re: #642 Dave AAA

What’s a couple of years he would endure anyway when there is an eternity of Bliss following? In Christian theology, life doesn’t end when the body dies.

That isn’t the point. The point is that allowing the innocent to suffer is unjust in and of itself, no matter what follows. Supposedly those eternal souls were in Heaven before being sent to earth, so why send them here for a taste of malignant Hell on earth? It simply is beyond all rational justification.

And that isn’t even getting into the irretriveable imbalance inherent in the very concept of eternally, infinitely rewarding for a finite fealty, or eternally, infinitely punishing for finite sins.

So what part of free will did you not understand? Over and above the Original Sin, which Jesus will take if asked, sin is a choice that one actively makes. It would be hard indeed for nearly all young children to have formed the intent to sin even if they have the ability.

Precisely. Which is why there’s no way that they could possibly deserve cosmically meted out intractable pain. And why its dispensation is immoral, regardless of who is responsible. And an omniscient and omnipotent deity would have to be responsible, because nothing whatsoever could happen without its knowledge and will.

In fact, the whole idea of free will is theologically suspect in the context of an omniscient and omnipotent God who would have to have known and willed what everyone would and would not do in their lives and where they would go when they died - Heaven or Hell - from the very beginning of time (which is why Luther and Calvin, among many others, had problems with it). In fact, one could do whatever the hell one wanted to do under such a doctrine, because one’s future location would have been celestially decided before one was even born, and there would be nothing that one could do, or fail to do, that could possibly change it. All human choices, whether good or evil, would ultimately be God’s choices, for the one thing that an omnipotent being is not logically free to do is to withdraw its power and control from anything, and still remain omnipotent.