**********disclaimer: I do not have the answers***********

this is just my perspective. Let's pretend, you woke up the morning of your wedding and the happiness fairy was standing there and told you it was time for The Choice. She goes on to explain that before you get married you have the choice of giving your husband the ability to choose to love you, honor you, and remain committed to your for the rest of your lives or you could make life a lot less stressful and remove that pesky free will from his make up. He has no choice but to love, honor, and remain committed to you. It would actually be impossible for him to let you down or disappoint you in any way.

It is a hard choice, when you dig a little beneath the surface.

Plan B) You are guaranteed that he will treat you as the queen you are... but if he has no other choice is it as special? Are his actions that honor you as meaningful when you have a few years to realize, it is impossible for him to do anything else?

Plan A) Free Will. You know him very well and you know he will disappoint you in your marriage. He will, at times, say unkind things to you, he will sometimes be thoughtless in his actions, he will often be self centered. There is even a possibility that he might decide his secretary is more appealing than you, at least for a day - inother words he will fail you (and himself)

BUT - and here's the big but, when he does love you and honor you, and treat you as he should - it is infinitely more valuable to you because it is his choice to do so. There is no coercion (sp). He had the ability to go the other direction, but because of his love and commitment to you he has honored you.

anyway - that's my perspective. obedience and good behaviour is meaningless if there were no other option.

Bee-u-tiful. No one has ever explained it to me that way. Totally makes sense. My knee jerk response to the marriage fairy scenario is of course free will. Now, let me chew on this awhile and see what I can find that I don't like about it :lol:

The other side of the choice story is whether you want a life that is filled with meaning or a life that is filled with certainty. Meaning doesn't necessarily pay the bills, so to speak.

The story doesn't fly. God doesn't have needs or wants that are made clear in any part of the manual.

I always thought the story said God created us because he was lonely..? Loneliness is a need/want.

Cite please.

Here's problem #1 with the fairy scenario...She forgot to show me the outcomes, and since I am omnipotent I would already KNOW that if I chose free will, the little bastard would cheat on me, leave his underwear on the floor 12 inches from the laundry basket, and gamble our life savings away. If I was an all loving spouse, saying that I would love you no matter what, why would I send to to eternal damnation if you end up choosing to divorce me (which i knew you were going to do)? (merging the 2 scenarios) Sounds a bit vengeful to me. If God isn't vengeful or jealous, and is supposed to love us no matter what, why send us to hell if we choose not to believe in him/break his rules? my head is starting to hurt

*frantically looking for Bible*

There's got to be one around here somewhere...

*keeps looking*

Of course there's the 'S/He made us so we could worship Him/Her' theory. What an ego! :cool:

Ok--Revelation 4:11 says God created us for His pleasure, so, yeah, you could argue that S/He created us to fuck with us. The Bible says a lot of things. Things that mostly contradict other things. It's a mystery locked in a cunundrum wrapped in an enigma. Or something like that.

That's because you're making the prime mistake when pondering God, thinking.

That's why I used the "made clear" qualifier in my statement.

So you get a choice between a minivan and a sports car? ;)

After reading all the other comments in this thread, I think UT's is the best still. :thumbsup:

Actually, there are very few (if any) contradictions when taking the statement in question in context in the bible that cannot be explained logically.

Please understand I in no way am stating they don't exist, lest the heathens inundate me with examples, just that MOST if not all of them can be explained with Eisegesis. (sp)


and TS, I dont think that you have to check intellectualism at the door of your place of worship. My biggest hurdle is my tendency to have to think things through, and for things to make sense. I can't, no matter how hard I try, have "blind faith", but rather, I have to have reasons why I believe like I do.

Some people can have blind faith, but I can't. And there's a passage in the bible that says specifically DON'T have blind faith, but have reasons why you believe like you do.

I don't think anyone should have blind faith in anything.

Says the woman who thinks the earth is 6000 +/- years old...

Yes, I believe that, but not because it's been simply fed to me, but because I looked at the evidence science has, and I've come to a different conclusion than evolutionists have.

It's not blind faith. In fact, it's precisely the opposite of blind faith, because I have reasons to believe the way I do about the age of the earth.

Blind faith is believing in evolution as a theory of origin...

;)