Better reasons to quit Christianity

[Mister Agenda]

In order for love to exist, God had to grant Adam and Eve perfect free will. He knew they would fail, but determined He'd rather have a world of sin and love than a world of stoic robots. Can you explain to me what X% more resistance actually looks like?

It looks like saying no to a snake trying to get you to eat a magic fruit.

So this is what you think perfect free will is: Create two people without the knowledge of good or evil and put that knowledge in a magic fruit. Tell the people they can eat anything but magic fruit, but if they eat the magic fruit, they'll die that day. Pretend to leave them alone (assuming you're an omnipresent deity) with a talking snake that's going to try to get people who don't know right from wrong to eat the magic fruit. The snake sells it (by being truthful, but that's another story). One of them tries it and is so blown away that she wants to share it with the other one, who also tries it. Suddenly they've got guilt and shame. You pretend to come back and pretend not to know what they've been up to; like a parent who asks a question they already know the answer to, to see if their kid will lie about it. Yep, they DID eat the fruit, and get exiled and cursed for doing something they couldn't know was wrong before they did it, along with all their descendants, whose first crime is being born human.

If there was ever a story in the Bible that begs to be taken metaphorically, it's this one.

If you knowingly leave two toddlers alone with a shotgun and a psychotic killer, who is ultimately to blame if the kids shoot each other? Are you off the hook if you told them they could play with anything but the shotgun?

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Whether Adam and Eve were actual people, or symbolic of the human condition, I think you are assuming that God (if he exists) tried to make a race that would never turn against him, or against one another. You aren't asking a question, so I suppose you don't mind if I go back to asking them: If God's purpose is believed to be to create a race capable of love, is such love possible while eliminating the possibility of hate? Is it possible to create beings who are capable of loving God, or others and who are (at the same time) incapable of hating God, or others? (I am asking the question in the context of definition (3) of omnipotence, which was suggested previously in this discussion.)

I'm inclined to think that the people who wrote the story didn't mean for it to be taken literally. Clearly if Yahweh created humans and has something anywhere near close to the attributes ascribed to him, he was definitely NOT trying to make a race that would never turn against him or one another. That was clearly not his goal in making angels, either, given how that turned out. Yahweh would get the race he wanted, clearly one capable of not loving him or others.

Now it is logically possible to create people with free will who choose to love God and others, while not creating people with free will who choose not to love God and others, if it makes any logical sense for a precognitive being with such creative powers to create beings with free will at all. We might have a much lower population today if Yahweh arranged things that way, but it wouldn't be a logically impossible world.

'God really loves free will' is offered as an ad hoc explanation for the Problem of Evil, but it's got problems, the greatest of which is the implication that God really tried but this was the best he could do.