Calvinism is a man conceived religion that came out of the twisted mind of the tyrant John Calvin in the mid 1500"s.
Calvinism is nothing at all but "Reformed" Augustinian doctrine. The belief that everything is predestined and its ancillary doctrines are all based on the idea that God is immutable, a belief that Augustine of Hippo learned from Plato and later imported into the Catholic church having used the Classics to interpret the bible.
Calvinism is self defeating. It requires that you believe things about God and his Son Jesus Christ that will damn you to hell. All through the Old Testament and into the New Testament, God's people are saved and justified by faith, Ephesians 2:8. The word "Faith" means to rely upon or to trust in. It is not humanly possible to have faith in a God that predestinates people to hell before they are born for no reason. Worse yet, It is not possible to have faith in a Christ that only atones for some sins, but not all sins. Calvinism makes Jesus Christ a failure and God an unjust, unmerciful sinner.
I'd almost entirely agree with everything you said here. I'd be a little more precise but the gist of this is correct. Given your stated definition of faith, it is clearly possible for people to have faith in Calvin's version of God. What is not possible is to make any sense of it but if you're being irrational, which Calvinists openly and proudly are, then who needs anything to make sense, right? Indeed, Calvinists believe that one's willingness to believe that which does not make sense is what faith and piety is!
Biblically, faith has to do with accepting the substantive evidence of things that you cannot see and putting your hope in that which the evidence testifies to. That is what the author of Hebrews is communicating when he writes "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In spite of the way the sentence is constructed in English, he isn't saying, as the Calvinist would have you believe, that faith itself is the evidence. This is born out not only by simple common sense but the whole of the scriptures as they constantly implore the reader to "reason together" with God and to "diligently seek Him with all your heart and mind" and to "judge rightly", etc.
Man is a sinner without works. We don't have to sin to prove that we are sinners. We are born into sin, Romans 5:12. It is not our fault that we are sinners, its Adam's fault. But its our fault if we don't accept Christ as our savior. Calvinism does away with God's judgment. If God has already predestinated people to heaven and to hell then what good is a judgment? Calvinism is anti-Gospel and anti-Christ. Jesus claims to be the savior of the whole world, John 12:47. Salvation has been provided for everyone, Hebrews 2:9. But nothing is ours until it is received by faith, John 1:12.
This part is where I think you make a significant error and end up accepting a most pernicious portion of the very doctrinal system you're arguing against, namely Calvinism's (originally Augustine's) doctrine of original sin. The doctrine of original sin is flatly wrong and it is wrong for the same reason you've already rightly rejected Calvinism, namely because, if it were true, it would mean that God is unjust. The fact that God is not unjust (forgive the double negative) is, by itself, proof that anyone who accepts the doctrine of original sin as true has made an error.
To be clear, I am not disputing the existence of what Paul called "the flesh" and it is entirely undeniable that we have inherited this "flesh" from Adam. In fact, it is clear that this fleshly sinful aspect of our nature is passed to us from our father and not passed through the mother. This is how Christ could be born of a woman and not inherit this broken and rebellious aspect of human nature. And so, yes, Adam broke something that has been passed to all mankind but there is an important distinction that separates an acknowledgement of this biblical fact from the doctrine of original sin which teaches not only that we inherit the flesh from Adam but goes well beyond that and says that we are born guilty of sin and that we are, in effect, held guilty before God, not because of any sin we have committed but because of the sins of our ancestor and that if we do not get saved that we will be punished in Hell forever because of Adam's sin. This is absolutely false and even blasphemously so. Such a belief cannot survive even a cursory, surface reading of Ezekiel chapter 18 (i.e. the entire chapter), which is where God Himself tells Israel to stop teaching people this exact idea. God DOES NOT hold us guilty for the sins of our father - period.
Ezekiel 18:19 “Yet you say, ‘Why should the son not bear the guilt of the father?’ Because the son has done what is lawful and right, and has kept all My statutes and observed them, he shall surely live. 20 The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
Further, to whatever extent the flesh separated us from God, that problem was fixed by Christ when He died on the cross, which is really the whole subject being discussed in Romans 5. In other words, God can justly refrain from outright condemning Adam's race because of Christ's death.
Romans 5:18 Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.
So, Romans 5 teaches us that the doctrine of original is false from several directions. Before the law sin was not imputed (that kills original sin by itself), after the law sin was imputed but not before the age of accountability (likely the age of 20 - see Deuteronomy 1:39 and Numbers 14:29-30) and then Christ undoing the entire problem by virtue of His own death.
So, to sum this up, when rejecting Calvinism, reject it all (i.e all of its distinctive doctrines). These ideas are much older than Calvin and have spread in a hundred different ways throughout a great deal of Christian dogma. It helps a lot to understand that Calvin wasn't the source of most of his doctrines but is merely credited with them because he wrote a lot of this stuff down. The source is Plato with Aristotle's teachings about an immutable god and the fountain head for these ideas in Christianity was Augustine who all but worshiped at the feet of Aristotle and Plato before being shown how to interpret the bible in light of the Classics and then become a Christian who formulated his own doctrine based on that Classical interpretation.
Clete
