On Hell and Forgiveness

[SteveII]

How can god possess libertarian free will if he is bound by his nature? If god isn’t free to consider what is or isn’t just and then act accordingly, then he isn’t actually free.

Libertarian Free Will just means your choices are not causally determined by something outside yourself. Having a nature/characteristic that governs your actions/thoughts does not in any way impinge on free will. Every conceivable conscious being has such influences/limits.

I have no idea what perfect justice is.

While I appreciate your humility in this answer, it seems to pose further problems. If humans can’t or don’t know what perfect justice is, then we have no rationale to support the notion that god’s actions are perfectly just. We must simply accept the bible’s claim of it at face value. But more importantly, if god is incapable of making cogent determinations about what is or isn’t perfectly just, then there exists no rationale for his actions. Without any rational his actions are essentially arbitrary, and the claim, ‘god is perfectly just’ simply hangs there as a bare, and meaningless assertion.

Human's ability to know what perfect justice is in no way affects, at all, that God would have perfect justice. The God we are talking about is conceived as the greatest possible being: the objective standard of things like Justice, Love, and Morality. God's rationale for his actions are founded in that concept (along with omniscience) and therefore cannot be judged by those that are no so equipped.  If God exists, his nature is the objective standard of all those qualities.  If God exists, it is incoherent to say that God may or may not be just--because you cannot ground such a determination in anything objective. 

I heard a good example this week. For three years people followed Jesus around watching him do miracles. Thousands of people saw and even more heard. In 1 Cor 15:6, we hear that there were more than 500 people that actually saw him alive following his crucifixion. In Acts 2, there were only 120 that believed enough to be wait in Jerusalem as Jesus had told them to do. The point is that being shown miracles, signs, and even the ontological argument, does not get a person's heart to the right place to meet God. It is almost always a process.

Or...that as time passes, people’s credulity becomes more reserved, which is perfectly rational. In any case, I’m not talking about Jesus performing miracles as a man who lived thousands of years ago, and the fallout of that. I’m talking about god revealing himself without any intermediaries, indisputably, to every person on the planet who ever lived and ever will live.  This is the only action that can logically follow from his expressed goal. 

You are talking about the concept of what should we expect God to be like or to do. To answer that, we can't start with, "well, if I were God, I would...". We have to infer our list from revealed information, the concept of God, and the natural world. 

1. From the concept of God, we get he is worthy of worship. This is a foundational concept. If a very powerful being exists and he is not worthy of worship, he is not God. 

2. Is it not the case that God is hidden from everyone. There are countless testimonies of people's experience of God. There are no defeaters for these billions of experiences so the claim really is: God is hidden from me when atheist demand or surmise that God would show himself if he were real.

3. God provided substantial evidence of himself in the person of Jesus and the events of the early first century. This is exactly what you seem to be asking for. God himself lived among us for 33 years and did many miraculous things culminating in the death and resurrection--with has huge existential meaning in both salvation and the possibility of a personal relationship through the Holy Spirit. 

4. God provides substantial evidence of himself in nature that is easily reflected on and has been for millennium. Why is there something rather than nothing? 

5. God gives everyone a sense of himself: Sensus divinitatis 

6. Every bit of evidence suggests that God's purposes are personal in nature. God desires a personal relationship with each person--NOT recognition that he exists. To treat the question does God exist as a science question to be analyzed is to miss the point. Experiencing God is not a proposition that can be examined outside each person. The end purpose of God is to bring your mind to a place where it desires a relationship with God. This necessarily takes time and a different path for each person. To say it another way, knowing God exists is not the goal. Satan, demons, angels, etc. know God exists. 

Oh, come on now, Steve.  Don’t be obtuse.  If our consciousness continues infinitely beyond our physical death, then our ability to make choices is obviously also infinite.  God is the one inserting arbitrary restrictions and ultimatums here. Why is that?

Can a disembodied soul make choices? There are no inputs or outputs.

There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to start. First, what the heck does that even mean?  What is existence like for a disembodied soul with ‘no inputs or outputs’? Are you saying that human souls have no experience?  The concept alone seems incoherent to begin with.

Further, how could you possibly know that a disembodied mind cannot experience inputs and outputs? Where did you derive this knowledge from?  

You asked why is it too late to make a choice when we die? Why can't we make it afterwards? You picture a waiting room where we can sit around a conference table and discuss this with Peter and give him notice on your change of mind. When you die, you no longer have access to anything. How are you supposed to see, hear, process new thoughts, etc. without the hardware to run on? Am I correct? No one knows. Seem plausible to me. 

Last, isn’t god a disembodied mind? According to your faith, does god not speak to us? Does he not hear prayers?  Does he not enjoy an interactive relationship with humans that involves actively giving and receiving love? Sounds to me like you are making this stuff up as you go along, Steve.

Are you really arguing that Gods existence would be dependent on the physical world like ours is? Really? 

Anyhow...all of my objections aside, I’ll give you your assertion about inputs and outputs for the sake of the argument.  Because, my point of contention here is that if we are no longer free to make any choices (into literal eternity) after physical life ends, then your god plainly does not value free will.  If he valued free will, he would not impose an arbitrary time limit on it.

You are saying that because you do not choose God before you die, there are consequence and that somehow shows God does not value from will. Those two things are not logically connected. At most you have is an objection to the requirement to accept God while you are still alive. Objection noted. 

Forgiveness is not the same as atonement. I can forgive a murderer for killing my brother. I can't take away the consequences. Atonement takes away the consequences. It would be like Jesus literally sitting through the trial, taking on the humility of facing the victims, then prison and then the death penalty and the actual murderer going free.

So basically, ‘somebody has to pay’?  Why?  Why is god so hung up on punishing someone for actions he knew ahead of time that humans were incapable of resisting? Furthermore, how can you reasonably argue that that is ‘perfect justice’ if you admit yourself that you don’t even know what perfect justice is?  If I know my dog is going to get into the garbage if I leave him alone, and then I go for a jog and he eats last night’s table scraps, is it just of me to punish him for that?  Is it just of me to punish some other dog in his place? 

In short, I don’t hear any rationale or reasonable explanation for why forgiveness alone is less than perfect justice. You’d need to be able to define it first, or else your argument doesn’t even have a starter.

You would have to show that God could have logically created a universe where everyone would freely choose him. It is clear that is almost certainly not actually possible. So, he settled for a universe where the greatest number of people would freely accept him. 

God is holy. He cannot be in the presence of anything less than holy. Holiness is a standard of perfection without any fault. In no definition of 'forgiveness' does it remove the fact that you have done something. Only God atoning for your removes the imperfection (wipes the slate clean). Only then can you be holy and in the presence of a holy God.