AnonymousHello woodsong
Thanks for clearing that up for me, you made some very good points. One point you made was,
“Now, we don’t have here on earth a positive non-choice relationship like God and the angels, only negative ones, such as between a master and his slave. Now that slave serves his master out of fear for his life, punishment or whatever,”
To me the relationship between Master/Slave sounds more like the relationship Christians have with their God, Friends have an EQUAL relationship (unlike Christians/God) Master/Slave has an UNEQUAL relationship (like Christian/God) that is why I have never believed that Christians have “free will”. Free will is the ability to make a choice, free of consequences by the person giving you free will. Example… if a criminal pointed a gun at you and said “Give me all your money or I will shoot you!” it would be ridicules for him to say to the policeman after being caught “But he gave me his money of his own free will” He did’nt give you free will, because the consequences were that he would shoot you. If God is going to give you free will/choice, than he can’t punish you if you make the WRONG choice, such as sending you to Hell! Because then you will be serving him out of fear of punishment rather than love
To Icrawf
Actually I didn’t give an opinion on the free will/ evil debate, I was just dismantling the ideas that everybody else stated. I’m afraid I have a very simplistic view of why there is evil in this world. I believe as long as people have a choice, some people will choose to do evil. It has nothing to do with God, & nothing to do with the devil, because these things do not exist! A wise man once said, “Good men will always do good, Bad men will always do bad, in spite of religion. The only difference is that the religious man will use his religion to justify his behavior weather it be good or bad
Peace
Ken
