(July 8, 2015 at 2:03 am)robvalue Wrote: Well, I am impressed that some theists even attempted to address this point. That shows courage at least.
If I remember correctly, Augustine addressed the issue of free will in heaven, so all they would have to be is well-read.
By the way, if you want to read religious craziness from someone who was relatively intelligent for a religious nut, Augustine is a good choice. Of course, he was still a religious nut, and much of his writing is tedious. Very tedious. But he is much more intelligent than the Christians one typically finds on internet forums. Much, much more intelligent.
If you want a suggestion for a start, let me know. If you want to know what kind of jerk he was, you can read his Confessions, but make sure you get an unabridged version, as he has an interesting discussion of time that is often edited out of abridged versions. But if you wanted an introduction to his views, probably you should go with The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love. Both of those books are much shorter than his City of God, and they are more than tedious enough. I doubt you will have the stomach for anything longer than those short books, and you may not have the stomach for them.
Just to be clear, I am not particularly recommending that you read those books. If you want something actually good, you will want to read something from a different author. If you want good books that deal with religion, I suggest David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion or his Natural History of Religion. The first deals with philosophical arguments regarding the existence of god and related matters, and the second is a history or prehistory of the development of religion. David Hume was both a philosopher and historian. His History of England was once very popular, though of course it does not cover anything that has happened in the past couple of hundred years; he died in 1776.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.