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Thanks for your rely. I'm going to leave double predestination out for now and just focus on the free will aspect.

God puts His Spirit in us to walk in His ways. WE can decide which way to choose but our Heavenly Father watches over us and guides our paths. If we choose poorly, God knows this, allows it and He uses this to teach us. God also guides us to do good things for His kingdom-which, if left to our own, we would not do.
There is no free will.

To me the second sentence denies the preceding paragraph. Free will entails choice and if we "can decide which way to choose" we therefore have free will. I'm starting to agree that it's not semantics. But I think we are reaching the point where words and concepts have trouble, because we are dealing with things that cannot be completely communicated using them.

if you actually had a choice to choose God's way or your way, then why don't you choose to go God's way in every single decision that you make? The answer is that you are not truly free.

Neither are we completely bound. I think a major problem in your view, and Calvinism in general, is to dichotomize and fatalize. Everyone is either all one thing or all the other. Forever. Coming into self-realization, when we first realize there is "me," our first words tend to be "mine." This is our "nature." But it is our pre-adolescent nature.

We do not remain pre-adolescents. We can, and God has created us such that we can, grow in compassion. Compassion means shared suffering. We repent. God transforms us, changes our wants.

We become more "free" to choose God.

You described this process in the paragraph I quoted from you at the top of this reply. I submit that God has created man such that this is the normal healthy process of human development - abundant life: physically, mentally, spiritually. The wages of sin are death here also.

I think part of the reason for our disagreement is what we are calling "free." I believe you see this as, again, an erroneous dichotomy, as in 'why don't we choose God's way every single time?" In other words, it's not free because we don't make the obvious choice. Since we don't make the obvious right choice, we must not be free to make it, in your view.

But all it takes to destroy this premise is for one person to not make the right choice one time and make the identical right choice the next time. Is there anyone who hasn't done this? In forward and reverse order? Are we flipping back and forth between free and not?

What has changed between making the "right" and "wrong" choice above? A plethora of possibilities.

Part of our "nature" is to not be aware, to be selfish, to be habitual. Part of our choices is to become more aware, to shift our focus from self to others, to starve bad habits and feed good ones. This is integral to spiritual practice. In my experience, this can result in more "right" choices and fewer "wrong" ones. No, we are not saving ourselves, we are not doing things pleasing to God. I believe if this is our motivation, we are acting out of self - a bad habit.

So why make these choices if not for our self and not to "please" God? Faith is the closest answer.

You emphasize in your post that we can do nothing pleasing to God.

I would go further: We can't disappoint, displease, earn the love of or earn the hate or wrath of God. All of these are humanizing God and making Him subject to passion, subject to change.

We and scripture speak in these terms in order to try to communicate, but we are, in the end, describing what can't be fully described. Theology is reasoning about the Divine. It is useful, but incomplete.

God can't be drawn down fully into reason. Cronos has posted about the holding of contradictions both fully in the mind. When we reduce the Divine into reason, often that is what results - two contradictions. In this case free will vs. predestination. I believe the way to hold them simultaneously is with faith and with relationship to the Divine, free will guided by the Divine light, the growth toward union where the boundary between our will and God's will disappears.

I think Calvinism, ever logical, systematic theology, looks at the contradiction and picks one side as true, the other false. In so doing it reduces both man and God. I see good people there, my only reason for opposing it is that, IMHO, it teaches a view of God that is harmful. It is used too often to portray a hateful God and needlessly impedes other's path. [Look at the long posts recently on God's hate and wrath for example, and imagine a child reading them.]

Thanks again for the discussion. My apologies for my length in reply.