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Notes -
I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:
Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.
"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"
"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."
As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory
I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.
Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.
And my response to this is: "So what? If I'm destined for eternal hell in 80 years I want to have an absolute blast before I die and being around people just like me will help with that." Signalling that I'm the kind of person going to hell is a good way for us hellbound to recognise each other and get together so that we can turn our lives into one continual orgistic rave of pleasure that we couldn't if we were all separated from each other. It far beats living a life of austerity and then ending up in hell anyways.
Here's my guess as someone who knows literally nothing about Calvinism:
It's analogous to googling for symptoms of a disease in an effort to self-diagnose, particularly for something incurable and terminal like ALS. Your knowledge of the outcome has no effect on the outcome, but a certain anxious personality type will want to know the outcome anyway, for the peace of mind.
Exercising your willpower and moral judgement is the best method you have of gathering evidence. If you're able to abstain from sin, it's taken as evidence that you're predestined for salvation. If not, you're in trouble.
And since abstinence from sin is a human impossibility, God provided an escape hatch: tell Him you don’t want to be that way, accept Jesus’ sacrifice as payment, and have certainty that you now have the good end firmly in grasp. Thereafter, expect to see your choices change as the Holy Spirit sanctifies (cleans) your choicemaker.
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