Originally posted by drevill
reply to post by Greatest I am
Ha ha wow.
Hiding something are we?
You show a complete lack of understanding of the Christian faith but choose to attack it on that erroneous premise.
As you mention Gods plan it is one of salvation. He created the angels with evident free will. He created man and personally feel that he was not given free will. Please read on and I'll tell you why.
Yes the fall in Eden was engineered as was everything else. Christ his son was God in the flesh so no child sacrifice.
So why this whole man thing??? Well Angels have free will and God wants them to love him freely. The plan with man will show his righteousness in dealing with Lucifer and the rebelling angels. Once this is complete those that be live in Christ will be as the angels with free will and live in love with others without sin as Lucifer will not be around to tempt.
So man was and is and will be, first and foremost, a judgement tool against the fallen angels.
Some people will not like the fact that man was not the priority here.
Regards
edit on 6-10-2012 by drevill because: addition and typo
Satan was given dominion over man with the power to deceive us all and you see us as God's tool against our master somehow. Foolish at best that notion.
You indicate that God has a need for love and man as his tool.
Omni-max God has no needs. An all-powerful entity needs no helpers.
Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.
That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."
But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.
If all sin by nature then, the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin.
Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil is all human generated. Evil is our responsibility.
Much has been written to explain what I see as a natural part of evolution.
Consider.
First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created.
Evil then is only human to human.
As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.
Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil at all times.
Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.
This, to me, explains why there is evil in the world quite well.
Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, we should all see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us.
There is no conflict between nature and God on this issue. This is how things are and should be. We all must do what some will think is evil as we compete and create losers to this competition.
Regards
DL
----------------------------
Theistic evolution.
www.youtube.com.../c/6F8036F680C1DBEB
Tell us what happened to A & E the first time they used the free will you say they had and did their will and not God's will.
Regards
DL
edit on 8-10-2012 by Greatest I am because: (no reason given)


