Did I miss anything?

[Drich]

Yeah, I get that, but you were saying it's a physical manifestation of the spiritual cost god incurred in forgiving us, but that's nonsensical. What spiritual cost? How hard is it to forgive people? I do it all the time.

to absolutly everyone who asks, no matter what they have done, no matter who they are on a planetary scale, spanning the whole of human history?
-or-
Do you just forgive a few more than what is beyond your inner circle? Is that forgiveness or is that what is in your self interest?

To forgive a heinous sin committed against you their is a great personal cost.

You were the one just telling us that sins affect god, as it "costed" him to forgive them... so the same question could easily be leveled against you. But I'm the only one of us speaking purely hypothetically.

if you ask me I can point to the bible where it tells us there was a great cost to God to forgive the sins of the whole world.

To the question now returns to you. How do you know what thinks or feels?

An abstract instance of disobedience from a pair of people with no knowledge that disobedience was wrong,

Not true. They knew disobedience resulted in death.

based around a tree that god didn't need to create or keep in the garden, that costed god nothing and led to wildly disproportionate retribution, inflicted upon billions of people that had nothing to do with the initial act?

With out the tree their could be no choice. We all have always been given a choice whether or not to follow God or go our own way.

The greater point I was making was we from the beginning we were provided a sinless environment , and it is only in this sinless environment can we commune with God. If we wish to commune with God we owe a sin debt. One that we can not repay, but one Christ paided for us.

Does 'my' theology still confuse you?

---

What is pain to a god?

Pain is pain/suffering period. Christ was so worked up over the up coming pain He was to experience He sweat blood in prayer.

Particularly when it's supposed to have planned the whole thing in advance and knew it was coming up?

I had to have surgery on my hand a few years back, and even if it was planned and I knew what was going to happen, I still experienced pain.

Planning has nothing to do with the avoiding pain.

Actually, a rather chilling thought just occurred. Did this god - at least within the context of the story - need to experience pain and death because it had no prior knowledge of them and how they feel on a human level? Because if that is supposed to be the case, all those immoral commands to slaughter in the OT just got ratcheted up by several orders of magnitude in the cold-blooded psychokiller league.

The sacrifice on the Cross was not for the benefit of God. The pain and suffering witnessed on the cross was for the benfit of man so we would have some idea as to the cost of forgiveness.[/quote]