I am not going to get into a defense of Stu's comment because my view is not the same necessarily, but I will take issue with this statement. How do you know this is true? If one assumes both God and free will, is it not possible that humans may need free development to become both independent and moral entities?

You can hold your view as a postulate, but it is not a demonstrable fact and is not useful for others who question the postulate itself.

It has not been established that granting humans free will is more benevolent than having no free will or less free will.

Perhaps, but there are other things not established. For one, free will may be all or nothing. Also, without free will you may just be a preprogrammed machine without awareness or real existence. Then the question becomes, is it benevolent to be granted existence? Given the choice I would say "Yes", I would prefer to exist. If you would say "No" or even "Maybe not" then that is fine but frankly that puts us in such different categories that I doubt we could ever reconcile our views.

However, imbuing humans with certain instincts towards good behaviour while maintaining the rest of the "free will" we exhibit would be one example, I would suggest, that would maintain basic free will while making humans much much much nicer to each other.

I am surprised by this. Don't you think we do? I certainly feel a desire through instinct or empathy or whatever to be nice to others and to help others who are in trouble. It remains subservient to my free will but it is certainly there.

I wasn't being too specific. Obviously I meant "more than we currently do" and I could also have specified a bigger instinct against bad behaviour. I don't think we need to get too specific here, only agree that we can imagine a better system than the current one.

I do not agree. Whatever instinct we had would have to remain subject to our free will, so bad behaviour would still exist. Only when the instinct completely controlled the behaviour would the bad behaviour disappear, at which point there is no will. Without will you have a machine. Like my computer if I program it to donate money to Haiti from my checking account. The computer is without will and without consciousness. If you turn us into computers you have not made us better, you have destroyed us.

Are you really saying that there is no reduction in free will that you will consider to be a fair price for reduced suffering in the world?

Another verse on this topic Romans 15:4 (KJV):

4 For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.

This discussion has nothing to do with what I would accept. It is a question of what is possible. People throw around comments about God could do this or God could make us in this way or whatever, but who knows what is or is not possible. We do not understand free will, we cannot even prove that it exists outside of our own individual consciousness so how can we say that we know what constraints exist on beings that possess free will.

Truth many times is ignored, like NOW by you for instance.......

If you want to pretend that what I am saying is false thats okay with me, I am not offended at all.

All religions are man made.

Except for the one true religion, duh.

Not much explanation needed about Haiti. The earthquake was supposed to sink the entire island. God intervened and saved millions of lives. Hope this helps.

Correct ALL religions are man-made.

Christianity is NOT a religion though.

Its the truth, its not man made no matter what anyone thinks. Yes there is a man and men involved but it was instituted by God who is not a man.

That cannot be said about the religions of this world.......

Well, I guess it can be said BUT its not truth.....

In any Atheist worldview, there is no "love", no objective "awful", no moral "should". There is only what was, what is, and what will be. You can't derive "should" from a godless universe. Whatever is evolving is doing so, but that doesn't mean it "should". It just is. It happens to be going that way. Therefore your questioning of God, whether He is loving, just, what "should" He do, is without meaning in your universe. Another way of putting it is, by what standard do you judge what is "loving", or "just", or what someone "should" do? Do you not have some subjective, arbitrary standard? If you have an objective, universally true standard, where does that come from?

Some tough questions for the Atheist who wishes to remain consistent, probably why C.S. Lewis wrote, "The young Atheist, if he wishes to remain consistent, cannot be too careful in his reading."

Yes, pretty obvious really. He was on his 10 minute break and couldn't get there in time to hold the deaths down to say, 5K.

This is a ridiculous and incorrect assumption.

Of course you can.

Of course the question of what a god "should" do is meaningless to an atheist. But I'm not asking atheists, I'm asking theists. And when asked a basic question like "Why would a loving god allow so much suffering and injustice in his world?", the closest any of you can come to an answer is "we cannot know the mind of God", which of course begs the question of why you all claim to know the mind of god when you describe him as "loving" and "good", which you can only answer with "Because the Bible tells us so", nevermind that the god depicted in the Bible is a jealous, murderous maniac.

The golden rule works perfectly well for this. Confucius and ancient Buddhists, Greeks, Egyptians and countless others who taught variations on the Golden Rule didn't need god to explain this to them.

The idea that atheists cannot be moral is absurd, among other things.

A+.

Wow, seriously Splendour? You're going to +1 that?

Yes...morality is complicated. All people have some since they were originally made in the image of God but the current atheist claims to morality don't match their worldview.

Would you care to elaborate on how atheists claims to morality don't match their worldview?

Here's one explanation. Yesterday, I went to a memorial mass, so I didn't attend my own church. As usual at the start of the mass, the priest had the younger children come up to the front of the church, and he talked to them before they went off for children's liturgy. His topic was Haiti.

The priest warned the children that they had to be careful - that people would try to trick them - claiming that believing in an all-loving God was wrong, that an all-loving God would not have allowed the death and destruction in Haiti. Atheists will use this tragedy to trick them into believing that God does not exist. He said this is wrong - Haiti is not God's fault in any way.

He said some blame the Haitians themselves, and he showed the Pat Robertson video, saying that view is crazy.

He told the children that we are the first world - we have money and things. Haiti is part of the third world - they are very poor. He explained that the literacy rate in Haiti is 50% - half the people cannot read. The reason for this, is that we do not send teachers to Haiti. The priest then explained that we have building codes, to ensure structures are well-built. Haiti builds buildings without steel, and that is why they fell down in the earthquake. So the tremendous amount of death and destruction in Haiti is our fault, because we did not give them steel.

So that is a theist view of Haiti. I don't know if other Catholic churches had a similar message. I should also mention that I used the presentation to the children, in part because I was surprised by it, but also because it was a concise version of the message. The same ideas, with some expanded content, were offered in the homily.

In summary, the message was that we should teach the people of Haiti, we should impose our building standards on them, and we should give them steel. Because we didn't, the earthquake was our fault. God is not to blame - God cannot be blamed. This is all on us.

god oshenz i dont mean this in an offensive way, and theres a 50% chance that we are having some sort of communication breakdown, but i find that post relatively disturbing. not in a "shakes me to the core" disturbing kind of way but a "wow do ppl really think that" sort of way. meh.

What worldview?

And what about a Muslim's worldview? A Hindu's?