@kellyjay said
Love and hate are not necessarily one against the other as good and evil are. True unhypocritical love will always hate evil for the harm it does to the one loved. Always seeking the best for the one loved is always good, always seeking their best. It then becomes no surprise that God showed us His love for us while we were His enemies seeking our best. He laid down His li ...[text shortened]... he sake of us, for our good due to our need, God is love, it isn't just what He does, but who He is.
Did Jesus really lay down his life? Did he not say that he would only be gone for 3 days?
And if Jesus is God, according to the Trinity concept, why would God need to be so dramatic in the act of forgiveness?
What was forgiven in the act of laying down and resting for 3 days? All sins, past, present, and future? And if God created us, did he not create us with an inherent defect, one which disposes us to sin?
And what of the original sin? If man has been given freewill, supposing a will to choose between good and evil, then why prohibit man from having the knowledge of good and evil? To properly exercise the gift of freewill in choosing to be good or evil, is not knowledge of what is good and what isn't, necessary? Therefore, God should not have prohibited the symbolic first man and first woman from gaining the knowledge from the "damned" tree. I suspect God, the Father, sent out his children into the physical world to learn, the hard way, just how good we have it in the spiritual world, the Garden of Eden. As it's said, we do not know what we have until we lose it. By losing the body we know we have a soul?
I believe that Jesus, like Socrates, allowed themself to be executed so as to not appear to be hypocrites, by not be willing, personally, to live and die as they taught. Besides, both knew that the soul lives on after physical death.