What a pile of leftist, unhistorical garbage! None of these actions characterized Geneva in the days of Calvin, other than the Sabbath laws, which were in force in Catholic countries as well. The Puritans in 17th Century New England did forbid a number of these practices, but they did not prohibit drinking in moderation or recreational activities, contrary to what many believe. The rise of stringent regulation of gambling and alcohol abstinence in America in the 19th and early 20th Centuries was the result of the revivalist movement, which rejected many of the doctrines taught by Calvin and the Reformers for a more emotional, less rational religion. In the Pentecostal and Holiness manifestations, the revivalists rejected such key Reformation doctrines as sola Scriptura and sola fide.
As for blaming the beliefs and actions of such people Mary Baker Eddy, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Ellen White on Calvin and the Reformers, this is as nonsensical as saying that the Catholic practice of priestly celibacy (in the Roman Rite) is the reason for the various cases of sexual abuse on the part of a number of priests. All four of the individuals you mentioned did not subscribe to sola Scriptura or sola fide, but rather relied on personal, extra-Biblical revelations and works-based salvation.
http://www.sxws.com/charis/doctrine-1.html says that:
In November 1552 the city state of Geneva declared Calvin’s Institutes a “holy doctrine, which no man might speak against.” Within five years of Calvin entering Geneva the second time fifty-eight citizens were sentenced of death for deviating from Calvin’s moral codes, seventy-six had their property confiscated and were banished from Geneva on the charge of wrong thinking, numerous eminent citizens were sent to prison for being frivolous and engaging in dancing. A twelve-year-old girl was publicly flogged because she refused to renounce her Catholic faith. As the self appointed defender of public morals Calvin placed “sur les paillardises, adulteres, blasphemes, juremens et despitemens de Dieu” (debauchery, adultery, blasphemy, and contempt of God) on his list of crimes to be punishment by death.
In Calvin’s Geneva unacceptable interpretations of the Bible were considered be “et despitemens de Dieu.” Morally upright citizens who believed in Jesus were sentence to death by Calvin not for any real crime against society but simply for wrong religious thinking. Under Calvin’s direct orders Michael Servetus was burnt at the stake for the unforgivable offence of opposing infant baptism and for questioning the Trinity doctrine. Roland Bainton says: “On only two counts, significantly, was Servetus condemned — namely, anti-Trinitarianism and anti-paedobaptism.” Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic (The Beacon Press, 1953), p. (see, http://www.bcbsr.com/topics/servetus.html)
Calvin was determined that Serventus would not get a fair trial. Before the charges against him were assessed by the judiciary Calvin declared, “If he comes [to Geneva], I shall never let him go out alive if my authority has weight.”(Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Baker Book House, 1950), p. 371)
When Serventus was eventually captured to ensure that the court did impose the death penalty Calvin wrote: “I hope that the verdict will call for the death penalty.”(Walter Nigg, The Heretics (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962), p. 328) In view of this directive the court did exactly what Calvin ordered it to do.
When Serventus was tied to the stake ”the fiery French preacher Guillaume Farel”, Calvin’s number man and mentor, ordered green timber so that the fire would burn slowly. Serventus suffered excruciating agony for half an hour and his legs were cooked to the bone before he finally died. Sad to say, on account of his close friendship with Calvin, Melanchthon referred to the brutal murder of Serventus as “a pious example, which deserved to be remembered to all posterity.” Today we are remembering it, just as it was.
Forced drowning, beheading and burning at the stake were Calvin’s method of upholding the purity of his creedal religion. In Geneva it was not the Bible but Calvin’s interpretation of the Bible that ruled the day. And who does not know that Calvin’s system of religion (brute force is good) originated in Rome?
When Calvin made it illegal for the citizens of Geneva to worship God according to their conscience, under threat of confiscation of property, imprisonment and other forms of severe punishment, when he had believing Christians put to death for opposing such things as infant baptism, he was a pope, and not a Protestant. Calvin was a self-deluded despotic leader who knew how to piously packaged his own ideas and murder by slow and painful means those who disagreed with him. The court records of Calvin’s own enforcement agency show he was prepared to kill other Protestants, and other Christian believers who disagreed with him. And yet there are millions of Calvinists who regard this pathetic man as a hero.
Calvin’s autocratic rein in Geneva was in his own day rightly identified as “a religious terror.” (Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, Quoted in Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture, (Oxford: Basil Blackford, 1990), 105) This is how much religious freedom Calvin offered the citizens of Geneva. In his Geneva “it was forbidden to give non-Biblical names to children.”
In his “A History of Political Thought in the 16th Century” (New York, 1928) W. Allen claimed that if the essence of Protestantism was a claim to liberty for the individual then “certainly Calvin was not a Protestant”.
Here is Calvin’s record as a “Protestant Reformer”.
(1) Calvin abolished the principle of sola scriptura and set up his own belief as the only rule of faith and practice.
(2) Calvin believed that a person could not be one of the elect unless they were in agreement with his teachings.
(3) He rejected the principle of the separation of church and state and he employed the civil authorities to force others to believe what he did and to punish everyone who did not.
(4) He turned Protestantism into a religio-political dictatorship that was identical to the Roman Catholic model. As the supreme authority over the church in Geneva he claimed religious powers the equivalent to papal authority.
(5) He had other Christians put to death for disagreeing with his teachings even if they professed faith in Christ.
Will Durant, author of the History of Western Civilization wrote: “We shall always find it hard to love the man, John Calvin, who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” But then Calvin was a pope.
This particular website is definitely Chick-style anti Catholic, so you’ll get no mileage out of that argument.