either people are purposely being disingenuous, are they too dense to understand your question. I think you need a new thread where you lay it all out in as simple language as possible

The same thing that kept Adam and Eve from sinning, before the sinned of course. Free Will.

To have free will is to be able to do otherwise. God is incapable of doing otherwise, he has no free will.

If God was shown to be incapable of doing something that we call sin, action X, it only logically follows that he would not have free will with regards to action X. You cannot extrapolate that out to anything else.

Now if it is shown that God cannot logically do action X, can it really be said that he does not have free will with regards to action X?

Do I not have the free will to be a married bachelor? does that make sense?

O/T, but why is it logically impossible for God to sin again? I didn't know the Bible's text was also the authority on what's logical and what isn't.

First, I never said that it was logically impossible, only that if it was shown to be logically impossible X would follow.

Secondly, I never said that anything I did or did not assert came from the bible.

Thirdly, God cannot sin, as the definition of sin is "missing the mark" with regards to God's will. God cannot logically will something against his will.

Now if you want to talk about something that we traditionally view as a "sin" or as "evil", like torturing a child for fun, then that is a different story.

So if God decided to torture, rape and murder a "true" Christian and then send them to hell for no reason whatsoever, it would be "good"?

What? Who said that?

Now doesn't this just feel right, like the good ol'days OH. I missed you

YOU. You said God cannot go against God's will. And you also said God's will is always "good."

So if God's will is to do what I said, then it MUST be good!

Oh, I miss you too.

Could you point out where you are getting these stances from, apart from the slightly muddled theists and trolls here?

If I offered you a million dollars to do a good deed that cost you nothing, would you consider not doing it?

If I offered you eternal life to give up everything you believe and accept a whole new set of beliefs, and you had evidence that you trusted that I could deliver, would you feel sufficient gratitude to me to do what I asked you on the rare occasions I asked you? Might you sing me a song now and then out of sheer gratitude? Would you be lacking free will if I asked you to do good always and you did so out of gratitude to me for creating you and endowing you with eternal life?

You just haven't thought this through enough. Angels believe they have nothing to gain by doing wrong, and as rational self-interested beings, they do not pursue behaviour that they have no reason to pursue. Satan, as rational self-interested beings are wont to do, saw his interests differently from those of other angels, that is all. He saw something to gain in defying God and did so. When God punished him for it by withdrawing his favour, he had in his view reason for doing bad. I don't see why any of the actors in this story have to be compelled to be 100% one thing or another. My gran has never knowing broken a law. She is 100% lawabiding. But you would not be likely to say she has no free will.

I might not lack free will and id take the deal. But since im a flawed human im sure i would **** up somewhere along the line so i couldn't be 100% good even in heaven. Unless you changed me in some fundamental way when i get up to your eternal life.

Maybe we're talking past each other. This stems from another thread. Here's how I started off:

• God creates everything.
• Everything is good.
• Angels all have free will.
• 342 (or whatever) angels with free will stay with God in heaven.
• 1 angel with free will, named Satan, decides to be "bad."

Considering everyone was created good and everyone has the same free will, WHAT is it that is different about Satan that caused him to be bad? Can we liken him to a serial killer who has no morality and cannot control himself? If so, then he is NOT responsible for his choices, something else is! Same goes for Adam & Eve.

If it is logically impossible to do X then by definition there is no free will with regards to that action. Also I think it extends beyond the ability to sin. God is 'perfect' and 'omniscient' etc so it seems to me *everything* he does meets the criteria 'unable to do otherwise'. So, God has no free will.

No. God has all the free will he wants to do any good things he wants. It's EXACTLY the same type of human that non-Christians pose and Christians pretend to rationally object to.

I think you take the point though. You would be free to do what you chose, but you would choose good. That's all that's needed to show that angels can in fact have free will. That they are better at not ****ing up than you are is besides this particular point.

Note that this ****ing up is precisely what Adam and Eve are supposed to have done. One could suppose that humans are a degree more fallible than angels.

You are here confusing senses of the word "good" and I don't know what can be done about that. It's like confusing "that pie tastes good" with "that pie is good for you". God created what seemed good to him. It seemed good to create beings that while they were in fact good were free not to be.

The Muslim understanding of Satan might help you understand. Angels are not created as homogenous beings but as beings that differ one from the other. Nothing exceptional in that, and I think Christians accept that too. Allah ordered the angels to bow to humans (because, I believe, he gave them dominion over the earth). Iblis, the Muslim Satan, was proud and would not bow to a creature formed from clay (he himself being made of fire).

Now, before he was posed with the problem of bowing to Adam, Iblis was good. He did good always. He never erred. Just like other angels. But he met his temptation to sin and sinned. Even angels are free to sin. They may not be constituted to be tempted as easily as a human but they are still capable of it.

I think most Christians would have it that good is in fact what God chooses it to be and he's perfectly free to choose it to be something else.

MB, I can't ask this any more plainly than I already have. If someone has free will but "chooses" to do good every time for a really long time, WHY did they arrive at those decisions? Are they just running unbelievably lucky?

Disobedience and Obedience.......

Also, what does it matter to you? Are you going to change if someone somehow says something that you decide makes sense?

Give me and everyone else a break please with all these questions that are just a waste of time.

I would agree. If they where anything like me and all the rest of the humans i have known they couldn't help but fail some of the time. Gods was asking for the imposable. And unless he changes us in some way when humans go to heaven we will all choose wrong up there too.

Our House does not understand nor consider that his understanding of words that are used in the bible are usually completely off course.

who is that girl in your avatar?

No. Humans create things too.

Obviously not. Since good is what God wants, there are plenty of things that are evil (i.e. what goes against God).

Biblical source?

Biblical source?

Biblical source?

Concerto, you misunderstood my list. It was a series of events from the beginning of creation, not just 5 random statements.

Oh, maybe a list isn't the best format for a sequence of events?