Simple question?

Time to defend free will

First, deny it:
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/christianity_freewill.html

Everyone should take an hour or two and read that whole website.

The story of Christianity is very real and I think that makes it truly valuable. I suggest you read the Gospels again to see the price that Jesus paid in His passion and death. He truly died and suffered and cried out on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me..." You are missing two very important things - Jesus was fully human and fully God. You are also missing how profound it is that God would enter into our suffering and experience pain, loneliness, abandonment, hatred, and death.

Quote: FrGamble

You are also missing how profound it is that God would enter into our suffering and experience pain, loneliness, abandonment, hatred, and death.

Rather than creating it just for us to
experience all those things? How big
of him to lower himself to our level,
is that what you mean?

Good grief.

Quote: Evenbob

Rather than creating it just for us to
experience all those things?

Remember why we experience these things, they were not created by God.

Quote: FrGamble

You are also missing how profound it is that God would enter into our suffering and experience pain, loneliness, abandonment, hatred, and death.

More evil than profound, I would think.

Assuming god has watched children being tortured, knowing he could interfere but doesn't, it's an odd thing to consider.

Would you praise a man who said he could interfere in the torture of a child, but chose not to?

We'll assume for the sake of argument god has interfered, but clearly he doesn't in plenty of cases.

Well with the question of Free Will we have certainly left behind any simple questions. I can't tell you how disappointed I am in Dalex's link which I found completely unhelpful and poorly done. Imagine a discussion on Free Will without any discussion on Molinism or Middle Knowledge or the role of Grace?!? Again this poor satanist has showed not only a very bad interpreter of Scripture but really unable to discuss with credibility the teachings of Augustine, Aquinas, or even the ancient and modern philosophers in regards to this very complicated and important issue. He does seem to grasp the Protestant reformers notion of the denial of free will, but even there does a poor effort in explaining it. I recommend we start another thread to talk about the concept of free will.

rxwine your question is a valid one. I wonder if you would suggest that God would remove the free will of the abuser in order to stop the torture of a child? Would you then go so far as to willingly volunteer to give up your free will and that of everyone in the worlds in order to create a perfect world? What would that leave us with? Is there perhaps another way in which the man would receive eternal justice for his actions freely chosen? If you want to keep free will but remove God then the man is free to do what he wills to the child without perhaps any consequences. If you remove free will and God than you remove the possibility of moral judgments upon the man's actions.

Quote: FrGamble

rxwine your question is a valid one. I wonder if you would suggest that God would remove the free will of the abuser in order to stop the torture of a child? Would you then go so far as to willingly volunteer to give up your free will and that of everyone in the worlds in order to create a perfect world? What would that leave us with? Is there perhaps another way in which the man would receive eternal justice for his actions freely chosen? If you want to keep free will but remove God then the man is free to do what he wills to the child without perhaps any consequences. If you remove free will and God than you remove the possibility of moral judgments upon the man's actions.

You could probably guess how I resolve this if you thought about my general position.

In your world, there is a guy up in the booth (so to speak) and everything that happens has to include him. So, you're in a position having to explain why things happen while he overlooks.

In mine, the booth is empty. No one could interfere from that perspective anyway. Stuff happens. Rocks may fall and squash you for no reason at all. Some people are bad. The only thing I question is how to keep people like I described from doing what they do in the first place. I blame that person, or whatever it is that makes him tick, or mentally ill, if that's the case. But I don't have to consider why an all loving god lets him do what he does, or for whatever reason stops the next person like him. To me the world acts more like random events would, not like an all powerful creator with a plan.

...anyway, I kinda of feel l let you off the hook with your answer. I'm sure you wouldn't praise a man who watched a child being tortured and did nothing, but you praise a god who does so?

You can still answer why you would do that if you wish.

Quote: pew

That is correct. Except for the protection racket part. God doesn't charge for the privilege.

Is your life not valuable to you?

Quote: FrGamble

Such is the risk of truly loving others and giving them free will. Again God could have created you and me as robots forced to do His will but I for one am glad He gave us the gift of freedom so that we could truly love and act.

And yet you use up your free will in non-sequiturs dressed in lofty rhetoric.

Does Jehovah have free will? At times he doesn't seem to be able to help himself.

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It was not for their actions that these children died but because of the evil actions of others.

Armed forces these days know they'll kill a lot of non-combatants and even supporters on the other side of enemy lines, yet they try to minimize this. They succeed seldom and often perform poorly, given the limitations of their tools and information. But they try.

Your Jehovah doesn't even try not to hurt the innocent.

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God did save those who were innocent by the way, don't think that death or sin gets the last say. Love and mercy always conquer evil.

Funny how there's no mention about it at all.

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Maybe they did and then kept ripping the newborn sons of Hebrew mothers away from them and throwing them in the Nile.

One thing history teaches us is not to take propaganda seriously. The Egyptians could be as brutal as anyone else in their time, including the Israelites themselves. But even brutality had limits back then. Unlike Jehovah, the pharaohs rarely committed atrocities against children specifically. Something so out of character would seem to be an outright lie.

Had this myth been set in Carthage, whose gods enjoyed the blood of children, I'd believe it. Alas, Carthage did not exist by the time this myth was invented.

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I think you finally correctly understand an aspect of the Exodus story.

I've always understood it, or at least since I questioned its legitimacy as history. It's the attempt by a chronically weak nation to paint itself as superior, by means of being the chosen people of the cruelest, baddest, meanest, nastiest god around. If ancient people could be brutal, you should see what their gods were capable of! And Jehovah trumped them all.

Seen from the outside, perhaps the best description of this cruel, all-powerful deity is, as Tennyson suggested, "He is all fault who has no fault at all."

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I'm amazed at how you think God who uses a story about a fictional man named Job to teach us all that He is present to us still in our suffering and to hold out hope and persevere in difficult times is being a bastard.

The story that teaches us Jehovah will put a man through hell to make a point?

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I'm holding out hope that you will come to your senses, but it is requiring the patience of Job.

Does it scare you to think I can't come to my senses because I am fully sensible already?

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You continue to use this statement, but I'm not sure how it applies. Two things are going on in the saving action of Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection. First the fulfillment of the covenant of God by the perfect sinless life of Jesus.

Suppose you created a painting and hung it on your wall. one fine day you want to see it, but it's not quite as you remember it. You feel disappointed and hurt when you look at it. In a fit of anger, you tear it up and burn it. Would you call that a sin?

Is that not what Jesus did to a hapless fig tree, which was exactly as he/Jehovah made it?

It's a small thing, I admit it, but a deity acting in so petty a fashion while spouting new-agey, feel-good, generalities is very much to be feared.