Guardian Belief editor Andrew Brown comes to the defense of Calvin:
OK: I asked why no more people were commenting on Paul Helm’s excellent Calvin series, and the response was essentially that Calvinism was too odious to argue with.
This isn’t a matter of atheists vs believers. PeterNW1 put the sense of the meeting very clearly:
“Work our fingers to the bone, and when we die, the vast majority of us are going to Hell for all eternity. And there’s nowt we can do about it because our tickets to Hell were chosen for us before we were born … Calvinism seems to me the bleakest theology ever invented.”
And—though I used to think so—I don’t now understand this objection. Let me be clear. I am not for a moment saying that the world as Calvin sees it is not terrible, full of unearned suffering, impossible to justify morally, and having no purpose that humans can discern by reason. No – he says the world is all those things. But isn’t it?
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