@jacquesm: At least from my perspective, "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "God wants some people to go to Hell" are further apart than "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "there is no God, and the universe developed through chance and emergent patterns."<p>Calvinism had _huge_ practical consequences -- in social policy, it's the difference between ensuring that the poor are fed and sheltered, and kicking them into the street; and you can only imagine what it meant for the laws of war...<p>Edit: And the joke you mention is only too recognizable, but it's more like the Catholicism-and-Orthodoxy situation, where it's a matter of tribal loyalties more than views of the world...