(November 19, 2014 at 1:08 pm)Godschild Wrote: Justice requires that if someone accepts Christ as their savior and receives eternal reward, then justice requires an eternal punishment for eternally unforgiven sin against a Holy and Righteous God. This means there are no other choices to be given, there is a limit to what can be offered when the requirements are so specific. Seeing now how this is not blackmail, if hell still bothers you I would think you would want to find out truly why.(Bolding mine, for emphasis)
This implies that god has no freedom to act of his own accord. I cannot imagine a scenario in which god is required to do something because he has no choice, or where he is limited in what he can do. He is god, and no other being can force him to do anything he does not wish to do. Any action he takes is good by definition, because god is above all other beings and thus not limited by their morals or standards.
God could have resolved the issue of sin any number of ways. The simplest would have been to offer outright forgiveness to those who sought it sincerely. Or to take Adam and Eve's lives as payment for sin and started over. Or even change human ethical and moral laws to absolve them of wrongdoing. There is literally no choice that was not available to god. You can say that he chose to offer himself/his son as a sacrifice in order to redeem mankind and that is what he chose, and you can say that you find his actions just and perfect. But I don't accept that he had no choice, or was required to take that route, or that his options were limited. And I think his chosen solution is convoluted and does not make much sense, considering all of the other options on the table.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould