(July 19, 2015 at 10:11 am)Nope Wrote:(July 19, 2015 at 10:04 am)Randy Carson Wrote: True. However, Jesus was also fully human, and he experienced hunger, cold, and pain just as we do.
Now, in terms of sacrifice for our sins, it was not REALLY necessary that Jesus be tortured and suffer. However, if he had simply walked into Pilate's office and said, "I'm here for my beheading" followed by a quick sword stroke, I don't think that WE would think quite as much of that as we do of the scourging, the crowning with thorns and the crucifixion. The latter execution is FAR more graphic and helps us to appreciate the lengths to which God was willing to go in order to redeem us. It was a heavy price, but He paid it.
If your child breaks a large bay window in a neighbor's house that he cannot possibly pay for by himself, you step in to pay the debt to the neighbor. The neighbor is satisfied and the child is no longer under obligation.
We could not possibly repay our debt to God for the sins we commit, so Jesus stepped in to pay it for us. We are absolved, and we are no longer under obligation.
The crucifixion means everything.
Your analogy does not fit what happens in the bible. For it to do so, you would have to put the child in a room full of only windows. No matter where he steps, you know that he will break something and therefore be responsible. After the inevitable (that you knew would happen because you set the scenario up that way) and he breaks the glass, you pay the price but demand that he worship and adore you to the point that he is your slave. How you can not see that this is what your religion teaches amazes me.
I know that you are quite eager to absolve yourself from any personal responsibility for your sins, but your desire to blame God simply won't fly.
God gave us free will and the potential to do good or evil. But the world God created was (and is) good...filled with wonder and beauty.
It is not logically possible to have free will and no possibility of moral evil. In other words, once God chose to create human beings with free will, then it was up to them, rather than to God, as to whether there was sin or not. That's what free will means. Built into the situation of God deciding to create human beings is the chance of evil, and consequently, the suffering that results.
God did not create evil; he created the possibility of evil. People actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning. it's a self-contradiction - a meaningless nothing - to have a world where there's real choice while at the same time no possibility of choosing evil. To ask why God didn't create such a world is like asking why God didn't create a married bachelor or a four-sided triangle.
