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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
The answer would be that you are not being punished for Adam's specific sin. You inherited a sin nature which means your flesh and mind is easily prone towards sinful behavior, but that doesn't mean you are forced to commit sin. You must willfully consciously commit a sinful act. This is why there is no judgment or death penalty for people who don't have the mental capabilities to know that they are doing wrong like infants or mentally retarded people. God didn't make us sin. We do it ourselves.
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According to the story, when Eve at the forbidden fruit, it brought sin into the world. Before that, Adam and Eve were sinless. If there was such a thing as personal accoutability, which is what you were talking about in your previous post, I would also have been born sinless with no "inherited sinful nature" to push me into a sinful direction. I should have had the same opportunity to remain innocent and sin-free as Eve did. Instead, I am who and what I am because of an act of disobedience committed by some woman thousands of years ago.
God even said that humans would be cursed unto the fourth generation - and obviously longer.
It should also be pointed out that God supposedly created the human species, meaning that whatever predispostion we have for sin, God put there. Humanity didn't develop that on our own. We were still a child-race when Eve ate that fruit.
And ... I disagree that we have to willfully and consciously commit sin. No doubt that many have unknowingly sinned or have been forced into having to choose one sin over another, thus removing the freedom not to sin. Christianity teaches that no one is free of sin; no one can live a sin-free life which means no matter how hard I try, I cannot avoid sinning, and that makes us robotic sinners.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Free will still involves choice. We choose to sin.
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This is only applicable if one of the choices is to not sin. According to scripture, that's impossible. Only Jesus supposedly had a sin-free life. No matter how hard we try, no matter what choices we make, we will eventually sin, and probably more than once. Ergo, even if we choose not to sin, we will still sin.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
If God made us incapable of committing sin then we are back to a scenario of humans being programmed towards righteous. So why did God create humans? Because His desire is to have fellowship. Sin prevents that fellowship.
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If God wanted actual fellowship, then why NOT program us to lean toward righteousness? Does it really make sense to hate sin then create humanity with a predilection for sinful behavior? If I could create my own friends, I wouldn't imbue them with qualities I hate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
I'm saying the free will was always there. We can see that free will even existed in heaven because 1/3 of the angels decided to rebel against their creator. But it sounds like you think free will is only possible if it is available at a god-like level where we can choose our bodies, environment or final destination.
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But we don't have free will. The scripture even says as much. Like I keep trying to explain, the playing field here is not level. We are predisposed to sin, to choose the path that is often the most sinful of the various choices. However, part of that problem comes from the definition of sin. I've said multitudinous times that religion is, by and large, an anti-pleasure cult; this is a secondary* reason why religion has been so obsessed with sex. When the Bible was written, sex was probably the single-most enjoyable experience Bronze Age desert goatherders ever had. (That's even true for some modern dwellers, for some inexplicable reason).
Religion and deity worship has always been anti-pleasure and anti-worldliness because those things distract us from the cult. When you enjoy life, you don't need gods and religions and the strict, draconian rules, nor are you disenfranchised from society and thus -need- the cult for socialization. The idea behind sin is to keep people from having too much fun and not obeying the cult leaders (thus depriving them the power they want to have over you).
*The primary reason is demographic - to keep inheritance straight, to prevent assets of the tribe of Israel from falling into the hands of outsiders, to limit internecine fighting due to illigitemate children, etc.
One of the strongest insticts humans have is the avoidance of pain and the desire for pleasure. Religion has done its best to label as "sinful" anything that is pleasurable - from sex to eating to masturbation to the types of celebrations we have. In modern times, music, movies, books, television shows, and just about every form of entertainment conceivable has been criticized for being "sinful."
Of course we're going to lean toward fun and pleasure and not the melodramatic somberness of religious observance. The Epicureans had a much better outlook on life.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Beyond someone just having a severe mental defect, a person raised in any environment still has to consciousness choose to commit a wrongful act. A kid that joins a street gang still has to decide if stealing the old lady's purse is good or bad thing to do. Our sin nature makes us very selfish being. Even someone who dedicates their life to acts of charity probably wouldn't do it if it made them feel bad.
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I think the point I'm trying to make here is that, regardless of what we choose to do, we will always end up sinning. That pretty much negates free will. Of course, you think it has to do with the nature of God, but I think it has far more to do with the nature of cult leadership and power brokering.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
You can see the selfish part of sin nature even in an infant. For example, he or she doesn't care if mommy has to work two jobs. They will cry at 3am, and continue to cry or scream until desires are met. That's a part of sin nature, but the infant still has to grow up and consciousness make a decision to sin. That's where the free will comes in.
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Uh no ... infants aren't being selfish when they cry at 3am. It's because they can't get out of bed and go to the bathroom on their own. They can't feed themselves. They can't change themselves out of that dirty diaper they're rolling around in. But more importantly, an infant has no conception of the "other." Infants do not come into a solid awareness of other people AS people for a good number of years. An infant isn't even cognizent that his/her parents are even people, much less the fact that the parents have to get up and work, and an infant is even less aware of what time it is.
To even suggest that a baby is sinning because it is being selfish at 3am is .... well, all I can say is that this kind of reasoning makes me happy that I'm not religious, and I'll leave it at that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
Sorry, but I don't see where God directly created sin. He simply allowed the condition to exist where sin would be possible if the creation desired to rebel.
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Then where did the concept of sin come from if not from God? Back "In the Beginning" when God was still sitting alone in his "outside of the space-time continuum" abode contemplating the creation of light, did sin exist with him there? Because unless it did, God would have had to create the concept of sin along with everything else. It didn't just arrive on its own.
Since God created all of the rules (most of which are utter lunacy), God therefore created sin. After all, "sin" is only what God says it is. Sin is not a separate entity that exists independently of God and humans. Since humans aren't making the rules, then I guess the only other entity that could have created sin is you-know-who.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
The difference is the people who make it to heaven will be the ones who love God and desire a relationship with Him. They realize one day that sin only bring temporary pleasure at best, and long lasting consequences. The wealthiest people on this planet are often the most miserable.
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Well ... I know people like to make themselves feel better by assuming that the wealthiest people are often the most miserable. However, as someone who really does know what it's like to live in 3rd World poverty conditions (not as a missionary, mind you), I know that's a falsehood.
As for the rest of it, well ... my feeling on it is that, if there is a god and this god is truly the embodiment of love, whether or not we worship him and praise him and glorify his name won't matter in the slightest. It'll be what's in your heart that counts. Thus a good atheist has just as much chance of ending up in heaven as a good Christian. The restrictive rules, the exclusivity, and the rituals are all just the fluff of man-made religion.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
That's a pretty arrogant response considering you don't know what my future arguments will be. Disappointing to see your comments sink to the level of Nozz rhetoric.
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For me, this might be the single most frustrating element of theistic/deistic debate. It's as if Christians simply can't wrap their minds around what it really means to be all-powerful AND infallible at the same time. Sure, it is hard to grasp since it is well beyond our human experiences. Nonetheless, it's not impossible to understand.
The reason why you will never make an accurate analogy comparing humans to God is because you're comparing a being of very limited perception to a being who knows everything, can do anything, and cannot make a mistake.
My statement is not at all arrogant. It is a statement of fact - you will never be able to construct an accurate analogy that compares God with humans - especially if that analogy is an attempt to hold humanity to a higher standard than God. I can't construct one either, so if you think I was insulting your intelligence, that wasn't my intent. I'm saying that no one can do it.
Let's suppose God and some random person, John, are taking a physics test. Both God and John fail.
Well, John might have failed for any number of reasons. He didn't study. He's too dumb to understand the material. Maybe John is only 6 years-old and physics is way too advanced for him. Maybe John smacked his head on the way to the test and developed amnesia. Maybe John is German and the test was written in English. Maybe John fell asleep during the test. Maybe John has test anxiety. We could speculate all day without exhausting all of the possible reasons why John failed.
But ... why did God fail? Can you explain why or how an all-powerful, all-knowing, infallible God who actually created the laws of physics failed a physics exam? There is only ONE possibility - because God
wanted to fail it.
So why, then, would it make any degree of sense to -expect- John to get an A+ and then punish him for failing while letting God slide on his poor grade by pretending God isn't at all responsible?
Because that's precisely what Christians do. It's all humanity's fault - as if humanity, not God, created ourselves to be so prone to giving in to temptation.
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Originally Posted by jeffbase40
There is no God so all creation should have equal right to life including insects, but yet you don't see anything wrong with applying superior power over them.
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No one has ever said that a lack of a God means all forms of life are equal. Who ever said such a thing? You've created a strawman to make your argument work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
But you think it's wrong for God to be superior over us? Apparently so because apparently your crazy idea of a fair god would be to let you have eternal life and commit all the sin you want, consequence free.
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I think it is wrong for a God to hand us this long list of ridiculously strict rules knowing full well we can't ever follow them all - and get angry with us when we can't. Meanwhile, God bullies his way through the Old Testament murdering, drowning, afflicting people with plague and other curses, committing genocide and ordering others to commit genocide in his name, colluding with Satan, destroying cities, sending bears to tear apart children, and on and on.
THAT, to me, is wrong. Why should humanity be held to standards so high that even God can't live up to them? That's ridiculous - a concept so idiotic that only a human being could have thought it up.
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