I am on Zyrtec, Benadryl, Mucinex, and ibuprofen. I hate tree sex. I hate everything.

I'm on all that plus Sudafed and Singulair.

Oh, I forgot Nasacort.

And yet I still have a headache, my brain is blurry, I can feel my lungs, and all I want to do is sleep.

For anyone keeping track: clusterfuck status = ongoing.

I am on Zyrtec, Benadryl, Mucinex, and ibuprofen. I hate tree sex. I hate everything.

I'm on all that plus Sudafed and Singulair.

I'm on Benadryl, Claritin, and Flonase every damn day of my life because I live with cats. Tree sex season *still* manages to mock my attempts at allergy prevention, so I tend to add Sudafed and an extra Claritin. (Protip: you can take the "once-daily" antihistamines, like Claritin, Zyrtec, or Allegra, twice a day if your allergies are really bad. Don't do it forever, but a couple of weeks of twice-daily Claritin is fine.)

As others have said, Calvinists believe that if god is infinite and all knowing, he knows who will be saved (the Elect) from the beginning of the world. The Puritans who made Massachusetts such a nasty theocracy were Calvinists. The main remaining Calvinist sect is Presbyterianism. (I was raised Presbyterian.) Theoretically, you can recognize the Elect by their upright behavior and devotion to god, but no one can know if he is among the Elect. In practice, many Calvinists believe they're among the Elect, which makes them insufferable.

Methodists and most fundamentalist sects believe in salvation by faith alone. Baptists believe in salvation by faith and good works.

And what if you have faith all your life, but, say, just before your death you're in such agony and so messed up psychologically you lose your faith seconds before you die? The whole thing seemed problematic to me. Plus the whole binary nature of faith/no faith seemed weird, because in real life I'm never 100% certain about anything. So if I had 60% faith but suddenly my faith dropped to below 50%--was that the cutoff point for eternal damnation?

Eh, the thing is, faith is supposed to be something God gives a person right along with the grace. It works well with predestination insofar as, God has to give out the faith that saved people need to get the grace to get saved. And then there's Jesus going around saying "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, your faith can move mountains" and someone else responding (though possibly in a different bit) "Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief." So the whole thing is either a really messed up recursion loop in which humans are not able to do a thing about getting right with God for eternity and yet somehow blameworthy enough to deserve damnation, or it's a recursion loop where having just enough faith to wish you had some faith is good enough to get the job done because God's doing the heavy lifting anyway (sort of like the grown-up Clydesdales pushing the wagon so the Clydedale foal thinks it's pulling it).

I'm only on Benadryl because that's all I can really take right now, and I only take that at night. So add me to the list of the people hating the tree sex. So very tired.

And what if you have faith all your life, but, say, just before your death you're in such agony and so messed up psychologically you lose your faith seconds before you die? The whole thing seemed problematic to me. Plus the whole binary nature of faith/no faith seemed weird, because in real life I'm never 100% certain about anything. So if I had 60% faith but suddenly my faith dropped to below 50%--was that the cutoff point for eternal damnation?

My upbringing stressed the converse -- if you obtained faith just before your death, you were saved.

My theology, such as it is, is this: either (1) God made us as fallible people who fuck up, and, knowing he did that, is cool with our failings, since they're his fault anyway; or (2) God made us as fallible people who fuck up AND THEN even though we can't help it that we fuck up, he decreed that we have to be "good" enough to overcome the way he made us.

If (1) is true, we're all good. If (2) is true, then I don't actually want to follow a god like that, so I'm still good.

I realize there's also option 3: there is no god. In which case, again, we're all good (in terms of not being damned for how we live).