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Originally Posted by Gitmo
I’m not a Bible thumper by any means and I know I’m not supposed to use the bible as a reference for this thread but the book of Job somewhat explains this topic. I guess if you look at God as all powerful and all knowing how could we possibly even begin to understand the things that he does and does not do.  |
Slap that together with Paul's writings to a church in Rome and you get more than you need to understand this dliemma/paradox/etc.
doesn't make much sense when you read them in context of modern renditions of "free" will.
If, however, you begin to understand that humans are now free to act according to their nature, and that their nature is inherintly sinful, then you would begin to think that that humans will only do "evil" or "bad" things if left to their own desires. That is, free will means that humans are left to wallow in their sinfulness, not that they can indvidually elect between a good course of action or a bad one. In fact, the scriptures and history are overflowing with examples of how this operates.
Then we have the gem that people will only do good things when they have the gift of grace. Although, some ungifted people will do good things, those things aren't truly good to the deity and are often resulting from one looking out for one's own interest...which wouldn't be construed as objectively or pure good (altruism). Branches of philosophy have battled out how and why people practice altruism.
This modern view of humankind is in contrast to the pre-sin view of the perfect creation: adam (man, being, whathaveyou). Whereas this perfect being, as such, had perfect freedom of the will, exactly like the deity possesses free will, that is, a will to do that which is in accordance with his own will. That's a bit muddles, but the gist is that a perfect being is bound to act according to how the deity sees fit. In short, the deity can not possibly do wrong since the deity controls the definitions and can not act abrasive to its own nature and desires.
So how could the first perfect being "sin"?
My only resolution of this comes from the notion that the deity intentionally split the perfect being, as explained in the book of origins (while allowing it to be a mythological explanation--and this labeling it as "mythology" in no way detracts from the factual truth or non-truth of the events, but merely clarifies that the text is a way of understanding human history). The deity split the perfect being into two: a man and a woman, thereby rendering the aforementioned perfect being into two imperfect entities. And then the course of history was set, what with eve's inability to only consider the will of the deity as her own, being an individual now. and adam not with his wife, doing his individual desires in some other spot, unable to counteract the disasterous effects of her personal choice to violate the will of her creator and the other half of her being.
And so we learn the lesson of our inconsequentiality, and our individualistic tendencies when left alone, both when we fail to take into consideration the motives and needs of the group (which would be extremely important to a tiny ethnic group in nomadic times) and the needs of the creator (also important if one were to understand this strain of religion as socially cohesive and necessary to the continued existence of the group that we now understand as "jews" or "hebrews")
and then we wonder just why in the hell all this happened, why didn't Adam stay as adam rather than Adam and Eve. And for that we have to look at a bunch of stuff, but we can really get an answer right from one of the most prolific writers and translators of this worldview into the gentile consciousness--Paul.
dang, I gotta go. This is a lot to read anyway, but basically paul claims that people will just act like sinful creatures, as he did, until grace comes upon them and compels them to see the truth. This is all for the deity's glory.