Heaven and The Problem of Evil

[Neo-Scholastic]

I think its been made clear already. Love is a consentual relationship. Love that is instinctual or compelled is not true love.

That's not what consent means. I could see what you meant if the threat of hell was off the table, but it isn't.

If an employer offers a woman to have sex or he'll fire her, that's considered coercion and is not consensual. If someone threatens to kill a woman unless she lets him have sex wit him, it's considered rape and is not consensual.

If God tells me that I should love him, but if I don't, he'll have me tortured for infinity years, that is considered coercion and is not consensual.

In life you choose to either love the Lord and neighbor OR yourself and the world.
If you love the Lord He empowers you to overcome sin and purge yourself of evil desires you freely but mistakenly nurtured. This process of regeneration is called either deliverance or victory.

Free choice is never taken away. Good spirits that have left behind sinful desires use their freedom to choose various ways of doing good.

You're stating that we have to be willing to hurt each other in order to prove that we love God, then after we pass that test, then he transforms us so that we have a sinless existence in heaven. Your approach literally says that we have evil and suffering on this world because God wants friends that love him.

That sounds incredibly narcissistic and callous.


"I have created you so that you may love me. You don't have to love me, but you should. You can demonstrate your love by loving each other... but you don't have to. You just should.

Hey! All that murder and rape is terrible and you shouldn't do it! I can't believe you're doing it! Oh no! I'm not going to stop it, but I guess you failed the test and don't love me. I'm glad I was able to figure that out."



Edit:
I thought of a better analogy for why this makes no sense to me. Basically, it seems like you're saying that God can't create white paint without first creating grey paint and then running it through a centrifuge to get all the black out. Why can't he just make white? You already admitted that it can exist. It can even exist without sin. Why does it have to reject evil? Why can't it just not have evil? If those sinless people are capable of love, why did they have to be capable of murder first to be capable of love? If free will is so important to this, why can't the choices be love or indifference? Why does the choices have to be "love God" or "kill fred"?

Heaven is where you live in the presence of God among those that also love Him. Hell is where people voluntarily apart from God. The torture doesn't come from God. It comes from one's own "burning" lusts, living in the smoke and darkness of self delusions among others that think nothing of using others to satisfy their own desires. There is no compulsion.