Is Calvinism a form of Gnostic Christianity?

Given the Calvinistic views you've expressed, IS God good ?According to those views, God intentionally arranged the Fall. God arranges every sinful act. Hell is not a punishment, it is God's whim. The whole convoluted (and apparently masochistic) plan of salvation is aimed only at creating a comparatively few exceptions to the general plan - the creation of eternal victims and a phoney justification for the torment.Forget "for God so loved the world..." - it's more "for God so loved torture..."How can you call that "good" ?

You can reduce the idea of God's "goodness" to something meaningless if you like. Because if you don't then it's pretty clear that Calvinism contradicts the idea that God is good.

You're the one saying that that view is true, and you don't really argue otherwise. Engaging in doublethink is not an argument. So you're the one saying that God is evil.It's not even as if scripture - taken as a whole - clearly agrees with Calvin. There are plenty of scriptural arguments to the contrary.You expect the stories of the tortures of the Inquisition to persuade us that the Roman Catholic church is evil. How is this any different ?

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Nothing happens without God, but God can do nothing evil in the sense of sin. That's scriptural. These things are beyond human understanding, I'm just trying to say what I get out of Calvin and I may get a lot of it wrong.

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Obviously sin cannot be willed by God if it deserves punishment. That would be God playing with humans as toys, punishing them for the things he made them do.

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The idea, however, is that something in the very nature of Creation of sentient beings seems to lead to this enmity against God which provokes His wrath, and yet the only alternative would be for Him never to have created anything.

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But why would that be ? It doesn't seem to be a logical necessity - and if it was, the saved would have to be enemies of God forever, even after the Final Judgement. But if it is not a logical necessity it must be God's choice. And that changes everything.

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You are seeing all this as evil in God, I am not. God to me is love, goodness, faithfulness, mercy and everything else that's good.

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But that's not true. We've said what we see as evil and why.

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Well, first, it's just my way of trying to account for how sin can exist, God be sovereign over all things and yet not the author of sin. But I'm quite willing to be wrong about this.

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To do that it would have to say that God does not control the actions motivated by this assumed emnity.

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I don't get this at all. Salvation is a transformation, a rebirth of the spirit which is of the nature of God. Our sin nature is ended by our faith in Christ's death and resurrection, we are made new creatures, reborn into an entirely new kind of life than that we were born to in the flesh.

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Then you don't understand logical necessity. You can't be transformed into something that cannot exist.

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Well, according to scripture it can't be.

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OK, so scripture says you're wrong.

You hate the arguments because your views don't make sense. Dropping Calvinism would be the obvious solution - after all there are other, less problematic interpretations of scripture. But I doubt you'll do that.I suppose that's your problem all over. You hate being wrong but won't make the effort to be right.

Insisting that you are correct in some way that nobody can understand is not much of an argument. Especially when the problems aren't exactly complicated.And if Calvin's positions are contradicted by scripture as well as supported by it.

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Calvin knew the Bible thoroughly. There is no way any of his positions contradict scripture.

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And as usual you can't be bothered to find out the truth. Do the research. There are plenty of Christians who'll argue against Calvin Bible.

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That's also the task where people find contradictions within scripture because we know it's God's word and therefore there aren't any. Not that I expect such reasonableness from unbelievers in Bible inerrancy of course, but that's the only way the Biblical revelation can be understood.

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There's nothing reasonable about twisting the "word of God" to fit with your beliefs.

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Even if God "hardened Pharoah's heart" Pharoah is acting according to his own character and motives, there is nothing artificial or unpredictable in his behavior.

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If hardening Pharoah's heart made no difference at all, then doing it must have been pure whim. Even mentioning it would be pretty pointless. And if God knew what Pharoah would decide without intervention, it must be that the "natural" decision would be to let the Israelites go.And that would never do. God would be without an excuse to show off his power, by inflicting another disaster on the Egyptian people.

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I meant it made no difference in the sense of what actually happened, since it could have been said that he hardened his own heart, which I believe it does say in another passage, but in this case it said God hardened his heart, so that we will understand the sovereignty of God that is Calvin's particular concern to elucidate.

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As I recall it only says the the Pharaoh hardened his own heart on one occasion, not every time that God claimed to have done it. And to say that God says so just to prove Calvin right is silly.

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That's a misunderstanding. If NOTHING happens without God's intervention, which is the point of mentioning it, then EVERYTHING that happens is the "natural" effect

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No, that's the obvious sensible meaning. And certainly the point is not to claim that God controls everything. And if God's intervention is required then there is no "natural effect". By definition, if it was natural it would happen without external intervention.

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Either way Pharoah's heart was hardened. BOTH are true, really: he hardened his own heart and God hardened it. That's the picture of reality I think we are supposed to take from such a revelation. The connection between God and His Creation is that intimate is the point. I can't raise my hand without God's raising it.

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Of course you have yet to actually find this "revelation" in the actual text...

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The point of the plagues WAS to demonstrate His power,

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Exactly. God is the sort of being to create a pretext to show off how powerful he is, by inflicting death and suffering. That's how "good" he is.

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Remember that Pharoah had ordered the slaughter of the firstborn of the Israelites.

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That was a different Pharaoh. And besides that doesn't change the point that God was making the Pharoah refuse to release the Israelites as a pretext for sending the plagues.

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Pharoah represents the Egyptians, it doesn't matter which one did what.

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I think it's worth getting the facts right.

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When a nation comes under God's judgment it may be centuries since the origin of the offenses that bring about the judgment.

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It's obviously unjust to punish people for events that occurred before they were born. And there's nothing to suggest that the Egyptians went in killing Israelite babies.

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He gives you the evidence everybody is always wanting, He proves He's God and then you treat Him like dirt for it.

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That's completely untrue. God hasn't supplied the evidence, and it's you and Calvin and the Bible that are portraying God as cruel and unjust. It's not me treating God "like dirt".

Well let's look at it. Where did the "evil intention" come from ? We can't put it down to a corrupt human nature because it supposedly caused the corruption. And it would be very odd for a human with an uncorrupted and "very good" nature to have such an evil intent.Then we have the implausibility of this evil intent corrupting human nature for all time. Surely a "very good" human nature should be more resistant to corruption.And then we have the whole "Sovereignty of God" issue which says that God must have willed both the evil intent and its effects.So, on considering these points it looks to me as if Calvin is implicitly - and grudgingly - accepting an Arminian view, but trying to gloss over the fact by saying that we shouldn't think about it.

As has been pointed out elsewhere the strong view of the Sovereignty of God taken by Calvin gives God primary responsibility for all the actions that supposedly are being judged. Even if the humans responsible have been corrupted and act from that corruption that, too was arranged by God - in part so that those actions would occur.My interpretation then is that Calvin is saying that we should not think about that. And it's obvious why it is a problem. If God is the prime mover, the master manipulator behind the sins being judged, then God is at least as guilty as anyone else participating. This is a point that deserves more than "don't think about it", and I consider it quite telling that Calvin should resort to that.

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He's just saying we can't attribute it to the creation, I don't see that he said not to think about it.

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No, the last sentence says that we should attribute "judgement" to human corruption without considering how predestination figures into it.Here it is again:

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I'm convinced enough that if God isn't sovereign over all things then He gets depicted as weak, and I've had personal experience of the effects of that in Arminian churches. I'm also convinced that God is good and cannot commit sin in any way so that the way He is sovereign is not THAT way

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If you want humans to be solely responsible for their sins, that requires that humans make decisions and do things contrary to God's will. Things that are not an intentional part of God's plan, although God can use them. Although I have to say that this raises huge questions that seem to me to imply limitations on God, I can also say that there is scriptural support for such a view.