Originally posted by Darfius
I only said that because you said all we did was suffer. If I or anyone else isn't suffering, it invalidates your claim.
As far as the suffering in other places, you're right, it's despicable. But I don't see how it follows logical ...[text shortened]... ld have fallen...like Satan. And guess what, Satan can't repent.
Free will can be beautiful or it can be monstrous. But God WOULD be a monster if He didn't give us free will. But the fact that He did is a testament to His uncomparable love for us.
When God gave humans free will, did God know what some of the monstrous outcomes would be? Or did he take a risk, and it just didn’t turn out the way God would’ve liked?
Free will is paradoxical: one the one hand, it means we
get to choose; on the other hand it means that we
have to choose. Every day we are faced with constrained choice under conditions of uncertainty in just about all aspects of our lives. Existentially, it is an “inescapable freedom.” Even if I choose to unquestioningly obey some outside “authority,” (and many people do) I still had to make that choice. I value my free will, but then what sensible choice do I have? We are not given the choice of whether or not we have such “free will;” we may know what it is like to be stripped of our freedom by human oppression, but do we know what it would be like if humanity as a whole did not have free will?
I don’t think a single one of the major religions pictures “paradise” (heaven) as a place where humans will retain and be able to exercise free will (if I’m wrong on that let me know). So one can fairly ask if free will is something God has done
for us or
to us.