Let me get this straight: God gave us free will, and that's why evil is done -- but he's NOT to be blamed?

Question

Hmm. Most of you seem willing to judge humans but not to judge God. I wonder why.
And LOL at NH Baritone!

@ gabrielbeware: I didn't thumbs-down you, somebody else did. Two somebodies, actually.

About this "test to determine whether we're worthy of heaven" -- that's BS, people. A loving father doesn't care what his children _deserve_, he just gives them everything he's got.

Answer 1

Yup, you pretty much nailed it. God is perfect, God doesn't do anything wrong, God is the pinacle of perfection. The fact that, if he exists, he's directly responsible for every disease, every evil act, every act of terror, pain or horror means nothing .. he must NOT be blamed.

Because that wouldn't grant them a free ticket to their cloudy afterlife.

Nothing like living in fear, huh?

Edit: And yet, not even 10 posts into the subject, and some STILL don't get it.

Listen up. Travelling on speculation, god made us, correct? God then made us to be able to choose do to evil. Hence, God is responsible for that evil.

I'll even provide an analogy for those who are having trouble with this. Let's say I'm a computer programmer. I create this awesome program, but I throw in a side program that allows the system to crash from time to time. So, when it crashes, am I not at fault, or is the system? I would be, I made it that way.

If your God created people with the capacity to do evil, then your God is to blame. How much simpler can that be?

Answer 2

Well, I'm not an expert on Religeon or God or anything, but it seems to me that free will is not "why evil is done"- it is what gives some the choice to do evil. Having the choice is what makes us seperate from God and gives us the ability to follow or not follow him. If he didn't give us free will then what would make us different than the trees or a rock or something in terms of praising God?

Answer 3

Evil is a negative, a vacuum. It's a nothing where something should be. Evil is ignorance, and it dissolves when knowledge fills the empty space in our souls. Of course we have free will, but there is no biblical "god" who gave it to us. By nature of being independent beings we automatically are free spirits.The Eden story is a metaphor about consequences and knowledge, like most prehistoric myths. The biblical "god" is fiction.

Answer 4

He's definitely responsible for evil. However, look at the alternative - He could have easily made us without the capability of doing evil. We would have just happened to be automatons devoid of conscience. (If there's no evil, then good might as well be meaningless. It wouldn't even need a label if there were no alternative.)

Answer 5

God created evil to give us free will, without evil we wouldn't have a choice to do bad or good so he wouldn't know who was truly worthy of heaven.

Answer 6

God gave us freewill because He desired to be in a relationship with mankind. man chose to disobey, and the consequence of that action introduced sin into the world. Satan is fighting agianst God, so of course he propogates evil. Remember, mankind had the freewill to choose to live in obedience, and therefore harmony with God. Man ate the fruit from the tree of the knowlege of good and evil, and that disobedience started this all.

Answer 7

Issues of faith cannot always be explained by common logic. If so, there would be no religions at all as within each religion, there are doctrines that, using common logic, make no sense whatsoever.

Many great things have been inspired by religion and done in its name. So are some pretty evil things. Let's us do our best to encourage / increase the former and discourage/ eliminate the latter.

Answer 8

This is why God is not to blame for the evil that is done. The leader of our church made this statement to them, when asked a similar question, "I teach the people correct principles and they govern themselves."

This ‘something’ called free agency is ‘everything’. We fought for it. We are divinely entitled to it, offered it by a loving Father in heaven. We are responsible for it. How we use it is up to us. And it is no one else’s ‘fault’ if we choose to use it unwisely. The responsibility rests squarely on our own shoulders. Each one of us, individually. Free to choose. We come to know that the responsibility rests squarely on our shoulders.

Tough love, as most of us understand it, is having wisdom enough to withhold expected or demanded help from a friend or family member not because you fail to love them, but because you do love them.

It is, to refuse to rob a loved one of the benefits of a lesson learned in the school of hard knocks.

Understand that “While we are free to choose, once we have made those choices, we are tied to the consequences of those choices.”

Many parents with the best of intentions have made the same error, but the fortunate ones have discovered, before it was too late, that love is not just gifts and protection but at the right times, the withholding of both. Learning how to truly love a person or a people requires that we abandon socialistic, compassionate, conservative or effeminate schemes which shield loved ones and collective society from every bruise, bump, storm, or roadblock along the road of life. For complete love is not blind and not stupid, but accepts people as they are, and administers to their needs with wisdom, a wisdom which dictates that sometimes the most compassionate answer to a plea for help is a firm and unflinching, ‘No!

Moreover, we live in an age when many simply refuse to feel responsible for themselves.

Some seek to brush aside conscience, refusing to hear its voice. But that deflection is, in itself, an act of choice, because we so desired.

Like it or not, therefore, reality requires that we acknowledge our responsibility for our desires. It is up to us.

God will facilitate, but He will not force.

You say everyone is judging man but not God.
Let me ask you this. If you are a parent, you have taught your kids how they should live and all the rules and explained the REWARDS AND CONSEQUENCES of obeying or disobeying them, EVEN IF CERTAIN THINGS WOULD KEEP THEM FROM RETURNING HOME AGAIN. Now you sat back and let your kids make all their OWN decisions, if they disobey those rules ARE YOU TO BLAME FOR THEIR CHOICES? Is it YOUR FAULT THEY DISOBEYED?

Answer 9

Lets take this a step further. According to all the faithful, God gave us the ability to choose between good and evil, and hopes that we'll choose him. Problem is, that the ability to choose between good and evil....the UNDERSTANDING of the difference between good and evil, came from the tree that God FORBADE ADAM AND EVE TO EAT FROM. Did He want us to know the difference between good and evil or not? If yes, why forbid adam and eve to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? If not, why MAKE the fruit to begin with? As a test?? He could have tested their obedience by forbidding them to eat a tomato. Instead, he MADE THE FRUIT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL. Obviously therefore, to anyone with an IQ over 74, He intended us to know good and evil, and therefore intended us to eat from the tree. We weren't 'punished' by being expelled from the garden, we were expected to leave from the beginning.

Answer 10

Actually, the evidence is accumulating that the sense of free will is an illusion. Much of what happens to us and within us determines our behavior. Our biology has influence on the environment, so there is a complex feedback loop, but free will appears to be a diminishingly accepted phenomenon.

Then you get to the question, does evil exist? I suggest that evil does not exist, but rather only helpful and non-helpful actions and omissions.

Then there's the question of God's existence.....

Oh, my goodness! I seem to have inadvertently argued with just about every part of your question, including this one: I'm not straight, I'm gay.
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