From: (Anonymous)	Date: December 1st, 2002 11:18 pm (UTC)		(Link)
Free will

Free will means having the ability to choose. What are you going to choose if there's only one choice-- good? God gave man free will and gave him choices to make. God didn't want to MAKE anyone love him-- what kind of love would it be if it were forced? Because he must let us choose Him or not, he must also let us make other choices. This is why free will exists, why it must exist, and why God exists. Care to respond? E-mail me. LadyEowen@hotmail.com. Don't use my IP address for anything, please.

	From: vexen	Date: December 2nd, 2002 07:48 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: Free will

Firstly, I do not believe that the Free Will theodicy stands up at all... free will does not automatically imply a choice between absolute good, and death, there are many ways to give free will without causing evil as a result. If God wanted there to be no suffering, then he would give us free will to accept God or not. If we accept, we live blissfully forever. If we do not accept, we live blissfully then die. Why does there have to be pain and suffering and evil? Free will does not work as a defence of this.

But that's not what I really wanted to say. What I really wanted to point out is:

Natural evil. (You know... Earthquakes, floods, suffering of innocent people, genetic deformalities, floods, still born children, etc)

Read this essay for a bit more:

http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/theodicy_naturalevil.html

From: (Anonymous)	Date: March 26th, 2003 02:16 pm (UTC)		(Link)

The Law of the excluded middle (which says, something either is or isn't there is no in-between) shows how there is either bliss with God or death without him. There is no inbetween, there cannot be. If you know the 3 universal priciples of logic(which i'm sure you do many of your arguments are very logically sound) then you cannot have a middle-ground, making this invalid.

	From: sick_of_man	Date: October 2nd, 2003 10:33 am (UTC)		(Link)

if jesus had free will while he was alive, but(perhaps) didn't commit sin that doesn't necassarily mean that evil is not needed to have free will. it just means that he knew that not commiting sin was the better path. if evil did not exist and we could only do good how are we free? how could an omni-benevolent God truely love us if we always had to do good without knowledge of evil? How could we love god if it shrouded us from his opposite?

JD

	From: vexen	Date: October 2nd, 2003 10:59 am (UTC)		(Link)

That Jesus had free will, and never chose evil, and is also the creation of God, means that it is possible for God to create beings that never choose evil and have free will. So why didn't God create us in the same way? Because God is evil... or, more likely, there is no god, and "good" and "evil" are homocentric errors.

If Jesus is a being that was created with a personality and character of a person who never chooses evil, and, Jesus does indeed love us, then this refutes the idea that god created us with personalities that choose evil for the sake of giving us free will.

Your argument has backfired!

How can we truly love God, if:

God is perfectly good and can't choose evil

*or*

God *can* choose evil, but never does, yet chose *not* to create us with the same quality of conscience, and intentionally created us in a way that causes us to choose evil? What a nice god... not!

	From: sick_of_man	Date: October 2nd, 2003 11:45 am (UTC)		(Link)

if you believe that jesus never commited a sin than you must also believe that he was divine. for the whole point of jesus existing was for God to become man and carry the weight of sin that we carry, the only way to do this is to become man, but if god became man and didn't acknowledge he was god then he wouldn't be God. He needed to be divine so he(God) could do this and the only way to do it was to knowingly become human and God.
or so the story goes.