With what you wrote it appears your decision is based on feelings (i.e. (1) I became despondent with the attitude and behavior of certain Christians, (2) Suffice it to say that I felt), and without Scriptural support (you supplied none in your post).
My decision to reject Calvinism was not based on feelings. As I said in my previous post, this did not "cause" me to reject Calvinism. However, it did cause me to re-examine Calvinian theology.
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Could you please give Scriptural support to your statements and explain more to the point what you mean by: (1) “I began to doubt my belief in the Calvin view of God's divine decree, in which God determines human decisions, and even human sinfulness,”
Allow me to deal with one point at a time:
For me, the weakest link in Calvinism was their view of God's exhaustive divine sovereignty in that God, by his divine decree, had determined and foreordained whatsoever comes to pass. Reformed theologian, John Frame, says, "God brings about our free decisions. He does not foreordain merely what happens to us, but also what we choose to do" (No Other God, 2001, p. 65). Notice that Frame says, "free decisions". Here he has stated an oxymoron. How can our decisions be free if God determines what decisions we should make?
Perhaps James Sire's description of Deism best describes Calvinism's deterministic worldview:
[In Deism] the universe is closed to human reordering because it is locked up in a clocklike fashion... Fenelon put his finger on a major problem within deism: human beings have lost their ability to act significantly. We can only be puppets. If an individual has personality, it must then be a type which does not include the element of self-determination. (The Universe Next Door, 1997, p. 45)
According to Reformed theology, God not only predetermined our decisions, but also our sinful actions! Again, Frame says, "However we address the problem of evil, our response must be in accord with the great number of Scripture passages that affirm God's foreordination of everything, even including sin" (No Other God, 2001, p. 68). Of course, this would make God the author of sin, so Calvinists such as Paul Helm, Loraine Boettner, and RC Sproul have attempted to respond along the lines that God ordains evil only in the sense of "willingly permitting it" (Helm in Divine Foreknowledge, 2001, 158-9).
First of all, this contradicts the statements of other Reformed theologians who taught that God causes people to sin (e.g. see Martin Luther, Born Slaves, 1984, p. 67). And secondly, it contradicts the Calvinian assertion that God's eternal decree is unconditional and not based on his foreknowledge (Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 1958, p. 105). In other words, if God permits sinful actions, he has to know beforehand that it will occur. But then God's foreordination or permission of sinful actions is based on his foreknowledge, it is dependent on human actions, and God’s decree is conditional.
When one reads the biblical narratives in the Old Testament, one does not have a picture of a closed system where human actions are the result of an all-determining, unconditional and forceful decree. Instead, God's plans and purposes are a reaction, or response, to man's free (in the true sense of the word) will and actions. For example, man freely rebelled and sinned against God. God reacted in judgment, but also in mercy. God foreknew that man would fall, and thus, in eternity past he purposed / determined to send his Son into the world in order to save the world (Jn. 3:16; Acts 2:23).
Because of sin, man often rebels against God, resisting and rejecting his will for their lives (Lk. 7:30; Acts 7:51). Their rebellious actions are outside of the will of God. Yet, God permits them to reject his purposes because they are free will beings.
On the other hand, Calvinists believe that nothing is outside of the will of God, even when people sin, for their sinful actions may oppose God's preceptive will (i.e. his desires, precepts, laws), but not his decretive will (foreordination of everything). This view of the will of God is incompatible with moral responsibility. Allow me to illustrate by way of a true story:
A few months ago, a young lady was kidnapped from her college and held to ransom. Leigh's father paid the kidnappers R50 000, but she was never returned. In the end, the kidnappers deliberately decided to take her life by firing 3 gunshots into her body. So Calvinists would have us believe that this monstrous act was against God's preceptive will, but not his decretive will. God did not desire that Leigh should be murdered, but according to his eternal purpose, he foreordained it. God did not desire or want the kidnappers to murder Leigh, but it was his purpose that they should decide to murder Leigh.
I would contend that God did not desire that Leigh should be murdered, neither was it his purpose that the kidnappers should murder Leigh. Yet, the omnipotent God permitted it. Why? Here is an extensive quote from C. S. Lewis who, I believe, best expressed the answer:
God created things which had free will… And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight… And for that they must be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes… If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings – then we may take it, it is worth paying. (Mere Christianity, 1997, pp. 39-40)
