This topic has been on my mind for quite some time, maybe you can answer this uccisore.
If alot of the justification for Evil in the world is free will, and in heaven there is no evil, how then can we be free? Free of all thoughts of evil? How then are we ourselves?
Well I’ve got a comment about this one:
If you have to break from free will to get to heaven, maybe heaven allows you to do whatever you want?
You mean, what was sin here is not sin anymore in heaven??
Well, as far as I remember in Revelations, the former things are to be forgotten when God replaces the heaven and the earth.
One of the things that turned me off about the idea of heaven is being in an eternal state of bliss…if we don’t remember what sadness and evil are, how can we fully enjoy the amazing and blissful? It would become monotonous on the timeline of eternity.
Ecellent question 29:
Notice how quiet the room is now…
— If alot of the justification for Evil in the world is free will, and in heaven there is no evil, how then can we be free? If alot of the justification for Evil in the world is free will, and in heaven there is no evil, how then can we be free? Free of all thoughts of evil? How then are we ourselves?
O- let me break it down:
The justifications given do not go as far as to prove that we indeed have freewill. Your difficulty, then, might just be in the propositions you’ve accepted as true. Suppose that there is no freewill either in heaven nor on Earth and see where that takes you. Far from being an original notion, this is Martin Luther’s idea in his book The Bondage of the Will.
God had free will to create a dog as a cat or something else.
But he didn’t.
He had essentially an infinite combination of options to freely choose from.
And he chose to create a cat as a cat, and a dog as a dog, and neither as something else.
He knew what was best and he acted accordingly.
So do we know what is best in the choices of our free will … in our heart.
Evil is created when an autonomous dynamic entity existing at our level (i.e. a person, system, group, and the like), that either has no heart or whose heart is not sovereign over its life, threatens, to any degree, to end the life of another entity at our level that has a heart.
The theory in the fantasy goes, that in Heaven we will all live from our heart, and choose freely our will accordingly.
Angelics are quite keen with their perceptive skills, and I cannot secretly scan heaven yet, but someday I hopefully shall be advanced enough to be un-detected by them.
I regret to inform you that in Christian heaven, morality is even more strict and freedom is even more suppressed.
Their government is totalitarian & despotic, after so many years it is still a vast despotic system: a dictatorship.
But there still IS “evil” in heaven. There is injustice. There is error. There are the innumerable fallen ones. Christendom’s heavenly angelic dictatorship has not yet fallen, despite how many enemies their order has made.
I wrote this in Ucci’s thread earlier.
Club29, have you read it?
Without special pleading and begging the question of a jusified difference, why don’t we have Heaven on Earth - free will and no evil. We rationalists just find there are unredeemable evils for which free will is misplaced ; we find that we could have free will without all those evils if there were no natural evils.However , John Hick alleges that we want paradise on Earth,but he here makes an all or nothing argument and a straw man. It is the relgious who claim a paradise for Heaven. Nelson Pike in “God and Evil” adumbrates on that we would be robots here if we had no evil to contend with ,but that proves too much and proves my point that what is good for one is good for the other:we would be robots eternally in Heaven in that case. It is begging the question as someone at another site tried to make the point that in order to gut cured from chicken pox, one had to get it first. But the point is that the tests are urredeemable for many and so one would not require them to get to Heaven - the analogy fails. It is just another cop out just as is the requirement to get to know a god , one should freely worship it in spite of all the evils here. A rational being abjures worship! It would objurate any for worshipping it. It is what is morally right for humans and other animals that is required , not what a god wants ! Morality binds a god. We have need to justify that a god treat us right. And contrary , to Paul might does not make right and we are not clay,property of a god! We are as much a thinking being as a god. As an ignostic, god has no meaning for me. However, for the sake of argument , I use the term as though it had meaning. Is that peluccid?[ Gee , the words I stumble upon!
Dan~,
I don’t know if I said this before, but one obvious difference between cancer and bacteria, and rape and war, is that rape and war are things that people do. Any good understanding of good and evil will include that factor. Another obvious difference is that rape and war (though you use them as nouns) are still events, where as lions, cancer and bacteria are things. What you ought to be saying is “Is being mauled by a lion evil?” “Is being afflicted by disease evil?” Morality is properly applied to events and not things. It’s arguable that there is no proper way to experience being mauled by a lion that makes it not an evil.