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To: .45 Long Colt
your statement Calvin is among the greatest liberators in human history. shows a need to read

I can recommend Stephen Hick's "John Calvin's Geneva

The city-state of Geneva was in effect, a police state, ruled by a Consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders, with the bloodless figure of the dictator looming over all, John Calvin....

Frail, thin, short, and lightly bearded, with ruthless, penetrating eyes, he was humorless and short-tempered. The slightest criticism enraged him. Those who questioned his theology he called “pigs,” “asses,” “riffraff,” “dogs,” “idiots,” and “stinking beasts.” One morning he found a poster on his pulpit accusing him of “Gross Hypocrisy.” A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was decapitated.
  1. Belot, an Anabaptist was arrested for passing out tracts in Geneva and also accusing Calvin of excessive use of wine. With his books and tracts burned, he was banished from the city and told not to return on pain of hanging (J.L. Adams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 597-598).
  2. Jacques Gruent was racked and then executed for calling Calvin a hypocrite
  3. A man who publicly protested against the reformer's doctrine of predestination was flogged at all the crossways of the city and then expelled.
  4. Calvin's Letter to the Marquis Paet, chamberlain to the King of Navarre, 1561. "Honour, glory, and riches shall be the reward of your pains; but above all, do not fail to rid the country of those scoundrels [Anabaptists and others], who stir up the people to revolt against us. Such monsters should be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus the Spaniard."
Sources quoted in Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church, vol. 8: From Other Sources: "Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?" James 3:11.

NOTE: he was as bad as anyone else in his day. He was no "liberator".

44 posted on 07/05/2012 6:39:36 AM PDT by Cronos (**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)
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To: Cronos

I’ll pray for you.


45 posted on 07/05/2012 6:41:41 AM PDT by .45 Long Colt
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