Omniscience, God allowing original sin

[D_M]

I agree with the existence of that fuzzy area that you mention;

No one has been judged a sinner because God, or some exterior authority has called them a sinner, they have been judged a sinner because their own conscience has judged them to be a sinner, and God knows when we do what we know to be wrong. It is by our own judgements that we are judged.

St Paul: Those who are under the law shall be judged according to the law, those who are not under the law shall be judged by the precepts of the law.

or at least he said something like that…

It is the golden rule which comprises both the law and its precepts, and by which all humanity is judged.

It might be surprising, maybe not, to many christians to know that the ten commandments does not apply to people who do not belong to the judeo-christian tradition. We are judged according to the ten commandments and as catholics what is in the catechism, because we have accepted these judgements to be true and are under its authority. These are our judgements, and by them we are judged.

The remainder of humanity is not judged according to either, but rather by its precepts, of doing unto others as should be done unto them. And the vast majority of them fall short in this regard, as this world is filled with people who pass judgements that they themselves are guilty of at closer inspection; hence they live in sin, not because God has said that they lived in sin, but because they do things that they know and judge to be sinful.

The golden rules really does take precedent.

I’ve had an interesting problem myself in this regard. I use to be an agnostic for a few years in my life and then when I came back to the faith, I got the distinct impression from my prayers and in what priests said that I was doing something very wrong by being an agnostic. Believers that I knew before my conversion gave me the same impression. The problem that kept coming back to me was that I couldn’t actually remember not believing in God to violate my conscience; I really wasn’t sure if there was a God. I liken this perhaps to Paul’s words when he said something like that he was convinced that killing Christians was doing the right thing before he repented. Maybe conscience isn’t enough then? I don’t know.

Maybe if we pray for it, God will answer these enigmas.

 

[sunnyJoe]

MY PEOPLE PERISH FOR LACK OF KNOWLEDGE
AND THE FEAR OF GOD IS THE BIGENING OF THE WISDOM.
Did we beleive in " all things works for the glory of God"?
if we do, then, the mans’ free will to choose between the good and evil is for the glory of almighty God.
Devil (Satan) has challenge God. don’t u see that in the stories of Job? when the Satan went to callenge God that it’s becoz he (Job) is enjoying every privelege from God that he served Him (God)
and to be honest, our God is a very jealours God and He is full of pride so decided to allow Job into the hands of satan to be tormented excerpt that he (satan) should not touch his life.do u think that God was delighted in the sufering of Job? no. but at the end He took glory that is the point of reference today.
My dear brethren, God has been in this seriouse battl;e with the satan over mans’ will and He will not be happy seen us falling aside of the devil so He decided to send his only begorten son to undergo all that just to show us the way.; Infact, “he who have ear let him hear” but remeber, God can never be interpreted canaly becoz, He’s mystery lest u get lost.

Thanks to all that and understand.
CATCH COLD FOR GOD.

 

[Ronald_E]

People can tell me all they want about how great God is, but, without His Grace I would not know Him or love Him. When I received His Grace three years ago there was no choice to be made except to desire to know Him better and to do what He made me to do. Grace gives me the freedom of choice which is to choose Him and to desire His Grace every moment. There is no free will without Grace and without Grace we cannot know God. Why didn’t Eve and Adam know this? They had just been born into a world that they did not know. They did not know each other. Innocence and naivete exist until we first experience the pain of innocent choices that harm us. God came to show us how to love one another. We did not know that before He came. Mary, who was full of grace, knew more about love than any of us will in our lifetimes. Until we can love like we are created to, we must use God’s Grace to show others His Love who have not received His Grace. That is our free choice if we know and have been blessed to receive His Grace.

 

[elts1956]

Your moderator Mike has banned me from at least one of the forums for something I said yet Catholics are alowed to stay on while calling protestants names like Liar.

He sent me a private e-mail after I had quoted from the secular church history books of how the early church had become pagan aroung 350 ad. He said that is not alowed and is inflamatory. If secular history is not alowed then how can we ever come to the truth. It has been shown that history from certain denominations and the Roman Catholic church have been changed in order to make there “church” llok good. I would suggest to all protestants and catholcs to go to the library to find true history and not read history from the religious crowd that is tainted.

reachingcatholics.org/rome.html

I think I’ve been made aware of this argument before, that God allowed us to sin in order to raise us to something better.

I just don’t believe it though… evil has no reason to exist, otherwise it would not truly be evil.

I don’t believe that we are going to be made better than we were in the garden. Perfection by definition cannot be improved upon. We will only reach our prior perfection, the perfect and everlasting joy which was always His will for us in beginning and in the end, we do not grow, we are not improved upon, if we could then we should never find a perfect state, because it therefore doesn’t exist (ie. there is always something better than what we have, always something lacking about this supposed state of original perfection).

I agree with St. Paul, but not with Aquinas or Leo. Grace needs to abound in order to free us from sin when sin has abounded, but how can grace take us to a state which is better than perfection? It restores us to that state which is lacking in nothing, I think their interpretation is mistaken.

Think about it… if Adam and Eve had been lacking in something which came later, how could it have been perfect or a paradise? If they did, then by definition it could not have been because it was lacking in something important and therefore imperfect. It would have required something else, it would be yet to be perfect.

God knows the whole of human history. He knows every action we take before we take it, He knows every sin we commit before we commit it, and He even knows who will befriend or reject His Son before He even created them (hence the ‘book of life’ which has existed from the beginning of time).

God knew that Adam and Eve would sin against Him before He created them, before He had placed them in the garden, before He even told them not to eat of the tree, He knew that they would sin. He knew that He would have to send His Son as our Redeemer before He told Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree. If Adam was not going to chose to eat of it, He would have known that as well, and He would also know that He therefore did not have to send His Son as our Redeemer.

My theory: Adam and Eve could have known Jesus and have had all the things which have been given to us now, and therefore been lacking in nothing, but they chose to sin against God and therefore, with God’s foresight, did not yet come to have those things; which he nevertheless would have offered to them had they not have sinned.

We created sin and the knowledge of it, He didn’t. He never told us we were naked, we did. It is from us in cooperation with the angels (the bad ones that is) who have decided that there exists such a thing as good and evil. God has a will which is all good, but He does not judge those who do not do it. But everyone has judged Him, and rejected His will which is good, and therefore in compliance with this knowledge of ours that there is a good and there is an evil, He sent us laws, prophets, revelation and most especially His Son, as proof of our own guilt by this knowledge we have illegally attained.

‘Stop judging and you will not be judged’, 'the Rod with which you measure shall be measured to you, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you, this is the law and the prophets’

It is by our own judgment, our own knowlegde, our own doings that we are judged. If we did not know good and evil, we could not know ourselves to be naked, and therefore where is sin?

If we found nothing wrong with God, God would find nothing wrong with us. If we turned aside from our ways and found that He had done nothing wrong (ie. repented), He would turn His face back to us and found that we He had done nothing wrong as well (ie. our sin will no longer be remembered). We have created sin and the knowledge of it, and He has taken those judgements with which we have rejected Him in the garden and proven ourselves guilty of them a thousand times over.

If you disagree, please feel free to challenge this.

Just a passing thought. Since God gave the first humans Free Will, how is it that He can personally allow, or disallow us anything? Isn’t that what Free Will means, we humans choose, we take the responsibilty and if we sin, we pay the consequences.

 

[elts1956]

Your moderator Mike has banned me from at least one of the forums for something I said yet Catholics are alowed to stay on while calling protestants names like Liar.

He sent me a private e-mail after I had quoted from the secular church history books of how the early church had become pagan aroung 350 ad. He said that is not alowed and is inflamatory. If secular history is not alowed then how can we ever come to the truth. It has been shown that history from certain denominations and the Roman Catholic church have been changed in order to make there “church” llok good. I would suggest to all protestants and catholcs to go to the library to find true history and not read history from the religious crowd that is tainted.

reachingcatholics.org/rome.html

Dear ABE, Where did this come from???

The letters Jesus wrote to these churches describe not only the conditions that existed in the churches at the end of the first century but also the conditions that would describe the church during different time periods in history

I don’t mean to be flip, but if this website has an obvious error like that, what else is it in error about?

The only Jewish “churches” in existence during Christ’s life were synagogues. I have not see evidence he wrote to them. Taught orally, yes, but no proof of writing to them available.

 

[D_M]

Just a passing thought. Since God gave the first humans Free Will, how is it that He can personally allow, or disallow us anything? Isn’t that what Free Will means, we humans choose, we take the responsibilty and if we sin, we pay the consequences.

True… one might even add the only alternatives were creating either a race of robots, or perhaps not creating at all… which is not necessarily preferable

(in the past few months since I wrote this I’ve come to think I was wrong in my conclusion)