A question for John Calvin

According to Calvinist theology some people are predestined for Heaven and and others, for Hell.  Or as a song goes by "They Might Be Giants" - "Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell".  So, ignoring the inherent cruelty in the implications of this teaching, my question for Calvin is why are we supposed to witness Christ to the Goats?  Even Solomon in Ecclesiastes teaches us that if life is meaningless we may as well 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die' -so, if this life is all some people are going to enjoy, why are you advocating for them to live a moral life, full of church and interactions with a God that created them for eternal torture? - shouldn't they get to live it up?  It also seems a bit meaningless to witness Christ to the sheep - if they are destined for Heaven, why are they required to reform any of their beliefs?  Finally, if goats can never become sheep, why are you teaching us to harass them?

Ok, one more question.  Is it moral to worship a God who creates people for Hell?

Oxymorons, Redundancies, and Contradictions

1.  Assurance of faith

2.  Free gift

3.  FOX News (sorry I could not resist)

4.  "Leave your burdens at the foot of the Cross" - "Pick up your Cross and follow me"

To be continued.....

Knowing Good and Evil

I believe that humans are incapable of truly understanding good and evil - in fact, we were never designed for this superfluousness task - after all, if we never ate the fruit, evil would not have entered the world and we would never have the need to avoid it.  In addition, our inane attempts to teach each other to rely on our own morality to determine right and wrong, while expecting positive and consistent results is sort of like expecting a monkey to write a novel if he is given access to a computer.  The fact is, our justice system causes more evil than good - ironically, without even addressing the issue of justice. Indeed, our incapacity to know the future excludes us from determining right from wrong - we need hindsight in order to see how our choices affect the world and others. So when Adam and Eve ate of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it didn't act as a 'magic' tree that gave them a new super power - instead, it was a fool's choice.  The very act of eating the fruit that God reserved for some other purpose (rather than feeding Adam and Eve), defined them as disobedient and cursed them by replacing their ability to choose between different good things with the limited ability to pick between lesser good things.  Jesus asked the Pharisees (tongue in cheek) why they called him Good (equating him with God) when only God is Good - correctly pointing out that only the Alpha and Omega who defines Good is capable of knowing the Good and providing us with the correct lenses for viewing it.

I think God has been trying to get this point across from the time He kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden.  It appears to me that He presented His 10 commandments to us not only to provide a standard for us to live by, but to prove a larger point, we are incapable of choosing to follow it and we are judgmental towards each other when we fail.  Instead of providing freedom for us, the law ended up condemning us because, despite Adam and Eve's initial assertions, we are not able to choose the Good.

Christ liberated us through the highest expression of love - forgiveness, despite the failure of Adam and Eve to ask for it.  The best part is the Good News of Christ is not instruction on how to effectively determine right and wrong, instead it is the revelation that we were actually created to love, rather than judge and that He is going to use our lives to remind our hearts how to do just that.  Birds chirp, dogs bark and we love.  Love cuts across good and evil - if we choose to submit to Christ's work in our hearts, we will automatically find our niche in Creation.  Finally, finding our rightful purpose allows us to rely on God for our morality and our hearts to graduate from the school of love.