Does the Christian God Play with Free Will?

Prozacman responds to me:

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I can almost tell how one might respond to these Bible verses, but I'll give them anyway since I'm playing at a christian response here.

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[New Testament comments deleted for space]

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All irrelevant. You're trying to impose a Christian theology upon a Jewish story.What does Genesis say? For the umpteenth time, I don't care what the Christian opinion is. I know what it is. I freely admit that plenty of people share this opinion.The question is not what the opinion is.It is whether or not there is anything in GENESIS that justifies this claim.If I lie about something and you agree with me about the lie and we convince a whole bunch of people to go along with the lie, does that make it any less a lie?That said, Romans 16:20 and John 8:44 aren't about the garden.

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As far as I can tell, only Revelation 12:9, & 20:2 directly call Satan "that ancient serpent".

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And what makes you think they're talking about the serpent in the garden? They're referring to a dragon.Revelation 12:9: And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.Revelation 20:2: And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,Besides, dragons have legs and the serpent from the garden doesn't have them anymore. Obviously, the "serpent" mentioned in Revelation is not a reference to the serpent from the garden. It is merely using the fact that a dragon is a kind of serpent.Are you saying that every time the Bible mentions a snake, it's a reference to the serpent in the garden?

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Actually I should have said that christians in general believe that A&E died both a physical & spiritual death, and I'm sorry if my previous post was misleading on this.

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But he didn't. He was supposed to die that very day, before the sun set, and he continued to live on for another 900+ years. Do you think when he hit 500 he figured that something was up with this, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"?

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I can't figure out either how god dares to tell Adam that he would "die that very day", and then it doesn't happen.

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And that's a big problem.Here's a thought: The Bible is actually a work of the devil. The character of god is really the devil and the character of the devil is really god. What better way to get souls than to make them think they're following the embodiment of all that is right and good?Or another thought: The Bible is a test by god to see who will be able to see the glaring contradictions and inconsistencies and decide to use their god-given intellects to examine the world around them, possibly being wrong but having the courage to try and find out. Those who get sucked in by the promises while ignoring the problems are going to be in for quite a shock.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Prozacman responds to me:

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But that's what christians have done ever since Paul wrote his letters

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Don't care. It's irrelevant. If I lie to you and you agree and we get a whole bunch of people to go along with the lie, does that make it any less a lie?Who cares what Christians have done? Who cares what Paul did? If Paul was wrong and Christians have gone along with Paul's error, does that make it any less of an error?What does Genesis say?

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For Pete's sake' aren't we talking about the x-ian god playing with free-will.

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Indeed. But if the Christian religion is going to include Genesis in its holy documents, then it is going to have to suffer the consequences of what it says. Genesis was written from a Jewish perspective and cannot be understood except in that perspective.If certain Christians screw up and claim that Genesis says something that it clearly does not say, then who cares how many make that claim? If Genesis does not say that, then it doesn't matter how many people claim that it does. Reality is not a popularity contest.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Prozacman writes:

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Now, does the nearly universal appearance of truth constitute truth? No way; just because there's a "univeral" belief that the sun revolves around the earth does not make it so.

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This also goes the other way...just because there is a "universal" belief that the earth goes around the sun doesn't mean it does. However, we still claim that the earth goes around the sun because we try to show the opposite and continually fail. We may eventually find a way to do so, but we haven't figured out how yet and the earth-round-sun bit works so well.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Prozacman responds to me:

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And as we continually fail to observe the sun orbiting the earth

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Not at all. Every day, I go outside and I witness the sun orbiting the earth. One can quite easily make the earth the center of the universe and have everything rotate around it. The problem is that doing this makes everything in else in physics horrendously complicated. Somehow, we have to explain why when we take a high pressure water stream and force it into a tectonic plate on earth, the rotation of the universe changes.It may very well be the case that such is the way things are...that there really is a force that can be transmitted instantaneously across the entire universe. We don't accept it because we get much more accurate results when we put the earth in motion, but that's primarily because we can understand the math better. There may come a time when we run an observation that supports a geocentric model but until then, we go with what we have.A heliocentric solar system is actually more a function of Occam's Razor than direct observation.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Prozacman responds to me:

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There will probably come a day when astronauts living on stations or planets & satellites for more than a year at a time, will look up at their place origin and watch it arch in movement about the star that keeps us alive.

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That could simply be an artifact of the rotation of the universe about the earth. Remember, you can make the earth the center of the universe, but you have to start adding in all sorts of new forces to the universe in order to get the math to work out correctly.If the entire universe is oscillating around the earth and you set something into it, it will pick up the oscillation of the universe around the earth. It may look like the earth is going around the sun, but that is simply an optical illusion based upon your position within the universe and its motion.You do this the other way, after all. From the earth, it looks like the universe is rotating around it and yet we claim it's the other way around. Well, from the universe it looks like the earth is moving around the sun, but we can claim it's the other way around, too.The reason why we don't is because it is extremely complicated to do so, introduces forces that we can't detect as such, and generally makes life difficult. But if some day in the future we were to find such things, we'd discard a heliocentric model of the solar system for a geocentric one.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!