On Calvinism

In my younger and less vulnerable years I was for a period of time a devout Calvinist. And if I know anything, which I grant is epistemologically precarious, it's that you haven't brushed up on your postulates of Calvinism lately.

I'm sure you studied them when you should have and all that. And were up late the night before and all that. Or maybe you didn't and weren't. But whether you ever knew or never knew the fact remains, that you don't now know the, some would say, metaphysically ominous and eternally cinched, postulates of Calvinism. I am here to help.

Calvinism has a comparably rigorous and easily brandishable logic. It’s a system of belief where part of its appeal is that the stakes are high. Where if A then B - means something. The world means something.

Calvinism presents a deity of awe inspiring potency, majesty, ire. This was an elixir-like counterpoint to a megachurch mindset which would rather memorize in unison than parley ramifications of an idea. Far from a craven nice guy of a god.

And Calvinism was also not some hazy dissociated spiritualism. Not a cellphone buddhism in a pseudo-sermon by a yoga teacher. The god of the Calvinists was thunderous and clear-headed. This was not morality on a swivel. This God was real. A god with desire, plan - authority. 

I had a craving for presence, stance. I had a craving for a backbone of thinking authority even if it was rigid. Even if it was ruthless. Even if the world as I experienced it didn't fit into the idea. What if A needs to become minimized and adjusted just so for it to produce necessarily the consequence of B? What happens if I trade off accuracy for certainty? What happens if I trade off complexity for confidence? I felt uncertain. And a system of of meaning backstops our psyches from the disorganized drift of schizophrenia. Relatedly, the craving for a foundation point for meaning-making is possibly a deeper desire of the psyche than either truth or goodness. Ruthlessness held rigidly fast at least is a system of meaning. 

Calvinism accents the fallenness of humanity. Its irredeemability. The logic, runs like this. If people are fallen and rejecting of God in their hearts, then they are unable to live a perfect life and be worthy of his presence. So God must choose to redeem them. God does not choose to redeem everyone. This would not manifest the diversity of his presence. He separates the elect from the reprobate. If God chooses to redeem you, you can't resist it. If God redeems you, He will see the process thru til the end.  

These elements have a logic to them. Even if they beg other questions. I appreciated the idea of working forward with reasoning from a premise. In this case I think what are at play are unconscious childhood needs, paired with adult logician's reasoning, functioning as premises. But thinking is required for reasoning, which is connecting thoughts and ordering them. And connecting thoughts - connecting A to B, when A could be said to connect to any of A thru Z, but you are choosing to connect A to B because it makes the most sense to you - that's a display of discernment and just add another person thinking and reasoning and deciding that A connects not to B but to C, and we have a disagreement. From which it's possible to have a debate. And debate around disagreement is key for healthy relationship. Successful debate lends itself to intimacy. 

But back to the elements of Calvinism having a nice logical coherence. There's the neat acronym of TULIP which is a handy mnemonic. It expresses the 5 points of Calvinism, which were agreed upon at the Synod of Dordt, which you may have guessed is located in The Netherlands. The logic of TULIP leaves no room for spirit. You could say this mnemonic is hermetic of the pneumatic. TULIP is the doctrine of predestination. 

Predestination is a paranoid stance. All power is outside of the person. There is nothing the person can do. It's a passive stance in its fundamentals. But the advantage of the paranoid stance is that there's never a shortage of meaning, there's a surplus of it. Every little blink or cough has metaphysical significance. The world is over-ordered. A fun world for a detective who needs no sleep. For an ordinary human, very quickly exhausting.  

And meaning-making travels with finding an outside authority for a child because the child needs an adult who is an authority to be meaningful with. 

Calvinism sets up a God who is not to be trifled with. Who cannot be trifled with it seems. Can't ever be conversed with to ever change his mind. But he is an authority. And the young child needs to identify with authority. For the young child much of the world is out of his control. And to find an authority to help him bring it into some manner of order. Power over the environment feels like a godsend. This is a deep need - for the child to feel a sense of control and power. If not, the chaos of the world encroaches his psyche and invades it. This need is so deep that the child is reluctant to sacrifice his initial claim, via relationship, to authority for much of anything.

The alternative is a world of helplessness, chaos, and meaninglessness - incoherent and full of suffering. And so the child will cling to the psyche of the parent. the parent who is the authority no matter what else they do, as long as the parent maintains the semblance of authority. If the parent isn't an authority, the child will supplement their authority with his imagination. It's possible to find one's own authority, but the sacrifice required is great, and truly very few are interested.  

This all maps well to religious authority. If the text says it, it must be true. And there are different texts. And there are different readings of the same texts. It's a lot to weed through externally, not to mention the unconscious areas of the mind which have a hard time seeing certain things or which have such rigid sight to only see certain things. 

Islam comes to mind at this point - the craving for authority is so great that Mohammad's pedophilia is brushed to the side as not important. You can easily find canonical accounts of his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha, and his consummation with her when she was 9. He was in his 50s, by the way. But the craving for identification with authority is so great that there is very little that can cause a person to put that identification up for debate, the early patterns form such impenetrable mold. They are the fundamentals that keep the psyche together, that is, from disintegrating. I think a person finding their own specific self is worth the risk if disintegrating those fundamentals. But this is a gradual process, where the old fundamentals are put up and risked little by little. But again, this is not easy, and its a choice only the person taking the risk can make, and the going is often alone, involving a recognition of aloneness. This aloneness is a fact of the psyche that is more convenient to bury away. But this aloneness is required for the individual to be born.

And in fact the fundamentals have such inexorable momentum that they function nearly as a determinism, that they nearly predestine a person for their fate. This is another reason why Calvinism's ideas are likely sprung from unconscious intuitions formed at a very early age. 

So Calvinism offers this kind of unquestionable, infallible God. In this way it is similar to Islam. Though, I do think, in opposition to multiculturalists who want everyone to get along, that critical thinking through what the texts say about their founders and their founder's vision is important. By this I mean that a person's own heart or essence is what matters most. Not the heart, in theory, of a religious founder. A good example is a good thing. But it's not possible to copy paste the heart of another into one's own chest. Those who look inward may find what they seek. 

Folks may laugh imagining the group-thinking religious followers. But the dynamics noted have to do with things more fundamental than religion. There is a similar unthinking group think in scientism. You may recognize the following sentences. I am the science. The science is settled. You are the unvaccinated. You are the problem. These are examples of the infallible religious texts of scientism. Science in true form is dynamic. Kuhn's book on Scientific Revolutions shows the difficulty that true scientists have in simply doing science. True science disrupts the status quo. And the status quo, or the momentum of the group doesn't like being disrupted, especially if it means they have to question their identity. A scientist worth his name is often going about his work in some degree of aloneness and against the grain of the status quo. This is because the dynamics at play have to do with things more fundamental than science. 

The quotes from the legacy media during Covid traded in fear porn and guild trips, intermingled with advertisements by vaccine manufacturers. And to pretend that they were unbiased, scientific, which they did, is part of why their reputation has rightfully deteriorated. Inciting fear and guilt in sophisticated ways through simple sentence, repetition, and assumption of authority triggered childhood unconscious panic in the majority of viewers. The authority says its bad to question, so just obey. Thinking is sinful. It's the shibboleth of the reprobate. The incitement of fear and guilt on repetition weakened the psyche of the viewer, gradually, unconsciously, making it receptive to the thoughts being introduced. The new thoughts on repeat. Trust the science. The world is ending. The unvaccinated are a threat. Choosing a target population to scapegoat. Vaccines are safe and effective. (But not so effective that if you get one you'll be protected from the unvaccinated person who is a threat.)

As many peole died of what was called Covid those years as died of the flu in a normal year, according to the World Health Organization. Few in my social circle were immune to the social contagion of obedience to the television. I was not. I got vaccinated, by the way, twice. I wish I hadn't. It's a regret. But I began to have cognitive dissonance between what I was being told and what I saw and knew. So I started reading, thinking, talking about what was happening.

Pfizer, by the way, wanted their vaccine science redacted or hidden away for 75 years. Why hide the science? 

And so Calvinism, Islam, scientism, all find a thing to worship. They find a thing to identify with and revolve around for meaning. Each excuses the adherent of thinking, and rewards with a prize for obedience admission to a prefabricated system of meaning, a mold of thinking, and very likely obedience is rewarded with admission to the warmth of the group. And the childhood panic and helplessness is assuaged. And there is no need to disagree, for that is left to those in the domain of the individual.