The amount of "freedom". Too much? Too little? Just right?

[Spock]

You say “gain”, I say loss. Why give up something good for something not good?

I put it into quotes to indicate mild sarcasm. Seductus_sum said that death is the road to something wonderful, to be united with God. If everyone would have that, then death would not be something to avoid, it would be something to hasten.

What if the starvation is inflicted on them from external sources?

Then we have the moral obligaton to go and help them. It is not an excuse to say: “it is not my obligation, you go and do it”. In other words, we do not consider “outsourcing” an acceptable solution. When I ask why God does not help those who starve, I frequently get the answer, that it is not God’s obligation to help, it is ours. Why would it be morally acceptable for God to “outsource”, when it is not morally acceptable for us?

None of us created our own ability to reason. I believe it came from God. If it did, using it to find and follow Him would be highly reasonable.

It is contingent upon your belief, which many do not share.

 

[david_friol_1]

Hey Spock

It has been stated many times that we “must” have free will, in order to love God in a meaningful fashion. However, it has never been discussed (at least to my knowledge) just how much freedom is needed to achieve that.

I am having a hard time following you on this one Spock. What do you mean by “how much freedom”? Do you mean in quantity some how? I’m not sure if we can quantify something like freedom in regards to love. We are either free or we are not in any give area. A child may be free to play anywhere on the street in front of the house and both immediate houses next door but no further and no crossing the street to play on the other side and this is for the childs safety, he/she has limits here. We do not have these boundaries in loving God. We are completely free to love God by choice. The only boundaries are not boudaries to love of God but boundaries to keep us from being mugged by sin. And if we do sin we can still love God though are sins displease him and we may lose his grace.

After all we have only a **limited **freedom to actually do good, or bad. Among other things, the laws of nature limit us, and quite seriously. But there are other limiting factors, as well.

What do you mean limited freedom to do good; the laws of nature can not dampen our freedom to love God at all. Please

So the question arises: “just how much freedom should we have?”. If our freedom would be limited to allow us to love God, or not, that would be sufficient. After all “love” is just a nice buzzword for a very human emotion - which should be expressed in both words and action. We could express our love by going to church, by worshipping, by adhering to God’s commands. (Well, at least to some of them, but I will not go into that right now.) Or express our lack of love by staying away from church, or doing some things that God allegedly “frowns” upon, even if those actions do not inflict suffering on others. For example: to love our spouse in a disapproved position, or loving our partner outside marriage, or even - horribile dictu - sexually loving a person of the same gender.

You went off here and lost sight of “freedom to love God”

Also, we could have much more freedom to do good: helping others in need, for example. So, on one hand, we have freedom which we could do without, on the other hand, we lack freedom which is highly desirable.

SPOCK!.. STOP AND LISTEN!.. YOU ARE FREE TO HELP OTHERS AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, JUST GET OUT THERE AND DO IT, STEP AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER AND HAVE AT IT! YOU ONLY LACK MOTIVATION AND "WILL"INGNESS AND PERHAPS DESIRE TO PLEASE GOD!

Do you have any argument to show that our amount of freedom is somehow “optimal”? That taking away some freedom to do bad, or having some more freedom to do good is somehow inferior to the current state of affairs?

I will answer this with the famous line from the movie Braveheart. William Wallace(played by Mel Gibson) gives the big speech before one of the battles and he closes with “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our FREEDOM!” That says it all, thanks Mel!
God bless you and set you “free” from whatever prevents you from using your "freedom"to please God!