Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?

[Tonus]

1) Exactly. Do you think I am suggesting that it is not similar with god? God knows our suffering, and so he decides to save us.

I am questioning the method. If God had any capacity for sympathy, he would not have needed to experience all of human suffering in order to feel compelled to do something about it. And the way he has gone about it since then would indicate that he doesn't really understand the concepts of sympathy or mercy.

4) Did it look that easy? In fact, it looked like a failure of a life... ending in a humiliating execution.

How was it a failure? Jesus did not sin. He proved his point. The humiliating execution was something he visited upon himself. Nothing stopped him from simply discarding the human body and returning to godhood.

5) Exactly! He promises you that your own suffering and death, in whatever form they take, will be followed by a similar refreshed return.

But he could have avoided that suffering and death for me altogether by making a more sensible decision from the beginning.

6) Says who?

The men who beat Jesus up and hung him on a cross will not be sent to hell for eternity?

8) Because in that tiny blink of a half a day of torment, every single torment in creation was visited upon him. Now, through those sufferings, we have a connection with the divine. "The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" -Romans 8:17

That's a bit of a stretch, IMO. I don't see how this implies that Jesus suffered every torment in creation. Nor do I see how such an over-the-top experience would provide a balanced perspective on what it's like to be a human being. And I still don't see how any of it was necessary for God to provide humanity with a better fate.

9) He already knew that we were in a bad state before Christ. It was exactly because he knew this that he sent his Son into the world as a human. His knowledge of our tragedy is why he came to save us from it.

I would expect him to have knowledge of our tragedy, since he authored it. From that perspective, it's not impressive that he saved us from it. Or that he will, eventually.

10) To show us that his transcendence does not mean that he is far from us when we suffer. He is close to us always, and especially when we suffer and sin. So close in fact, that he endures that suffering and the effects of those sins himself.

I realize I'm repeating myself here, but he didn't have to endure these things in order to be close to us. He created us, right? He knows us inside and out. Our condition is the direct result of a curse he placed upon all of humanity as penance for the crime two other people committed and paid the penalty for. We shouldn't be suffering at all.

14) That's the good news. He's fixed things, and that fix has spilled over into our reality.

Maybe he claimed to have fixed things, but they don't look fixed. People still suffer, people --and nature-- still visit horrors upon one another, people still walk that wide path to destruction, and so on. This could have been stopped right from the beginning, but instead there were centuries of suffering followed by the implementation of a bizarre fix that hasn't taken effect two thousand years later. We live in a world that resembles one where there is no god, and explanations like the ones above sound like attempts to account for that. It's just not convincing to me.