That's because Calvinists do believe that they have a choice. I find myself perpetually on the fence about whether the opponents of Calvinism are in the habit of misrepresenting it, or if they genuinely misunderstand it. I don't know about BobRyan, and though he has badly misrepresented our position I can't say for sure if it was intentional. Bcbsr definitely does not strike me as a usually malicious person, but his misrepresentation is severe.
People cannot logically destroy what they do not understand. They can only convince those who already agree, and who also do not understand. I know I've said it before, but people don't listen, and I know I'll have to say it again: Arminianism is a one-sided coin, and Calvinism is a two-sided coin. If you follow the Arminian perspective and want to understand Calvinism, then you need to know that we do not essentially abolish the Arminian position with our own. The premise of Arminianism remains intact. People do have free will in the way that they perceive it. God offers salvation, and people need to accept it to be saved. People need to choose to repent of sin and follow God. On the human level we are all Arminian. To call us hypocrites, as
@bcbsr did, because we relate to people on a human level, just because it resembles Arminian thinking is not only rude but very much a misunderstanding of Calvinism. We are not so stupid as to think that people are robots or puppets, though you guys keep throwing that at us, as though you expect us to be surprised by this fact.
The issue that Calvinism deals with is on a level higher than the human one. While God does interact with us on a human level, because he knows we're human and he's not so stupid as to ignore this fact, he also operates on a higher level, a sovereign one. It's a reality that seems paradoxical to the one we know, but some of us have no trouble reconciling the two. As a Calvinist, I find that every Arnimian attempt to bring down the sovereignty of God in an effort to deny Calvinistic predestination is a denial of God's higher reality, as if he were wholly contained within the universe he created, being more like a really big polytheistic, though singular, god. Again, we do not deny the human level of relating to God, but the argument against Calvinism seems to drag down God's higher reality to dissect it on a human level. When God became man we were able to understand him on a human level, and we were right in relating to him in a human way, but this is no excuse to deny his divine infinite attributes, such as perfection, eternity, omniscience and omnipotence, which not only cannot be understood in our simple objective reality, and cannot be contained by it, but which also logically necessitate predestination.
We say that God knows absolutely everything and has the perfect ability to achieve exactly what he wants. To let the wrong thing happen is no easier than making the right thing happen. Therefore, it would be folly to say that God allowed what he does not want, because nothing prevented him from getting what he wanted. How do you stop an omnipotent God? The very idea of thwarting God denies his omnipotence. This does not mean that he regards everything that comes to pass as desirable, as if a novelist could never write a villain into a story. God still has posisitve and negative opinions on the circumstances and people in the story. He controls the final outcome. God is sovereign.
In the meantime, we little ignorant humans must still work out our salvation in our weak and ignorant (and highly emotional) way. None of what happens on God's level elevates us to the level of omnipotence, nor is God's omnipotence reduced to the anxious, helpless, hand-wringing God who hopes we will choose him.
