Doubting the Answers 51
God could have created us all for everlasting torment if he had
so wished, and it would have been perfectly just for him to do
so simply because it lay in his power. To me, this seems like
the most decadent theology imaginable, and certainly blasphe-
mous through and through. But I do not hold Calvin himself
necessarily accountable for this, since in this matter he was the
product of centuries of bad scriptural interpretation and even
worse theological reasoning; he differed little from many of
his contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, except that
(as I have said) his thinking exhibited a greater consistency
than anyone else's. Nevertheless, to me the God of Calvinism
at its worst (as in those notorious lines in Book III of the In-
stitutes) is simply Domitian made omnipotent. If that were
Christianity, it would be too psychologically diseased a creed
to take seriously at all, and its adherents would deserve only
a somewhat acerbic pity, not respect. If this is one's religion,
then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the
story confused. It is a vision of the faith whose scriptural and
philosophical flaws are numerous and crucial, undoubtedly;
but those pale in comparison to its far more disturbing moral
hideousness. This aspect of orthodox Calvinism is for me un -
surpassable evidence for my earlier claim that a mind condi-
tioned to believe that it must believe something incredible is
capable of convincing itself to accept just about anything, no
matter how repellant to reason (or even good taste). And yet
I still insist that, judging from the way Christians actually be-
have, no one with the exception of a few religious sociopaths
really believes any of it as deeply as he or she imagines.
There is, moreover, probably a very profound truth hid-
den in the Calvinist version of the story of salvation and dam-
nation, even if it is a truth that leads in quite a different direc-
tion from the one that Calvinist orthodoxy suggests. At least,