Christianity is Morally Bankrupt

OK so I don't get what you are asking. Apparently I can't get it. My answer is that anything other than what He did is impossible, what we have is what He had to do for the best possible outcome. I still think that what you want, eliminating all evil and suffering, would be static and boring. We had to fall, we had to experience evil and suffering. It had to be the way it is. So to you this is just making excuses for the way things are. OK, maybe so. There isw no other possibility that I can see. That "other place" you are talking about: why didn't He build that and not this you ask. Because it's impossible to thave that without this. That's my answer.

I'm just trying to explain why God made it so that suffering has to happen, why things are the way they are. I think I'm in the ballpark at least. But yes there is a comparison to be made between heaven and Eden that seems to suggest we could have been happy in Eden as of coruse everyone is in heaven. But maybe this explains it: Adam and Eve started out without the knowledge of good and evil that they would get only by disobedience of God. But God says that would make them like "us, knowing good and evil" so in heaven they DO know of good and evil. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it suggests that heaven is different in this important way from Eden. Perhaps I just can't understand it, it's beyond me. Much of biblical truth does have to be taken on faith because we can't comprehend it.

Eden is synonymous with Earth, why are you separating them? God made the planet and then established His garden in Eden where He placed our first parents. Nobody is sure where Eden was located though probably somewhere in the Middle East. So Noah probably built his ark there as well but there is no way of knowing for sure. Human ity would have covered the whole world by then, which would have been the one continent known by science as Pangaea. The ark certainly landed somewhere in that area in any case, Ararat which has two possible locations but bother are in that general area. Then Noah's descendants spread out from there and repopulated the Earth. Yes it contradicts not only scientific timing but the idea that humanity originated in Africa. I know you didn't need this much information but oh well.Where are you getting this idea that "Eden was an experiment that went wrong?" That isn't so, God knows what He is doing even if we can't figure it out. He made humanity ultimately to bring down the satanic rebellion that had preceded our Creation possibly by thousands of years though the timing isn't given. We just know it happened before God created us. This is no experiment, we aren't in a position to understand it beyond some basics, but it has a definite purpose and a derfinite outcome in God's eyes. yes the war between good and evil and the eventual vanquishing of the devil and his hordes. "Don't you know that we will judge angels?" says Paul somewhere. Fallen angels of course.As I understand it God made Paradise as a holding place for those who die in faith in Christ, it's not our final destination but where we await the Judgement while history is playing out on Earth. Hades is the Greek version of this idea for instance, but as I understand it Hades has divisions for good people and the wicked and various degrees of those. Not sure of that but heard it somewhere. I don't think Paradise has these divisions. The biblical story of Lazarus who goes to "the bosom of Abraham" while the man who tormented him during his lifetime is suffering in Hell may show that there are at least two different places for humanity to go before the Judgment. At the Judgment Hell is to be thrown into the lake of fire. Anyway Heaven is God's home and humanity has no place there until our final redemption and resurrection. So heaven is only for the ultimately redeemed and as I wrote previously it probably isn't going to be the final home of the redeemed anyway which will be the New Jerusalem described in Revelation.

Shortly after this post I elaborated, saying that we WOULD be happy in heaven where they have the knowledge of good and evil, whereas Adam and Eve did not have that knowledge. I didn't say there couldn't be happiness, I said that it would be static, but the knowledge of good and evil would make it more like heaven. Except in the case of Adam and Eve it required disobedience to bring it about and that's what causes suffering. In the end we should haved knowledge of good and evil and perfect happiness without suffering.No we don't lose this knowledge in heaven becaue it exists in heaven.

I answered that too, Taq, but I'm not up to tracking it down. Because we disobeyed, we don't merely have knowledge as God does, we committed sin, and we commit it every day, 3we are in opposition to God. I believe that in the end knowledge we will have, we will have memory of it all, but we will be free of sin and the power to sin. In Eden they had the power to sin and not the knowledge of good and evil. They ac quired that knowledge by disobeying God, by committing sin. The wages of sin is death, that is sin, opposition to God, disobedience of His morela law is the cause of all sufferinjg.

You are saying I haven't said what in fact I have said and more than once and pretty cleqarly I thought. Yes we have the knowledge of good and evil because we disoberyed God. Good grief, I don't know how I could have been any clearer.

What you quoted seems to me to say exactly what you say I didn't say.Yes we will no longer have the freee will to sin/disobey God, but we will have the knowledgeof good and evil.

I think it's the other way around: in many ways earth isa mirror of heaven. The war in the heavenlies is between the good angels and the fallen angels, God's angels and Satan's angels. Ultimately our wars have the same basic conflict between good and evil. This is clear in the Second World War at least.

Of course it's "crossed my mind" and been rejected as false.

Sure, all the fairy tales are distorted reflections of the heavenly truths. Again you have it the wrong way around.

No, Phat, I believe Christian theology is clear that we will no long have the ability to sin when we are in heaven, we will have lost that kind of free will. I'm not sure what form it will take, maybe just that we'll have so much greater love for God and so much better understand we will just never want to sin, but in any case we will never sin and I for one look forward to that, becauseto my mind it is freedom FROM sin and evil. But unlike Adam and Eve I belive we will have the knowledge of good and evil and memory of the sin and evil done on Earth while we were here.This is just my own understanding but now I'm going to go look it up.

I didn't ask the question quite right so I'll have to ask it again but I did get this answer which seems to answer my question too, from Sproul's Ligonier Ministries.That is about our justification and he goes on to say that we will be judged by how we lived our lives here too, apparently mostly in terms of what kind of reward we will get rather than punishment. Those with the best record of good deeds will get a higher reward and those without good deeds I guess will get no reward at all but we won't be banished from heaven.I still want to get a more direct answer to my question but I think the implication of our being clothed in Christ's righteousness is that we will never sin because He never sinned. HOWEVER, we are also told in scripture that He was "tempted even as we are tempted," so it's not as if we will be without the knowledge of sin, we will simply have Christ's power to reject it.Here's
a more direct answer to my question:

I just wore myself out trying to get the above post straightened out since I kept getting the codes in the wrong place. I don't understand all those parts of Revelation either but you could google it you know.

There is a difference between the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil, which of course God has, and Adam and Eve's disobedience which brought about that knowledge in their case. They got the knowleddge but they also got the sin and its suffering.

Predestination is often treated as you treat it, but I think it's missing the point. Everything, absolutely everything, and everyone, every action we make, must be similarly predestined because that is the nature of God and the universe. In knowing anything at all about predestination which we only know through the Bible, we are simply being allowed to look behind the scenes as it were, look into the things of God that on our own we would never be able to see.The Bible reveals predestination to us, quite subtly really, it certainly doesn't hit us over the head with it. It states it here and there and that's about it. Calvin spelled it out in his theological treatises, but Luther also wrote about it and all serious exegetes of the Bible take note of it whether they spell it our or not. Calvin spelled it out in more detail than mnost so he's always getting bashed for it by us fleshly fallen people who haven't the humility to leave the mysterious things of God to Him.Every movew I make is predestined, so what? That's a philosophical nicety I'll never be able to fathom and if I try too hard I'll only tie myself up in knots and think how unfair it is as so many do. But it's just a fact, it's just the way things are from the point of view of God. We are limited to our own earthly perceptions and at this level it is utterly irrelevant. \We are responsible for our actions. If we violate the moral law that's our violation of the moral law. The fact that we can't help doing it because of the way the spiritual universe is constructed is absolutely irrelevant. We act freely and feel that we act freely, and that's all we need to know. Judas did what he did because he did what he did, he was responsible for it. And the Moral law that judges him did so according to its own inexorable standards TO WHICH WE ARE NOT PRIVY.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.