• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Did god not have the power to give us free will without also giving us evil?

    • Had the power but opted not to: god is himself some part evil

    • Didn’t have the power, did the best he could with the tools he had: god is not omnipotent.

    Pick one.

    • FrostBlazer@lemm.ee
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      5 hours ago

      I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.

      The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.

      I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.

    • samus12345@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      Going by the Bible, it’s both. He acted with malice and proved himself to not be omnipotent many times.

      • Agent641@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Jod introduced the idea of freewill to the board.

        Lucifer said “That’s a bad idea, chief. Free will would ruin them.”

        Jod cast him out.

        Humans fucked everything up.

        Jod sent his CTO, Jesus to try and fix it. It went poorly.

        Lucifer said " I told you so"