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Obviously he wasn't "perfect" or he would have never have fallen.
I don't think that is so "obvious" or necessarily follows.
To be perfect means to be flawless. Satan has flaws. You stated that God created Satan in perfection. He fell, so therefore couldn't be perfect.
I see in this just the foreknowledge of God. I don't think the foreknowledge of God means the imperfection of God. Nor the self choice of a free will creation implicates his Creator.
Not the imperfection of God, just the imperfection of Satan.
However, who are you going to find transcendent to God as an umpire to do a little straightening of Him out ?
No one, because it's not required. You believe in objective truths, morals, and meaning, but most of the world lives without them.
The second possibilty is that, Yes God foreknew. And yes, this being became something so negative. Yet God is still absolutely right and righteous. And this is difficult for us to understand.
The problem is that we use all kinds of justifications by claiming it is a decree from God. And then when someone tries to rationalize it, they usually respond in kind with, "God's ways are higher than our ways."
These are the same justifications you hear from Al Qaeda and it's the same justifications you hear when people defend God ordering the murder of children.
One writer put it this way. The day will come when we realize that in many things we in which we thought we were right and God was wrong, we will find that God was not wrong but we were.
That's wishful thinking. You want to believe that, and so you will believe that.
At any rate, the idea of us the creatures finding fault with the Creator does not make sense to me.
I don't think you understand the purpose. The purpose of the exercise isn't to rationalize God, the purpose is to get you to think outside of the box -- that perhaps the God you think is there is a contradiction, revealing that no one was ever there to begin with, or that God is vastly different than you thought.
From the beginning Satan injects the thought into man that God is an arbitrary tyrant who does not have man's best interest at heart. He causes man to doubt the goodness and love of the Divine heart. He causes man to doubt the truth of the Divine word.
That's just what you claim. Satan is a bogeyman used to dissuade people from critically analyzing things. Besides, if Satan does do this, then it's still God's fault for allowing it to happen.
When you have an omnipotent God, the fact that Satan exists can only logically be God's fault.
His job has always been to convince man that he, Satan, is God, and that God, is Satan. Satan's scheme has been to reverse roles of God and Satan in man's mind.
The bible doesn't say anything like that. That's an interpretation that has expanded over time, thanks to the Roman Catholic Church that butchered.
Concerning thier temporal existence, they really had it bad off. Concerning their eternal life, you do not know how greatly they will be blessed. Do you ?
Does that make any sense to you, honestly? If the "eternal" is the ultimate goal, then why have not forgo this temporal existence? The bible never answers such questions. It just tells you how to live while here, and weakly attempts to answer why we suffer. But at the end of the day, if God is ever bit what you say he is, it doesn't have to be that way.
The reason for Job's experience is really not found in the book of Job. God, in the book of Job, NEVER gives Job OR the reader, an explanation of the whole ordeal.
Yes, it does. It's even laid out in the first chapter. The point was a pissing contest between God and Satan, so that God can prove to Satan that even under extreme duress, people still loved God. God had no compunction with sacrificing Job's family to Satan for the sake of making a point to the Devil (which, honestly, Satan would have already known).
Disgusting, detestable, and loathesome behavior.
Does God's foreknowledge make God responsible for the choices of the free will agent ?
Yes, because God made us with our weaknesses, he chose not to reveal himself, and chooses to allow Satan free reign to torment us. That makes God the ultimate tormentor.
The "faulty, error prone Almighty" who needs some education and correction from His own creatures, makes no sense to me.
Of course not, because you are too conditioned to believe specific things about God that you don't dare actually utilize the intelligence he supposedly bestowed upon you.
Your job is to protect God's image at all costs. The question is what your real motivation is. Do you do this to protect God, or do you do this to protect yourself? IOW, are you defending God or are you defending your belief in God?
For example, you are here cautioning me of the faulty and error prone God.
I'm questioning the feasibility of God's existence by showing that per God's own supposed attributes, the buck logically has to stop with him.
Satan is too cunning for us to be able to deal with. But He is not too cunning for Christ to deal with. So we humans need to be in oneness with Christ in order to overcome Satan.
God is an absent father who thinks if he shows his face once a millennium we're all supposed to drop to our faces. Yes, please throw me in to a lake of fire because you made me weak and couldn't answer prayers you promised.
I think this kind of reasoning lead to a dead end. And few people live thier lives this way. You have no sense of being coerced or forced in many of the decisions you make.
You said yourself that only placing you life in the hand of Jesus is the only way to escape the wiles of the devil. So that means that heathens are not responsible for their own actions because Satan has a grip on them.
This is what Christians do. They go from blaming Satan to blaming the sinner. So which is it?
Concocting and elaborate philosphy that God is the one to blame for your evil choices, is not as sactifactory a justification as the justification God has provided by the saving redemption in Christ.
Saying I make evil choices is your assumption because you have to defend God, without ever even knowing me or the choices I make. You defend God regardless because philosophically he
has to be perfect and I have to be imperfect.
So my approach is to marvel at the salvation God has provided in His Son rather then continue Adam and Eve's excuses to blame thier Creator.
It was A&E's Creator who is to blame, absolutely.
I regard your line of reasoning as just a further passing of the buck. "God's to blame. God is implicated. God is responsible. I am innocent and God is the guilty one."
I'm guilty of whatever I'm guilty of. I take my consequences gladly and don't blame God or Satan because I strongly suspect they just aren't there and never have been. Or at least God is nothing how he is portrayed in the bible. I don't have a built-in fall guy like the Abrahamic religions do. My faults are mine alone.
However, if God is real as you portray him, then absolutely this is all his fault.
If you want to carry that argument with you to the judgement day, go ahead.
Threats don't lastingly compel people to Christ.
My opinion is that all the rebels, all the revolters, all the unbelievers, all those disgruntled and opposed to Ultimate Governor of the universe, needed a big repository to all go together. Satan the Devil was allowed become what he did from his lofty position to be that leader.
Well, maybe you'll get your wish for us to burn for all eternity. If challenging the validity of something supposedly so important makes me bound for hell, then to hell I go.
I think if God is not there, there should be no sense of wrong doing in your own conscience.
When a dog takes food from the table and you scold him, does he know he's wrong because God placed it in his heart or because the dog is conditioned to believe that taking food from the table is wrong?
If there is no God I think you would have perfect peace about everything you did.
That's because you're conditioned to believe that.
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Are both you and I rebelling against Allah, or do we simply have no good reason to assume Allah's existence?
Islam has a completely different teaching on Allah forgiving you sins. And that goes well beyond the scope of this topic.
Dodge.
It's a simple question. I'm not asking you an elaborate question about Islam, I'm asking you a simple question which will reveal that just surrendering to Jesus without reason is about as effectual as you surrendering to Allah.
So, are you Allah's rebellious little child or not? If not, why not?
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Whose fault is that, ultimately? Last I checked, Satan didn't create himself and neither did we create ourselves. It seems that you are minimizing, severely, God's own role in the whole kit and caboodle.
Last time I checked, God said to this being " You were perfect in yur ways from the day you were created, until unrighteousness was found in you." (Ezekiel 28:15)
A being created perfect in his ways at some point gave birth to unrighteousness within himself.
Again, does that make any sense? He's either perfect and incapable of sin or not.
If anyone in history had the qualifications to point out that God is the faulty one in all this, that would have been Jesus.
How is that supposed to be some kind of useful confirmation? Of course, that all assumes that Jesus was who he claimed to be.
As you can see, Jesus poured out His life under the conviction that His Father was absolutely right and righteous:
"Righteous Father, though the world has not known You, yet I have known You, and these have known that You have sent Me." (John 17:25)
Quoting scripture, unless we're having a specific debate about the bible, is useless. I question the validity of all of it.
Jesus prayed "Righteous Father .. the world has not known You, yet I have known You ..."
Great, but saying it doesn't necessarily make it so.
Christ, who was excelling in purity, goodness, and holiness, did not give us any hint that His Father was at fault. I think I have to trust His testimony over your kind of rationale.
Of course, because that's what you're conditioned to do.
"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it" -- Thomas Paine
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