That should read “It is circular reasoning.”
I’m not sure I understand the point you’re making here. How is it bad not to be able to choose to do evil? I’m all for the forcable reduction in people’s ablity to choose to commit evil- which is the only reason I support the death penalty. I fail to see how it makes an unfavorable difference if some negative things are beyond our ablity to choose to do to others. Free will is wonderful, but not to the point it violates the rights of others.
As for the OP, I choose option 3.
Marcus, why don’t you ask the parents of a child who was molested and tortured to death if they would have preferred the force field alternative.
“Gee, my child would be alive today, but gosh darn it, then the molester would have been denied his free will to choose to violate little Joey and gut him like a pig while he cried for Mommy to save him! I can’t live with that…”
By that same logic, I guess we shouldn’t jail anybody either, because that denies them their free will to commit most crimes, too.
I know you weren’t arguing that they used free will, but I just wanted to point out that the hurricane incident I referenced took place many decades ago, and likely they had no idea what kind of risks they were taking by living where they were.
In any case, it’s very easy to totally remove free will from the discussion by using other examples; such as children getting fatal diseases.
So it is generally accepted by theists. And God could have created the force fields. This would have prevented an evil act from occurring. But I don’t think that’s the point of it all.
I believe that the point is not to prevent such acts, but to raise the consciousness of mankind to such a level that the acts are not committed. This is not to say that we should allow such acts to occur without attempting to prevent them, Revtim. I’m not saying that it is wrong to deny a molester his free will - I’m surprised that you read that into my comments.
Each evil act represents one gram in many hundreds of kilograms of evil acts. I think the point of us all being here, one of the meanings of life if you like, is to be rid of the hundreds of kilograms. The individual acts will also disappear. (Such acts are of great consequence from a human perspective - I do not seek to dilute their significance by referring to them as “one gram”).
The only way to be truly rid of this stuff is if people don’t want to do it. If they are able to exercise their free will and still they don’t want to do it.
An uncle of mine who is a smoker had a stroke a couple of years ago. For over a year he was unable to look after himself or even speak, and was looked after by nurses. During this time he did not smoke. He slowly got better, and once he was able to he continued smoking (duh). This is my point - he still wanted to smoke, although his body was prevented from doing so for a long period. Most if not all the nicotine in his body would have left after a few months - he was no longer a smoker! Except that he thought he still was.
If you kill 'em, elfkin477, you still haven’t killed the desire for evil - you’ve just removed it from Earth!
So, why doesn’t God, the omnipotent and benevolent Diety that He is, simply remove Evil from this world all together? To hell with the force-fields! All He has to do is decide that all evil and imperfection will be abolished, and bam, as if by magic, it’s gone.
Because that would hamper our “Free Will”. Well, if something doesn’t exist, and has never existed, we won’t be even be tempted to do it, and therefore, can’t be stopped.
Let’s say flying (not in an airplane) is a horrible sin. So God took that ability away from us. I never really feel the urge to fly because I know that I cannot, and I know that it’s never been an option.
So, why doesn’t God take the option of sin away completely?
I admit I haven’t read all the way through all the posts, but for a good reason (or maybe cheap cop out) for “Why God lets bad things happen,” you really only need to read the first book of the Bible. Basically, we screwed ourselves. We (and by we, I mean Adam and Eve, for what the stories say) were living in paradise where maybe God did remove evil and made sure that nothing bad ever happened to mankind and everything was happy. Unfortunately, some stoop had to go and fuck it all up for us and humanity was cast out of paradise and into a world were terrible shit existes. Before that, labor pains didn’t exist, man didn’t have to work to survive, hatred, pain, fear, non of that existed. So, as a result of mankinds somewhat inherrant rebellious attitude towards God, we’ve brought it upon ourselves. Evil shit happens because we are, by nature, evil (note: by evil I don’t mean “no good,” I just mean there’s a huge fault located within our being that pushes us away from God. Or something. People are good, it’s just…whatever, I’ll flush that out later if necessary).
Anyway, if you choose to follow biblical stories, there you go. Adam and Eve screwed the pooch, and thus the rest of us have to live in a world where we constantly fuck things up and cause heartache for ourselves, and God in his infinite stubborness just stands back and waits for us to come back to him to put a bandaid on our scrapes and nicks.
Personally, I don’t put too much faith in biblical stories as fact, but I don’t see why so many people have such a hard time accepting a God that allows this sort of shit to happen. Why would he prevent it? What would the point be? Maybe it’s through the hardships that we all come closer to Him/He/It/Them. Who knows. Shit happens, the world is perfect in its imperfections, just like people.