take a breath is damnably sinful just because a human does it.
Frankly, I find no justification for such a view of humanity. We are all sinners but TOTAL DEPRAVITY? That's Hannibal Lecter, not your average human.
The Calvinist assessment of humanity is clearly pathological and whoever invented this idea ... well I am suspicious that he was mentally unbalanced. It is not in the Bible (though Calvinists have tried to read it INTO the Bible) and it has no foundation in the Historic Christian religion.
What about Unconditional Election? That means that God chooses whom he will save for no discernible reason. He does it arbitrarily "for his own good pleasure." This is another way of saying that God acts IRRATIONALLY. this is another characteristic of the PSYCHOTIC patient. He will act spontaneously on impulse to do whatever pleases him at the moment ESPECIALLY if the voices tell him to do so.
Limited Atonement? God doesn't waste time and resources on those he wants to damn. He ignores them even though there is NO DISCERNABLE DIFFERENCE between them and the elect. This lack of concern or sympathy for other people is another sign of PSYCHOTIC behavior.
Irresistible Grace? When God saves you, he bends your will to act contrary to your natural "evil" inclinations. The corollary to this is that God does not merely ALLOW the non-elect to persevere in sin. He actually ordains their sins, making them do evil that he has already prepared from all eternity for them to do. Then He punishes them for doing what He himself has made them do irresistibly. This is the utter denial of free will. When I was in med school, one of the psychiatrists who trained me quipped "There are only two types of people who do not believe in Free Will: Psychotics and Calvinists."
Finally there is Perseverance of the Elect. Now this is a real good one. It means that the only people that ever receive true regenerative grace are those that persevere to the end. Everyone else - no matter how they strive and long to be good - have been abandoned by God to their sins (which He had ordained from all eternity and for which he will damn and torture them in unending Hell). The beauty of this tenet is that anyone who disagrees with the Calvinist system or who ultimately rejects it NEVER WAS SAVED IN THE FIRST PLACE. God does nothing for the non-elect. What elements of common grace exist among the Massa Damnata of humanity are for the benefit of the elect. Once again we see the PSYCHOTIC symptom of delusions of grandeur.
This is a very short presentation, but I hope it makes a point.
Are Calvinists all psychotic? No. They merely aspire to be that way. And the deity they worship and whom they hold up as the ultimate standard of goodness and rightness is is a willful, raving,uncaring, psychotic, psychopathic, monster.
The God of the bible made people in His own image he gave them a free will that would allow them to love him and follow him without "irresistible" coercion. Humanity in its arrogance rejected Him and went out on its own. By all rights he should have abandoned us, but God so LOVED the world that he sent His only son that all who believe in Him might be saved. The offer is real and the choice that we make is real. He is there with His grace at every step of the way, but as St. Augustine said, "The God who made you without you does not save you without you." At anytime in His good faith offer, we can reject Him, and He will respect our wishes, but it is OUR doing, not His.
Is the god of "free-will" Christianity something that should be mocked?
