Salvation Lottery: The Calvinist Roots of American Cruelty

There's a curious aspect to cruelty. It seems so inhuman. But think about the fatalism, helplessness and determinism of Calvinist doctrine and it begins to make sense. God appears to be cruel and unjust and arbitrary. A person's fate is inescapable and predetermined at birth. I can see how those with a Calvinist outlook would regard cruelty, injustice and suffering as unavoidable parts of life.

Like the Amish, Calvinists believe in effectively refusing to protect people from certain bad events--if what I have heard is true, that the Amish refuse, for example and among other things, to put lightning protection on their barns. There the similarity ends, though. Amish neighbors will all help you rebuild your barn if it burns down, regarding the catastrophe as individually arbitrary and bad luck. 

Calvinists, however, think that you suffer bad fortune because you deserve it and they will not only not help you they will mock you and look on you with contempt because it's a personal sign of God's disfavor. These are the roots of Calvinist and American cruelty and why evangelicals want to screw you. They want healthcare to remain a lottery and an insanely barbaric enterprise and utterly unjust.

They want everything to be cruel and barbaric because that's the way God made the world, patterned on arbitrary salvation, and it's wrong to mess with it or make it better. Good works are not only futile but anathema. Good fortune, especially wealth, is an indication of God's favor and poverty and despair are indications of moral depravity and bad character. In other words, Calvinists are mean, sick people.

If it seems to you that the country is run entirely by pernicious assholes it's because it is. If you can't believe they are as evil, cynical, smug, and serene in their depravity as it appears then get over it. They are exactly that. They don't give a shit about you or anybody else and we have somehow turned everything over to them. Evangelical, fundamentalist Christians are at fault. And Trump is their man.