Heaven and The Problem of Evil

[Neo-Scholastic]

You might think that you'd feel sad thinking about loved ones that ended up in hell… there is no…suffering in heaven, and certainly, no one is hurting anyone up there.

I don’t think that is entirely true. The general state of the righteous in the afterlife would best be described of as the most bliss of which one is capable of receiving. This general state does not exclude their specific states while performing various offices, like ministering to the spirits in Hell. The idea that God Himself does not suffer seems like a later doctrine not entirely supported by Scripture. Clearly, Christ in His humanity did suffer. I cannot imagine that I would not be saddened upon finding that people about whom I care reject God’s love. Hopefully this will be tempered by the understanding that their rejection reflects what they truly want.

Free will…You can ask why God has to work under this framework and why it's necessary for us to be able to be this terrible for God's great plan, but rest assured that this is because of [reasons]. Sometimes, people speculate that this is because God needs to know that we really love him, so we have to be able to love him on our own, and that this isn't super creepy or narcissistic because of…

You were created with the potential to love and to choose the object of your love. Your ability to love is God’s gift to you. Perhaps you would rather have been made incapable of loving and/or deciding who you would love?

Also, they are being nice to each other, because if they weren't, it wouldn't be wonderful. So, are they able to sin or be mean to each other? Do they still have their free will? Yes or no?

Your thinking is fallacious. Choices are not limited to just good or evil. You can also choose between greater and lesser goods or equally good but different courses.

Yes, they still have their free will, but they never make bad decisions. What the fuck?! Why couldn't God have made us this way in the first place?

The only decision of consequence is whether you love the Lord and your neighbor OR love yourself and the world. Everything else flows from this choice. As stated earlier, the ability to love and select the object of your love is a gift. I cannot understand why anyone would complain because they aren’t zombies.
In life you choose the object of your love (God and neighbor OR self and world). Moving to a glorified state allows you to perfect your love in the afterlife. The value of earthly experience is that the consequences of your decisions are not as fixed or dramatic. You always have the option to repent and try again. In a glorified state the effect of decisions are magnified a thousand times. It’s like learning to walk before learning to run.

… to the Bible there are no people on this planet who are without sin. It's not like they are already that good or anything. There's obviously some type of transformation going on here, and YHWH is clearly holding back on Earth. So, this leads to the conclusion of unnecessary suffering.

In one sense you are correct, suffering is unnecessary. People could choose to do otherwise by loving God and their neighbor. Your mistake (and that of Faith-alone believers) is thinking that you don't need to work in partnership with the Lord to overcome. The Bible clearly says that those who overcome have their part in the Kingdom of Heaven.

… So, the idea here is that God faces some sort of limitations … and that we have to suffer here before we can enjoy heaven there.

God’s only limitation is to not force anyone to love Him against their will. Earth was created for us to enjoy life here and now. The evil hurt the righteous in this life because we have not yet been separated based on our choices because those choices have not yet been made. In the afterlife, He separates the sheep from the goats. The evil will no longer be able to hurt the righteous. God does allow this to happen so as not to interfere, but we trust in his restorative justice. He will restore the years the locusts ate and wipe the tears from every eye.