[.45 Long Colt]

I’m not going to debate you in this thread or any other. You don’t understand Scripture and either you don’t know history or you are determined to misstate it to paint the Roman Catholic religion in a better light. Perhaps you are a priest, maybe even a Jesuit.

Yes, Calvin was a sinful man, just like the popes who for centuries presided over hideous tortures and even genocide for so-called “heretics.” They strangled and then burned heretic William Tyndale for daring to translate the Bible into the vulgar English tongue giving common people access to God’s Holy Word. What kind of “church” withholds God’s truth from men? Had I been alive during in certain times and places I would have been one of the inquisition targets because they tortured and murdered people who believe as I believe, namely that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone. Pursuant to the Council of Trent, I’m still under worthless anathemas.

Oh, and what was liberating about Calvin was his theology! Without men such as Tyndale, Luther, Calvin, and Knox, the American Revolution would not have happened as it did and our founding documents, if they even existed, would have looked radically different. Our nation has fought tyranny for countless millions around this planet. They have those protestant reformers like Calvin to thank. In contrast, Catholicism goes hand in hand with both theological and political oppression.

[Religion Moderator]

You don’t understand

Reading the mind of another Freeper is a form of "making it personal."

Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.

[Cronos]

I’m not going to debate you in this thread or any other.

You mean you are not going to debate the scripture I posted?

don’t understand Scripture

You mean your inadequate mistranslations of Scripture don't stand up?

[Cronos]

your statement Calvin is among the greatest liberators in human history. shows a need to read

I can recommend Stephen Hick's "John Calvin's Geneva

The city-state of Geneva was in effect, a police state, ruled by a Consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders, with the bloodless figure of the dictator looming over all, John Calvin....

Frail, thin, short, and lightly bearded, with ruthless, penetrating eyes, he was humorless and short-tempered. The slightest criticism enraged him. Those who questioned his theology he called “pigs,” “asses,” “riffraff,” “dogs,” “idiots,” and “stinking beasts.” One morning he found a poster on his pulpit accusing him of “Gross Hypocrisy.” A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was decapitated.

1. Belot, an Anabaptist was arrested for passing out tracts in Geneva and also accusing Calvin of excessive use of wine. With his books and tracts burned, he was banished from the city and told not to return on pain of hanging (J.L. Adams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 597-598).
2. Jacques Gruent was racked and then executed for calling Calvin a hypocrite
3. A man who publicly protested against the reformer's doctrine of predestination was flogged at all the crossways of the city and then expelled.
4. Calvin's Letter to the Marquis Paet, chamberlain to the King of Navarre, 1561. "Honour, glory, and riches shall be the reward of your pains; but above all, do not fail to rid the country of those scoundrels [Anabaptists and others], who stir up the people to revolt against us. Such monsters should be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus the Spaniard."

Sources quoted in Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church, vol. 8:

• "The death penalty against heresy, idolatry and blasphemy and barbarous customs of torture were retained. Attendance at public worship was commanded on penalty of three sols. Watchmen were appointed to see that people went to church. The members of the Consistory visited every house once a year to examine the faith and morals of the family. Every unseemly word and act on the street was reported, and the offenders were cited before the Consistory to be either censured and warned, or to be handed over to the Council for severer punishment."

• Several women, among them the wife of Ami Perrin, the captain-general, were imprisoned for dancing.

• A man was banished from the city for three months because on hearing an ass bray, he said jestingly 'He prays a beautiful psalm.'

• A young man was punished because he gave his bride a book on housekeeping with the remark: 'This is the best Psalter.'

• Three men who laughed during a sermon were imprisoned for three days.

• Three children were punished because they remained outside of the church during the sermon to eat cakes.

• A man who swore by the 'body and blood of Christ' was fined and condemned to stand for an hour in the pillory on the public square.

• A child was whipped for calling his mother a thief and a she-devil.

• A girl was beheaded for striking her parents.

• A banker was executed for repeated adultery.

• A person named Chapuis was imprisoned for four days because he persisted in calling his child Claude (a Roman Catholic saint) instead of Abraham.

• Men and women were burnt to death for witchcraft. (See Pike, pp. 55,56).

From Other Sources:

• Belot, an Anabaptist was arrested for passing out tracts in Geneva and also accusing Calvin of excessive use of wine. With his books and tracts burned, he was banished from the city and told not to return on pain of hanging (J.L. Adams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 597-598).

• Martin Luther said of Calvin's actions in Geneva, "With a death sentence they solve all argumentation" (Juergan L. Neve, A History of Christian Thought, vol. I, p. 285).

• "About the month of January 1546, a member of the Little Council, Pierre Ameaux, asserted that Calvin was nothing but a wicked man - who was preaching false doctrine. Calvin felt that his authority as an interpreter of the Word of God was being attacked: he so completely identified his own ministry with the will of God that he considered Ameaux's words as an insult to the honour of Christ. The Magistrates offered to make the culprit beg Calvin's pardon on bended knees before the Council of the Two Hundred, but Calvin found this insufficient. On April 8, Ameaux was sentenced to walk all round the town, dressed only in a shirt, bareheaded and carrying a lighted torch in his hand, and after that to present himself before the tribunal and cry to God for mercy" (F. Wendel, Calvin, pp. 85, 86).

"Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?" James 3:11.

NOTE: he was as bad as anyone else in his day. He was no "liberator".

[Cronos]

Nah, Tyndale had no influence on the American revolution -- you do know that tyndale was there just about the time Columbus set sail and quite a while before American independence (btw, you were taught the old one "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, right?

Oh, and you do know that we've been independent for about 200 odd years, right?

[ShadowAce]

Yes, Calvin was a sinful man,...

So why do calvinists identify themselves first and foremost with a sinful man, rather than as a disciple of Jesus?

I call myself Christian--not calvinist, not catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or any other denomination. I follow Christ, not the extra-biblical teachings of a sinful man who claims that God creates most men for the express purpose of throwing them into Hell.

[Cronos]

with both theological and political oppression.

do read some history. Read about the Calvinist Hohenzollerns who forced the Lutherans in Prussia to submit to Calvinist ways.