How far reaching are God's powers?

[The Grand Nudger]

Excellent, and how can you be held responsible for what you cannot control, again?  

Well, you're assuming that you shouldn't be held responsible for what you can't control. Says who? Perhaps we shouldn't throw insane murderers into asylums, but let them roam the streets...? I mean, if they can't tell right from wrong, then why hold them responsible at all? Let them be free!

 Says you, apparently, but while we intuitively understand and it is in no way controversial how a moral agent with a moral choice can be held morally responsible...right or wrong...it remains a complete mystery as to how we can be held morally responsible for what we can't control, when we have no choice, or when we are -not- moral agents.

Are you responsible for what a god does or doesn't do to me?  Are you responsible for whether I am or am not incoherent?  Are you ultimately responsible for anything...and how? Maybe you should be allowed to roam the streets (particularly if you not bullshitting us when you tell us that your comments about the nature of man are an accurate description of your experience) - but not letting you roam the streets and holding you morally responsible for this or that are not the same thing.

Can you give me a reason why you shouldn't suffer for committing an act of rape, particularly if God is trying to teach you that it's wrong and will only bring suffering upon you? I mean, you know it's wrong, but you do it anyway, does it make sense to you for God to just let it go, to not punish it at all? Who is He supposed to punish, Himself? Why, if He meant it for good? And the criminal, why not, if he meant it for evil? After all, he did the crime, right? Should his uncontrollable compulsion exonerate him, does it change the fact that he did the crime? Should he remain free, to do as he pleases? That would thwart God's plan. Who are you to determine the rules in a world run by God?

Evil doesn't exist for its own sake, but to accomplish God's purposes. If God doesn't punish evil, then it makes no sense for it to exist, because no lesson can ever be learned if wrongness isn't addressed with consequence.

You want some easy, cut and dry answer when the issue is more complicated than that, and if you're honestly assessing it you can admit that. I won't hold my breath.

An honest assessment of the moral field doesn't lead me to anything even remotely resembling the idea that people can be morally responsible for what they do not control.  That is, after all, why I keep asking you how that works. We can be practically responsible, or instrumentally responsible. I can kick a can that sets into motion a chain of events that leads to the annihilation of all human life. Instrumental responsibilities, like instrumental goods, are not moral responsibilities, or moral goods. I can kick that can, and it can lead to complete annihilation (and kicking the can can be good-for annihilation, and annihilation can be good-for producing a human free world), but how am I morally responsible? By what theory? By what means? By what justification? By what tic or facet or mystery of reality? I couldn't have known it would do so...and can't even imagine it, physically incapable of imaging how my kicking a can would do that. I certainly don't intend, in the kicking of a can, to annihilate all human life. If I also have no choice.....what's left? What possible avenue of moral responsibility remains? What hypothetical chain of desert?

Gonna get around to it or not? I understand moral responsibility in the case of a moral agent with a moral choice. Help me to understand the moral responsibility of a non moral agent with no moral choice.