40 Jesus saith to her, `Said I not to thee, that if thou mayest believe, thou shalt see the glory of God?'
Edit should be breaks blood ties😪
40 Jesus saith to her, `Said I not to thee, that if thou mayest believe, thou shalt see the glory of God?'
Edit should be breaks blood ties😪
Salvation is this weird concept, to believe that human beings are evil by nature and need to be saved. How about convince people that human beings are not evil by nature? because the viciousness of this concept is followed by they create the Problem, they Agitate the masses, then they Propose the solution. So, is that the salvation of mankind must be the destruction of mankind. So they have Christians and to a lesser extent most Jews who are atheists, so they're not involved in. But to a lesser extent the Cabalists and the Islamic faith all working towards the destruction of humanity based upon the myth that Humanity must be killed to be saved.
So, typical Hegelian dialectic. Thesis: human beings are evil by nature. Antithesis: without God, Yahweh or Allah humans go straight to Hell. Solution: save mankind through the destruction of mankind (Armageddon/nuclear holocaust). Worship (accept/believe) Jesus, Mohamed, Yahweh and obey us (Church, Mosque, Synagogue) or be condemned.
Nobody's perfect. Except one.
Why does anybody have to be perfect, if we supposedly have free will? why would this God you're talking about, think that his creation would still find him to be a perfect Creator despite his very flawed creation? that's a pretty big risk. And for many of us it has been a huge swing and a miss, we could look at the free will experiment again. People often just put God in a box and say he had to give us free will because he didn't want robots. Well, Heaven already messes that idea up but let's not forget this is an all powerful God he can do whatever he wants and he chose to create a system with free will. This is truly probably the the biggest bet that God is going to place risking that his children will have the option to choose sin and death, and Hell supposedly, and kind of in between these first two with the Eden setup. This is going to be a huge gamble for us where God places a literal test for the first two beings that he creates, Adam & Eve. Everything is perfect that's how God supposedly wants it and he's going to give them the opportunity to fail. But he didn't just allow this one test to exist, he stacked the odds by allowing whatever the serpent is supposed to be something there to further the temptation, the ease of access to this tree the labelled the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why so easy access to death? and is knowledge so wrong? even the fact that he didn't give them the knowledge of good and evil before, thus eliminating their actual awareness of what was at stake, there's a thousand other ways that God could have tested his creation without creating the fall of man.
It's so obviously just a mythological story and I don't think you fall for it. But if you're going to take it as literal truth then its implications for today is that we are still broken creatures in need of a Savior, the perfect Jesus Christ, as you allude to. However, you first have to answer for why would this God risk so much, but keep in mind there's been about 120 billion Homo sapiens that have existed. If we believe that each of them are imbued with the soul and each of them was born with this sinful nature damning them to Hell from birth unless they properly somehow find and do and believe just the right thing then that first bet with the tree and the garden of Eden becomes the most disgusting gamble and risk for any God of all time.
The creator of a world has to decide whether it will include freewill or not. If not, it's not much of a creation, more of just an automation. If freewill is included, that will mean some creatures will do evil, but (as your question presupposes) it is better for creatures to have freewill (a good gift) than not.
It's not relevant to compare this universe with other hypothetical ones though because this is the one we live in. If other universes had been created, by the definition of universe they would be separate from this one and so we wouldn't know about them except by imagining them. So, yes, freewill creatures who have willingly given themselves are a better aspect of this universe than the creatures who have no freewill and just obey the laws of nature regardless (whether those are robots or rocks).
Then the creator has the decision of how to structure the world so that freewill creatures will choose good and so that evil will be limited. There too one can't fault the creator for deciding on a certain amount of evildoers if there is evidence that the domain of the welldoers is infinite and that of the evildoers is finite (it burns out). If the first evildoer is a spirit creature, and this tempts many other spirits and ensnares all humans who will be born of Y-chromosomal Adam, that's not a risk but an accepted part of the freewill narrative that is outweighed by the benefits coming at any time.
So we don't "have to" be perfect, but while we are not it grates against life and calls us to higher life, which is a good thing in a freewill universe.
It wasn't that knowledge was wrong, it's that knowledge of evil by definition means accepting the corruption and nihilism that the concept of evil would mean. Jesus willingly accepted that corruption upon himself by becoming intimate (knowledgeable) as to evil without committing evil. The purpose of the tree was to show that there would be a human who could absorb death without committing evil like our parents did. And that's what Gen. 3:15 says. They didn't have intimacy with evil before because they hadn't committed it, even though they could have reasoned about it for some time before making the fateful decision (see Perelandra by Lewis for a narrative of what could have happened).
There was no risk because the trajectory of those hundred billion plus would be calculable. The issue is the amount of loss compared to the amount of gain in the long run. We have faith that it's worth it, and he have faith that it's correctly stated that all those hundred billion had opportunity to recognize the creator in his creation in some way and were able to choose sufficiently for their lifespan, or not. But when we start saying we know better both how many people are unsaved in this universe and how many people should have been unsaved in a more perfect universe, we're playing God when we are just incomplete creatures. There are many more reasons than we can process for why things happen, and I've found that whenever I seek a specific reason or answer it's always available sufficiently for what I ask. The handwaving escapism of rejecting all moral responsibility because a couple of theodicy questions remain a bit murky is always mystifying to me. If you know so much about right and wrong, propose a moral law yourself and go about doing right and getting right done, instead of criticizing those of us who are doing it.
I assume the Creator to you is the God of the Old Testament. You call him Yahweh, but feel free to correct me. This god by the way shows to have omniscience as he is constantly, at least in the OT, surprised, regretful and angered all of a sudden. So, this God of the Bible who is supposed to be the example of the good father I see so many problems to the degree of which I have to say this God is simply willing to gamble with his creation his children's well-being their lives and worse their souls. This god Yahweh is not limiting evil, he's amplifying evil throughout the entire OT. I think allowing the serpent adds kind of unnecessary gamble. And all of this leads to which is the problem of evil God allows a world of evil and suffering to exist and still hopes that people can find their way to believing that he is a good god which is necessary for people to believe in, to worship him and follow him and put trust in him. Many people myself included are more than willing to accept that there could be a god out there. And many people like myself immediately remove this God, Yahweh, from the possibility of that because he is either not the good god he says he is, thus refuting his claims in the Bible and making himself falsifiable, or he's straight up evil and not worthy of my worship or not trustworthy of my devotion.
I'm not saying that. People have different opinions of what means to be saved, I think that's obvious. To me it makes no sense for a good father to decide he's going to flood the whole world. Why? because things got away from him he regretted the creation that he made. Even though it was made exactly how he intended it to be with his perfect form knowledge. If we're going to again attribute these things to God that's problematic in and of itself but the bet is that the world would be better that Humanity 2.0 would somehow get it right and he lost that bet immediately in the sense that Noah sinned almost as soon as you could sin. As well as his sons and from there it simply did not get any better. So all that genocide all that murder all that suffering all those animals all those babies all those women all those people who were collectively not horrible and evil paid an awfully hefty price for God's 2.0 gamble that failed as soon the flood receded. If you still don't see a problem with this god, wait for the next one, and we're only in Genesis.
How about the Tower of Babel risk? Yahweh who claims himself to be not the author of confusion purposely confused people creating new languages and scattering them around the earth and what's the gamble here? these people will still be able to find him even though he's not going to appear to most of the places on Earth for a very very long time, if at all. And that he's only going to give his holy scriptures in three of the many thousands of languages relying on humans to be able to translate them and spread them around this large Earth. He didn't provide for anything that would be necessary to overcome these odds. We didn't get the printing press for millennia nor did we cross the oceans. There was simply no hope for the vast majority of all people who have ever lived because of this decision, this bet from God. I hope that by now you're seeing failure after failure after failure. And the best thing you can do especially if you're parent is just compare yourself, really compare yourself, with God. I don't care how bad of a parent you think you are I can almost guarantee you you are miles above this God.
I'm only proposing people use common sense. If you had just two children and they were going to be 100% dependent off of you for their survival and their eternal fate would you raise them each with their own language so that they could not communicate or work together? and then would you provide them the instructions for how to live life and find you in a different language than those two with simply no way to access it? because that's what this God did.
You're talking about moral law, how about this. And I'm willing to be wrong on that, if you can show me something different, I will correct myself. But my understanding is that Lot's oldest daughter convinced the younger daughter to join her in an incestuous relationship with their father to perpetuate the family lineage. Both daughters conceived sons by their father by getting him drunk. So, Lot's eldest daughter with Lot has a son named Moab the ancestor of the Moabites. Where we get Ruth and Ruth and Boaz are the great grandparents of King David. And we know through King David we get the lineage of Jesus. So if I'm understanding everything correctly, Jesus is 100% a descendant from this ancestral rape again bringing forth the literal nature of these stories instead of some metaphorical moral truth.
I'm not criticizing anyone, just point out the facts. I'm not even sure what you mean by "criticizing those of us who are doing it". What exactly are you doing?