Heaven and The Problem of Evil

[Ryantology]

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.

Disregarding hell, the fact that there is an incentive to make any of the choices, plus no option to simply abstain without consequence, is compulsion.

[Coffee Jesus]

If there is a transformation, why didn't God just make us like that in the first place?

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

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.

So God programs us with this unpredictable thing called free will. If we love him anyway, one of two things must be true.
1: We loved him purely out of chance.
2: We loved him because that love was in our nature.
If it's 1, we can turn against God at any moment unless he decides to take our free will away. If he takes free will away, the love is no longer consensual.
If it's 2, the test was completely unnecessary.

[RobbyPants]

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.

Why do we have to be able to make the choice to harm each other to show that we love God? I'm not saying that it couldn't be indicative. I'm fine with the notion that if we love each other, we're showing that we love God, but it's not the only way.

I mean, sure, one way I can show my wife I love her is by not harming our children, but there are other ways I can show her. If God's goal is "show me you love me", he could have devised a test that didn't involve people getting murdered and raped. This goes double in that people nominally passing the test are still vulnerable to being murdered or raped. The fact that he could have found this out without suffering, yet chose not to means that either

• he doesn't care if we suffer, or
  
• he wants us to suffer.
  

Regardless of whether or not he needs to know if we love him, he's totally fine with unnecessary suffering. That's why heaven runs counter to any defense of the problem of evil/suffering.