Tell me are both of these people able to make free, moral decisions, especially to choose either the “narrow way” or the “broad way”; the crack baby who grows up in an abusive, neglectful house with a revolving door of “johns” and can’t read or write and must steal and connive just to live or the bright child who grows up in a loving, caring, comfortable, stable, middle class family who gets a good education?
Do I hear the high pitched yelps of the weasels?
If there is an ethereal and ever wafting and invisible list of who is the elect and who isn’t, it doesn’t matter a tinker’s cuss if you’re born a crack baby and you aren’t. You’re either on the list or you aren’t.
The elect. The predetermined. The bilge.
If nobody is free to accept or to reject God, then there is no impetus for us to go to the crack babies, the poor, the sick, the old and the needy. Mother Teresa should have just stayed home and smoked opium in Romania. John Paul II should have confined himself to state dinners across the world. And I need to give up serving in the soup kitchens and raising money for the mentally retarded and the parish and serving in the Church and looking after my family and confine myself to pursuing whatever the hell it is that my whims or lusts direct me to do.
Because if things are predetermined, and nothing that I do matters, then I will do nothing of matter. You cannot weasel your way out of this one, my friend.
Amen. Exactly the right questions for those who insist God must be "fair."
I like what James Jordan says about the false notion of the RCC's "common grace"...
If you think "common grace" restrains this sadism to any significant degree, you are really, really, really, really, really ignorant about the real world. It is really amazing how Christians living in the comforts of the USA dispense this "common grace" idiocy to the rest of the world. Go there and live under their governments, and then tell us all about the wonders of "common grace"! God does restrain men, but it does not amount to much. Ah, the wonders of common grace!! Let's see. Millions of wives forced to immolate themselves on the funereal pyres of their husbands. Millions of babies put in baskets to be eaten alive by ants as an act of worship. Child prostitution as national industries. You gotta love it! Why would anyone want Biblical law when you can have common grace?" -- James B. Jordan"It is impossible for any human being or institution to be "neutral" as regards moral issues. The civil magistrate will either call good evil and evil good, or he will call good good and evil evil, and he will act in terms of these standards. Now, man hates God more than he hates anything else, and thus men hate other men because other men are images of God -- and people hate themselves because when they look in the mirror they see the image of God. Accordingly, all civil government is simply organized sadomasochism, until changed by the gospel.