The brand of theology I grew up in was pretty brutal. Why did God make hell, and people who were gonna go to hell? We believed in predestination, so He *knew* he was making ppl who He was actively sending to hell. Why?
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The answer I was taught was basically 'for His glory.' Those people He created, *deserved* to go to hell, so it was right and just and good for Him to send them there. It's good to create things and then put them in their rightful place.
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He did the whole world-creation-send-Jesus-die-for-sins thing as an expression of His might and holiness; He chose to save a subset, and this is magnificent mercy. He chose to condemn the rest to be tortured for an eternity, and this is magnificent justice.
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But... is that good? Eternally torturing ppl He predestined to it seems horrifying.
Well, that's a *you* problem. See, God is *definitionally* good; anything He does is holy and beautiful and correct. If you personally dislike it, that's a reaction of your flawed human nature.
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The people around me probably wouldn't have phrased all those beliefs in that way; they couched it in more gentle things, putting more words to describe His love, and often didn't directly grapple with those concepts, but really that *was* our underlying belief system.
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(forgot to mention: this was 5-point Calvinism)
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also ok before yall shit on Calvinism, it *is* brutal but also the strength is it resolves a lot of philosophical confusions present in other denominations. Other Christian beliefs sacrifice consistency/logic for more 'goodness'; Calvinists are the autists
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If they’re so consistent then how do they reconcile the exact paradox you’re describing?
The flawed human excuse doesn’t hold with me because the entire Christian belief system is centered around the premise that humans can understand spiritual morality.
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That God is “good” but creating billions of beings for the sole purpose of condemning them to a miserable eternity isn’t a very “good” thing to do.
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That is what my Sunday school teachers always said.
I think Calvinism creates more contradictions than it solves. How does “God so love the world” if he doesn’t care about most of them? How is he “not willing that any should perish” if he chose their fate before they were born?
