Isn't God evil, if He allowed Adam's fall to harm us?

[A_Thinker]

My sister has cancer. When one of us proposed to pray for her, my brother chimed in, 'Why would I want to pray to your evil God who gave her the disease to the begin with?' He openly declares that our religion is stupid.

I am dreadfully sorry that your sister has cancer. I have recently experienced loss due to cancer. I will pray for your sister.

But consider my words.

How would the acceptance of your view of the guilt of Adam and/or any of the rest of us ... change how your brother feels about what is happening with your sister ?

Christians have struggled with the presence of evil in our lives for the 2,000 years of christian history. We live ... we get sick ... we die. But we do all of this while in relationship with One Who truly loves us ... though He doesn't have to. God came to earth and lived with, shared with us, served us, and, ultimately, died for us, ... and He didn't have to.

The struggle against evil is one in which God is invested ... and which we, as His children, are also invested. The way of the christian is love ... and sacrifice. We open ourselves to the pain and struggles of others, hold their hands, and share in it with them.

 

[DamianWarS]

Sorry that doesn't make sense. The post 12 was solid. If I can't be sure what "love" and "kindness" mean for God, His promises become cause for alarm and thereby undermine Christian hope.

you mean it undermines your hope. just because you're having an existential crisis doesn't mean all of Christendom needs to suffer.

Why do you think that's a problem for me? It's an exercise in logical consistency. If you can start with a different definition of love than mine, hold God to your standard with consistency, and end up without endangering Christian hope, then you've achieved consistency. In which case my objection at post 12 doesn't apply to you.

it's an exercise of logical consistency in your world view. Post 12 belongs to you and no one else. It's an answer in a vacuum and shouldn't be pushed on anyone else or claimed that it refutes anything except in your own personal world view and should be prefaced with "according to me..."

Look if these concepts such as "justice" have no humanly recognizable meaning, where is the Christian hope?

what mirrors your standard and what is humanly recognizable are not the same thing. you need to figure out where you stand. either it's what's good for humanity, or what's good for me but those two will inevitably collide. God told Adam not to eat the fruit. What aspect of this is humanly rational? Why is there a tree even made with desirable forbidden fruit? We don't need to know the justification of God's actions and if we gauge God's love it needs to come from a source that is reliable and doesn't change, post 12 is not that source.

 

[prodromos]

All Christians including myself believe that God is good and proclaim His goodness.

But what if our doctrines inadvertently extrapolate otherwise? The church clings to two views of Adam:
(1) Adam was our representative. ( Catholics and Protestants)
(2) Adam's sin didn't incriminate us but did have horribly painful consequences for our world. (Orthodox).

I suppose a third view exists.
(3) Adam never literally existed. Biologically we evolved into this horrible world.

All three views unacceptably extrapolate to a God who is hardly the epitome of kindness and thus is either comparatively evil or totally evil. After all, given the power to create a world, any of us would have exercised more kindness than 1,2, and 3.

2,000 years of investigation have demonstrated that only one solution is possible. And the church is well aware of it but has rejected it because it flatly contradicts their dogmatic assumption of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts.

The obvious solution is that God only made one material soul named Adam (even Eve was a physical subsection extracted from Adam's ribs). After Adam sinned, God removed most of that material soul from his body unto a place of suspended animation. When each of us was later conceived, God mated a separate microscopic portion of that sin-stained soul to each of our bodies. In other words, YOU are 100% Adam (not a mixture). YOU are the one who freely chose to eat of the forbidden fruit (although none of us currently remember doing so).

P.S. This remedy isn't a complete solution to the problem of evil. The larger issue is, why would a perfectly kind God allow temptation in the first place? Historically the church has made a pretense of providing satisfactory answers but has patently failed. Problem is I can't discuss this aspect on the current forum as my solution falls under Controversial Theology.

I'm sorry, but what did Adam do that we haven't done a hundred fold? No one forces us to sin, but we still do. Take responsibility for your own sins and repent, asking God's forgiveness. Don't waste time with this foolishness.

 

[All4Christ]

All Christians including myself believe that God is good and proclaim His goodness.

But what if our doctrines inadvertently extrapolate otherwise? The church clings to two views of Adam:
(1) Adam was our representative. ( Catholics and Protestants)
(2) Adam's sin didn't incriminate us but did have horribly painful consequences for our world. (Orthodox).

I suppose a third view exists.
(3) Adam never literally existed. Biologically we evolved into this horrible world.

All three views unacceptably extrapolate to a God who is hardly the epitome of kindness and thus is either comparatively evil or totally evil. After all, given the power to create a world, any of us would have exercised more kindness than 1,2, and 3.

2,000 years of investigation have demonstrated that only one solution is possible. And the church is well aware of it but has rejected it because it flatly contradicts their dogmatic assumption of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts.

The obvious solution is that God only made one material soul named Adam (even Eve was a physical subsection extracted from Adam's ribs). After Adam sinned, God removed most of that material soul from his body unto a place of suspended animation. When each of us was later conceived, God mated a separate microscopic portion of that sin-stained soul to each of our bodies. In other words, YOU are 100% Adam (not a mixture). YOU are the one who freely chose to eat of the forbidden fruit (although none of us currently remember doing so).

P.S. This remedy isn't a complete solution to the problem of evil. The larger issue is, why would a perfectly kind God allow temptation in the first place? Historically the church has made a pretense of providing satisfactory answers but has patently failed. Problem is I can't discuss this aspect on the current forum as my solution falls under Controversial Theology.

Honestly, your solution seems more unkind than solution #2. Why would God intentionally mate a piece of a sin stained soul to each person when they are conceived? In that scenario, He has every power to not have it be stained when he creates us. Your view has the same end result of suffering - so it doesn’t save us from suffering. In view #2, we are not held culpable for something someone else did. Following that logic in your proposed view, God creates us as already being sinful, and thus being as condemned as Adam was (attaches a soul with sin to us at the beginning, this having us participate in that sin before we are even born). Even view #1 doesn’t hold us to be personally culpable, which seems more kind than your view imho.

I’m heading out so I can’t respond in detail to the subject of kindness and God right now - that will have to be later.

 

[Neostarwcc]

This is a monstrosity. 100 billion people are guilty of 'involuntary sin' (surely an oxymoron) that Adam caused?

You don't see that you've villainized God beyond belief? And all you need to do to resolve it is accept my simple solution?

Right. It's clear to me that Scripture doesn't teach the Catholic/Protestant theory of Adamic representation.

No I will not accept your OP because you're trying to call God evil and unfair and unjust. When that is not what God is at all and is 100% not true.

I am not aware that the protestant church has EVER taught that we are responsible for Adam's sins so idk where you got that from. Even Martin Luther did not believe that. That would make God unfair, evil, and unjust you're right but also why would God stop there? Why not be responsible for our father's sins? For the sins of all of the males of all of our generations until Adam? No when God judges both unbelievers and believers he will judge them based on what they have done with their lives both good, and bad.

Paul when he said that we inherited our sins from Adam meant that sin spread through the world through Adam when Adam had children. Because Adam was the father of humanity and sin is passed genetically just like all of our other traits that we get from our father/mother.

As to explain why hundreds of billions of people got cursed with sin. We don't know 100% of how sin works but it is NOT God's fault nor his intention. Humanity CHOSE sin. Just like humanity now has a free will choice whether they want to be with God for forever or whether they want to be apart from him for forever. God does NOT send people to hell people send themselves there because they think that they are wiser than God and don't need God. But the truth is, we ALL need God and were made to not only worship and praise him but to also worship and praise false Gods and idols. Think about it, we either are worshipping money or we are worshipping ourselves, or our television sets, hobbies... literally anything can be an idol. If you spend more time with one thing than you spend with God, than it's an idol.

Anyway, only God knows EXACTLY why sin has entered the world and why every human born has that sinful nature. But I can make a guess.

When you get AIDs or any other disease you risk spreading that disease to every one of your children correct? Well and to your spouse but my point is mostly towards the next generation. If they catch AIDS from you they have a risk of spreading it to their children all the way down the line. Yet apparently, sin has a 100% chance of spreading to our offspring. So every child born from us will have the deadly consequence of sin.

Again exactly why that is, I don't know. But it's a truth of scripture and it's been proven throughout the ages of our world's history. Because every human God also did not want that to happen and did everything that he could to warn Adam and Eve about that happening.

As to what else you said before about it being unfair that God judges something that we cannot help. You cannot ask God to not judge sin and disobedience to him because not only is it against his moral character but it would cause him to sin. So humanity is EXTREMELY lucky that God made a plan before he formed the universe and humanity to rescue us from our sins and to one day completely remove them as if they never happened. Otherwise, ALL of us would be punished and we would have seen his judgement at the end as righteous and good. I know it's hard for sinful human beings to fathom but trust me, one day we will ALL completely understand God's judgements and moral character just like Adam and Eve once did and call will call God "Righteous, good, ..etc". We only see the lake of fire judgement as unjust and unfair because we are plagued by sin.

Also, asking God to not judge a disobedient and sinful person is kind of like asking a court room judge who is sentencing you for murder (or any other crime) to let you go free unpunished. If they did let you go unpunished just because you asked for it that would make them a corrupt judge right? The Judge may show mercy on you and give you a lesser sentence if you show remorse (Not really the case in murder, usually it's life without parole but in what is considered to humanity "lesser" offenses a judge will go lenient on you for. But I personally believe all sin is the same in the eyes of God) That's the same with God. If he just let us all go without unleashing all of his anger and judgement on a perfect sacrifice than there would have been no hope for ANY of us and he would have been a corrupt and evil judge.

I say this because there are varying denominations that say that in hell there are varying punishments based on a persons deeds in life. Like those who fully knew what the gospel was and rejected it would be punished more severely than somebody who was ignorant of it. I don't know if this is true or not but I know that each and every one of us will be judged fairly by God based on what we have done with our lives. Even Christians. The only difference is, there's no condemnation for Christians. We do not have to fear the lake of fire judgement that's to come because God has completely forgiven and forgotten about our sins. Again, that was only made possible by the sacrifice that Christ made on the cross.

Another possible way to explain it is if God sinned during any point during eternity he probably would be cursed with sin for eternity because there would be no other God in history who could free him from his sin. I guess it's kind of the same with humanity only God is able to and has promised to completely remove our sins one day so that we will never sin against him again.

Hope that answers your questions to your satisfaction. If not we can talk/debate about this some more. I enjoy talking to you.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

I'm sorry, but what did Adam do that we haven't done a hundred fold? No one forces us to sin, but we still do. Take responsibility for your own sins and repent, asking God's forgiveness. Don't waste time with this foolishness.

You got it.

I think Adam's sin is symbolic of our daily sin.

 

[Halbhh]

All Christians including myself believe that God is good and proclaim His goodness.

But what if our doctrines inadvertently extrapolate otherwise? The church clings to two views of Adam:
(1) Adam was our representative. ( Catholics and Protestants)
(2) Adam's sin didn't incriminate us but did have horribly painful consequences for our world. (Orthodox).

I suppose a third view exists.
(3) Adam never literally existed. Biologically we evolved into this horrible world.

All three views unacceptably extrapolate to a God who is hardly the epitome of kindness and thus is either comparatively evil or totally evil. After all, given the power to create a world, any of us would have exercised more kindness than 1,2, and 3.

2,000 years of investigation have demonstrated that only one solution is possible. And the church is well aware of it but has rejected it because it flatly contradicts their dogmatic assumption of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts.

The obvious solution is that God only made one material soul named Adam (even Eve was a physical subsection extracted from Adam's ribs). After Adam sinned, God removed most of that material soul from his body unto a place of suspended animation. When each of us was later conceived, God mated a separate microscopic portion of that sin-stained soul to each of our bodies. In other words, YOU are 100% Adam (not a mixture). YOU are the one who freely chose to eat of the forbidden fruit (although none of us currently remember doing so).

P.S. This remedy isn't a complete solution to the problem of evil. The larger issue is, why would a perfectly kind God allow temptation in the first place? Historically the church has made a pretense of providing satisfactory answers but has patently failed. Problem is I can't discuss this aspect on the current forum as my solution falls under Controversial Theology.

God acts in ways we can recognize, including in the Garden with Adam and Eve, as a good parent would act.

Christ said He is our "Father". And Christ said we are to be His children.

(We cannot even be acceptable unless we have that attitude; Matthew chapter 18).

And it's not possible to grow up, mature, without mistakes along the way. To grow up we have to learn from our mistakes, as we go along.

How would a good parent act? Answer: precisely the way God has.

 

[Hawkins]

Kindness seeks to minimize suffering. That's what I mean by 'love'. What definition of love do you subscribe to?

Clearly you are just fishing for a solution to a problem elusive to you on traditional assumptions. Such solutions are the very sort of pretense-of-a-solution alluded to in the opening post.

Sin is a result of freewill, logically. Suffering is minimized in comparing to eternity. Within our short life time on earth, evil is exposed and will be destroyed once and for all to secure the eternal life of God's sheep. That's what the loving God is doing.

God's love is for His sheep but no one else. God's love is for minimizing the suffering which is required for the removal of evil once and for all, such that His sheep can live in a perfect eternity which we call Heaven.

 

[Johan_1988]

Like I said before in other threads, since God is the only one who is always perfect, it is clear that His creation might not always being perfect, and creating people who will always follow him is not love.

I agree, since loving someone is a conscious decision that make and act on and also I we if Adam never sinned and we never inherited it how would he ever be able to show how much He loves us. The sacrifice of His son is the greatest example.

 

[JAL]

Honestly, your solution seems more unkind than solution #2. Why would God intentionally mate a piece of a sin stained soul to each person when they are conceived? In that scenario, He has every power to not have it be stained when he creates us.

You're misunderstanding me. God doesn't stain me, he doesn't add that Adam-soul to me. Rather, that spec IS me, presumably expanded to spread throughout my body. The exact density of the original Adam, or that of a present-day subsection, is unknown to us, but we shouldn't presume it to be constrained by the limitations of ordinary matter (i.e. protons, electrons, neutrons). God manages it in ways allowing for more flexibility than ordinary matter, I would presume.

To summarize, God punishes me because I AM Adam, as are you, though, due to our current physical separation, you, I, and 'Adam', now cogitate independently of each other. You might want to re-read the OP.

 

[JAL]

you mean it undermines your hope. just because you're having an existential crisis doesn't mean all of Christendom needs to suffer.

Deflection. Ad hominem.

it's an exercise of logical consistency in your world view. Post 12 belongs to you and no one else. It's an answer in a vacuum and shouldn't be pushed on anyone else or claimed that it refutes anything except in your own personal world view and should be prefaced with "according to me..."

Your world view too. You're in denial about the cogency of the objection and, in so doing, hold to a absurd position. Let's be clear about it (although post 12 was clear enough). If key terms in the Bible don't mean what you ordinarily take them to mean, then the Bible cannot be regarded as providing hope. For example I personally take honesty to mean indeceitfulness (although I can condone dishonesty when a white lie satisfies the law of love). If honesty does NOT mean that, then all the promises in the Bible could be lies. It affords no hope. Similarly if God's 'love' doesn't mean love as I define it (kindness), the Bible affords no hope.

Thus for you to suggest that we - as responsible exegetes intent on logical consistency - have no need to hold God to our human definitions of the virtues - is patently absurd. And if you keep insisting to the contrary, without showing me a clear resolution of the apparent contradiction, you'll be ignored. I just don't have a lot of free time to waste on apparent nonsense.

Your 'rebuttal to this has been, "But I'm not having existential crisis. I DO believe that God loves." Right, for two reasons:
(1) As a Christian, you have the Inward Witness of the Holy Spirit helping to persuade you of His love.
(2) Fact is, when you read the Bible, you DO hold God to those standards. You DO read love as kindness, for example, and honesty as indeceitfulness. The only reason you're taking exception here is to cover up holes in your theodicy of Adam and God in general, such as I have been alleging.

what mirrors your standard and what is humanly recognizable are not the same thing. you need to figure out where you stand. either it's what's good for humanity, or what's good for me but those two will inevitably collide. God told Adam not to eat the fruit. What aspect of this is humanly rational? Why is there a tree even made with desirable forbidden fruit? We don't need to know the justification of God's actions and if we gauge God's love it needs to come from a source that is reliable and doesn't change, post 12 is not that source.

Exactly. Thank you for admitting that! The whole Garden scenario is completely irrational on the traditional understanding of God. I love it when a debater concedes a crucial point in my position.

 

[JAL]

I'm sorry, but what did Adam do that we haven't done a hundred fold? No one forces us to sin, but we still do. Take responsibility for your own sins and repent, asking God's forgiveness. Don't waste time with this foolishness.

Most posters on this thread have either intimated or made explicit what the church has always rightly affirmed - that Adam's sin is in some sense cause/causal to the world's current state of misery and corruption, or as Paul put it, "Through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners." Meaning, if Adam hadn't sinned, this world might not be corrupt at all. I see two possible modes of causality.
(1) I myself am Adam, at least a subsection of his material soul. Adam's corruption has thus been distributed throughout the world, corrupting it. That's my position.
(2) I am merely a descendant of Adam which means that, in some sense, God allowed Adam to have a corrupting influence on his (inherently innocent) descendants. 100 billion of them. That's the church's
position.

You shouldn't punish 100 billion people for the sin of one man. And yet, God walled off the Garden and pronounced a death sentence upon the human race immediately following the sins of Adam and Eve. Even if you could justify this impingement judicially (which seems logically impossible), it doesn't maximize kindness. Any of us would have shown more kindness than that.

This miscarriage of justice is a problematical and unnecessary tenet of theology - unnecessary because in my theodicy, for example, it does not exist. My God is maximally kind.

 

[JAL]

Sin is a result of freewill, logically. Suffering is minimized in comparing to eternity. Within our short life time on earth, evil is exposed and will be destroyed once and for all to secure the eternal life of God's sheep. That's what the loving God is doing.

God's love is for His sheep but no one else. God's love is for minimizing the suffering which is required for the removal of evil once and for all, such that His sheep can live in a perfect eternity which we call Heaven.

So Adam had no negative impact on us? That's what this thread is about, but I don't have time to repeat all that material.

 

[JAL]

I am dreadfully sorry that your sister has cancer. I have recently experienced loss due to cancer. I will pray for your sister.

But consider my words.

How would the acceptance of your view of the guilt of Adam and/or any of the rest of us ... change how your brother feels about what is happening with your sister ?

The root complaint underlying the problem of evil is that even innocent fetuses suffer. Everyone suffers. Hence the atheist sees no evidence that my sister's illness is the result of sin. If it's happening even to known innocents, why attribute it to sin?

MY position offers him a change of perspective. What if there are no innocents? What if every fetus sinned in a past life, as subsections of Adam? NOW we have some actual justice happening. A solid theodicy potentially makes all the difference in the world.

Again that's just the first part of the picture. The 2nd part is, why did God create Adam in the first place? However, I can only cover that part in Controversial Theology.

 

[FireDragon76]

All Christians including myself believe that God is good and proclaim His goodness.

But what if our doctrines inadvertently extrapolate otherwise? The church clings to two views of Adam:
(1) Adam was our representative. ( Catholics and Protestants)
(2) Adam's sin didn't incriminate us but did have horribly painful consequences for our world. (Orthodox).

I suppose a third view exists.
(3) Adam never literally existed. Biologically we evolved into this horrible world.

All three views unacceptably extrapolate to a God who is hardly the epitome of kindness and thus is either comparatively evil or totally evil. After all, given the power to create a world, any of us would have exercised more kindness than 1,2, and 3.

2,000 years of investigation have demonstrated that only one solution is possible. And the church is well aware of it but has rejected it because it flatly contradicts their dogmatic assumption of an immaterial soul indivisible into parts.

The obvious solution is that God only made one material soul named Adam (even Eve was a physical subsection extracted from Adam's ribs). After Adam sinned, God removed most of that material soul from his body unto a place of suspended animation. When each of us was later conceived, God mated a separate microscopic portion of that sin-stained soul to each of our bodies. In other words, YOU are 100% Adam (not a mixture). YOU are the one who freely chose to eat of the forbidden fruit (although none of us currently remember doing so).

P.S. This remedy isn't a complete solution to the problem of evil. The larger issue is, why would a perfectly kind God allow temptation in the first place? Historically the church has made a pretense of providing satisfactory answers but has patently failed. Problem is I can't discuss this aspect on the current forum as my solution falls under Controversial Theology.

Another possibility I suppose is something like in Oomoto or Konkokyo, or Process theism, God exists... but doesn't fit western ideas about omnipotence that negate human power and responsibility, because God is not conceived of as a savior, but more in Whiteheadean terms, as a source of inspiration and moral persuasion.

 

[JAL]

No I will not accept your OP because you're trying to call God evil and unfair and unjust. When that is not what God is at all and is 100% not true.

No I'm saying that the traditional understanding of God and Adam extrapolate to an unkind handling of the Fall. My understanding does not.

I am not aware that the protestant church has EVER taught that we are responsible for Adam's sins so idk where you got that from. Even Martin Luther did not believe that. That would make God unfair, evil, and unjust you're right but also why would God stop there? Why not be responsible for our father's sins? For the sins of all of the males of all of our generations until Adam? No when God judges both unbelievers and believers he will judge them based on what they have done with their lives both good, and bad.

Have you ever heard of the Protestant doctrine of Original Sin? You're saying that we sin and then, as a result, are rightly pronounced sinners. Original Sin (the traditional version of it) says that we inherited Adam's sin, consequently we are sinners involuntarily and, as a result we cannot help but sin. R.C Sproul sums it up:

The doctrine of original sin teaches that people sin because we are sinners. It’s not that we are sinners because we sin, but rather, we sin because we are sinners; that is, since the fall of man, we have inherited a corrupted condition of sinfulness. We now have a sin nature. The New Testament says we are under sin; we have a disposition toward wickedness, so that we all do, in fact, commit sins because it is our nature to commit sins. But that’s not the nature that was originally given to us by God. We were originally innocent, but now the race has been plummeted into a state of corruption[by Adam].
What Is Meant by the Term Original Sin?

Paul when he said that we inherited our sins from Adam meant that sin spread through the world through Adam when Adam had children. Because Adam was the father of humanity and sin is passed genetically just like all of our other traits that we get from our father/mother.

Monstrosity. First of all it is illogical to say that sin spreads biologically. Sin cannot 'spread' like a disease because it is a volitional act. Secondly, even if it were a disease, why let it spread? If one of your kids gets a disease, don't you try to prevent it spreading to the rest of them? How is it maximal kindness to let 100 billion people be infected?
Any of us would have been far more kind.

As to explain why hundreds of billions of people got cursed with sin. We don't know 100% of how sin works but it is NOT God's fault nor his intention. Humanity CHOSE sin.

But you just said that He let it spread genetically/involuntarily. On that assumption, it wasn't 'humanity' that chose sin but only Adam that chose it - for the rest of us it came involuntarily. You confirm

Yet apparently, sin has a 100% chance of spreading to our offspring. So every child born from us will have the deadly consequence of sin.
Again exactly why that is, I don't know. But it's a truth of scripture and it's been proven throughout the ages of our world's history. Because every human God also did not want that to happen and did everything that he could to warn Adam and Eve about that happening.

No it's not a doctrine of Scripture. It's a traditional interpretation that cannot be true on account of contradicting the biblical portrait of a maximally kind and just God.

As to what else you said before about it being unfair that God judges something that we cannot help. You cannot ask God to not judge sin and disobedience to him because not only is it against his moral character but it would cause him to sin.

But I am not asking that. If I am Adam, I SHOULD be punished, except insofar as atoned for of course.

So humanity is EXTREMELY lucky that God made a plan before he formed the universe and humanity to rescue us from our sins and to one day completely remove them as if they never happened. Otherwise, ALL of us would be punished and we would have seen his judgement at the end as righteous and good. I know it's hard for sinful human beings to fathom but trust me, one day we will ALL completely understand God's judgements and moral character just like Adam and Eve once did and call will call God "Righteous, good, ..etc". We only see the lake of fire judgement as unjust and unfair because we are plagued by sin.

Hard to understand? God's justice isn't very hard to understand once you take my view of Adam.

Hope that answers your questions to your satisfaction. If not we can talk/debate about this some more. I enjoy talking to you.

Thanks but I might not engage you further because I don't have a lot of time and I see us at an impasse. I don't think you're resolving what I see as a fundamental problem in your position. You're claiming that sin is basically involuntary on our part and yet somehow merits divine wrath. I see that as contradictory to the nature of justice, goodness, and kindness.

 

[JAL]

God acts in ways we can recognize, including in the Garden with Adam and Eve, as a good parent would act.

Christ said He is our "Father". And Christ said we are to be His children.

(We cannot even be acceptable unless we have that attitude; Matthew chapter 18).

And it's not possible to grow up, mature, without mistakes along the way. To grow up we have to learn from our mistakes, as we go along.

How would a good parent act? Answer: precisely the way God has.

A good parent - all the ones I know of at least - would never act the way that traditional Christianity is predicating of God. I've been posting copiously on that discrepancy.

 

[JAL]

Of course atheists think we are stupid... Does the bible not say that they are blind? They cannot see the truth... SO, you can side with them... or try to explain to them... but.. most are to prideful in their self determined intellectual superiority to humble themselves and learn.

Christianty makes some claims that, to the atheist sound unlikely and, in that sense, sounds like foolishness. But we shouldn't make their hearts harder by teaching foolish things. I visited an atheist forum a few days ago. They were chatting about incredibly unjust it is to punish the whole world for the sin of the one man Adam. As a result, they said, the Bible cannot be true.

So, now God gave your sister cancer... and you go along with this mind set?

I was describing the reaction of an atheist. Obviously. Why are you asking me that question? Did you not read the OP?

Christians are sitting comfortably sipping a nice cup of coffee... Atheists don't believe that there is even a coffee bean or boiling water.

Huh? Not following you.

Explain what is monstrous.

From a dictionary online, "(of a person or an action) inhumanly or outrageously evil or wrong."

Sorry, I cannot follow your train of thought here.

I was responding to your misrepresentation/misextrapolation of my words.

How is it "casual"?

Just like you misread me here too.

Again, I cannot follow your train of thought or deductions.

Ok let's keep it simple. If Adam's action had any negative impact on me, God's behavior in the Fall was neither maximally kind nor maximally fair (unless I myself am Adam of course). And it did have an impact, for example the Garden was closed off immediately, and a promise of death given in tandem - for all of us.

Again.. I think our trains are on very different tracks...

Correct. You don't seem to be understanding me at all. Nevermind then.

 

[JacksBratt]

Correct. You don't seem to be understanding me at all. Nevermind then.

Don't understand you and don't agree with what I do understand.

 

[All4Christ]

You're misunderstanding me. God doesn't stain me, he doesn't add that Adam-soul to me. Rather, that spec IS me, presumably expanded to spread throughout my body. The exact density of the original Adam, or that of a present-day subsection, is unknown to us, but we shouldn't presume it to be constrained by the limitations of ordinary matter (i.e. protons, electrons, neutrons). God manages it in ways allowing for more flexibility than ordinary matter, I would presume.

To summarize, God punishes me because I AM Adam, as are you, though, due to our current physical separation, you, I, and 'Adam', now cogitate independently of each other. You might want to re-read the OP.

I reread it. I still feel the same way. God could propagate us however He wants, so it is still the same result. He didn’t have to, as in your theory, make us that way (as Adam himself). It’s a creative out of the box way to consider it though.