It looks like it's a Calvinist thing. If everything is already predetermined, once you're saved, you can't be unsaved. Never mind all of the backsliding that goes on in the fundamentalist community.

Right, but if you go back to the origins, the way it largely played out was that there was a premium on public demonstrations of how devout and good you are, in order to demonstrate to the neighbors that you were one of the saved. Criminality, etc, would imply that you weren't among that august number. In theory. So no license to kill, but plenty of license to be self-righteous and judgy.

I've always wondered how people who make a big public show of their religious devotion interpret the early part of Matthew 6.

My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell. Also, that everyone's soul was black, but some people (the saved people) had a cloak of grace that masked the black soul, and those were the saved people. However, it was impossible to know if you had been saved or not, so you should act like it.

Catholics believed that everyone was born part good and part bad, and your going to heaven or hell was determined by how you acted on earth.

Of course this course was taught by a Catholic....

interpret the early part of Matthew 6.

My favorite set of verses.

re: salvation, I believe the thinking was that salvation was a two-way street. Yes, Jesus saves you from the goodness of his heart, but you've got some responsibilities to continue to be worthy of it. Jesus won't stop loving you, but he's not going to ignore what you get up to while waving your Admit One Saved! certificate around. I may be getting some of this from purgatory theory, where you don't go to Hell but get to work off the sins you didn't manage to have cleansed before you died.

Making a fuss of how righteous you are and doing the elaborate public praying was always considered gauche in my church.

One of my friends friends posted this on facebook, and I was so confused by it:

I'm so glad that when God looks on sinful me He sees the blood of His only son washing my sins away. Aren't you glad He knows our hearts?

My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

As others have said above, that's true for some Protestant denominations. I grew up Missouri Synod Lutheran, which preached that it's all a matter of faith. If you have faith, you're saved -- nothing was decided at birth. Also, faith will motivate you to be a good person.

My background is also academic, but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

That is straight Calvin. Definitely not all Protestants believe that!

This elaborate wikipedia article says there are three main branches within Protestantism: Calvinist, Lutheran, and Arminian. [link]

I don't think we dealt with "new" religions in this course- It was Judiasm, Islam, Christianity (divided into Catholic and Protestant (as in the Protestant Reformation times)).

but I was taught that Protestants believed that people when people were born, it was already predetermined whether they went to heaven or hell.

I'm not aware that any modern Protestants still believe that. It is definitely Calvinist/Puritan thought but not mainstream.