Sorry I’ve been away for a little while, guys. Just been really busy. I’ll try to jump back in again soon. 🙂
Open Conversation Part 4
Sorry I’ve been away for a little while, guys. Just been really busy. I’ll try to jump back in again soon. 🙂
Finding Truth 
I’m thinking more of examples like the rape law stating that if a man rapes a woman, he must marry her. To us, this is absolutely absurd! This is not justice at all. However, if Tamar, a Bronze Age princess, represented the feelings of ancient women, they would have perceived this law as appropriate justice for their culture. Of course, as time goes on, the law must update to reflect new realities, but the spirit of the law to say that rape is wrong and deserves justice is what does not change.
Okay, Brandon, I wanted to hug you a few minutes ago. Now I want to kick you in the shins. j/k
You and I have gone over this. Yes, the ancient culture was different. But, as a woman, I submit to you that at no time ever has any woman wanted to marry her rapist. As the ancient culture was different that meant that women were completely dependent on men. Either their father or their husband. Any woman who had been deflowered was undesirable for marriage. So her alternatives were to live with her parents until they died or to marry her rapist if she ever had any hope of having children. That’s what they were good for and if they didn’t have children they were shamed. Tamar likely believed that this was appropriate justice because it was law not that it was the law because it was appropriate justice. That is a significant distinction.
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Appreciation Theodicy
First some disclaimers: as with most ideas I have I am sure that someone else has already thought of this and I fully recognize that. Second, all of this is hypothetical and does not represent something I believe, although I do think it is plausible if several assumptions I’m about to make are true.
Assumptions: We are in a universe that was created by a deity. This first creation is a “stepping stone” and a new creation will follow. (Yeah, those are some big assumptions)
I’ll be using Brandon’s concept of a deity that was able to program everything prior to the big bang and was not actively involved in shaping the evolution of lifeforms. I go a step further and say that it has not been involved in any way whatsoever – no revelations and no miracles.
Since the creator deity is able to foresee what would happen in a perfect universe it does not create a perfect universe. The only way to create beings that actually appreciate the deity and appreciate a perfect universe is to first let them experience a universe like this one. All of the mysteries, questions, random suffering and evidence for natural evolution are intentional. We are supposed to be agonized by the uncertainties of our existence. This is all so we can one day appreciate the new creation where the deity will finally reveal itself. Uncertainty will be replaced with certainty. Death will be replaced with eternal life. Suffering and disease will be no more. We will only retain our memories of this place as a reminder of what life used to be like. This life is not a moral test that we must pass – it is a realization of what life is like without a god.
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This life is not a moral test that we must pass – it is a realization of what life is like without a god.
Are we in….hell? 😉
Seriously, Dave, that is interesting and I saw a similar comment yesterday on another post. That, if there is a deity, it created evil and suffering so the we would know what good even is.
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Everyone, feel free to point out any problems with this theodicy. I’ve already thought of one.
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Interesting concept, Dave. I don’t guess there would be any reason to believe in such a deity or concept, because as one of its primary parameters, it leaves no evidence. But I can’t think of a problem beyond that so far…
Brandon,
You said:
But why was the ancient environment so radically different? I’ve heard other Christians say that much of the OT seems barbarous to us because God had to meet those people where they were.
Why?
If the Christian god created humanity, then he was starting with a clean slate. And if we’re to believe the stories in Genesis, he started out wanting a relationship with mankind — and that seems to have continued even after the Garden, since he talks directly to Cain. If God is that involved, why would mankind have turned after false gods and developed such heinous practices? Who would choose to worship a hunk of stone or some imaginary being, if they’re already communicating with an actual god? That’s one of the reasons these stories are so hard to believe.
Christianity can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim “every knee will bow” and that God is “all powerful” while simultaneously claiming that humanity was so, so terrible that God couldn’t pull them out of it right away. That doesn’t work if he was involved from the beginning, unless he created man to be depraved. But Christianity doesn’t really want to claim that either, because it gives God culpability…
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Dave,
This solution is definitely appealing, I won’t deny that! There’s a similar solution out there that you may have heard of. Some modern theologians are arguing that these genocide commands were hyperbole within the context of Ancient Near East wartime language. Paul Copan is one such example and he’s written a few books on this subject. He argues that these totalizing commands were hyperbole for fight the combatants and take the Promised Land. There is also good reason to think that this is partly what God wanted since Deuteronomy mentions “dispossess” the land so often.
But, blaming humans is definitely a good option. Although, this solution sort of tarnishes God’s predictive power. He would know that someone would lie and place this in the bible, so why not play the chess game to prevent this from occurring?
Honestly, when I first reconverted I was more in the Copan camp. I think a few things changed my mind. First was the realization that it sort of fits into the bigger picture of the problem of evil. Is the fact that children die of brain cancer any less bad than God requesting children’s lives in this conquest mission? Also, historically it just became more and more difficult to think that the command contained hyperbole with respect to women and children. Take for example Numbers 31. God has Israel avenge against some city-states and in the process they leave alive Midianite women and children. When Moses learns of this, he is infuriated and has them killed. Secondly, God gives separate wartime rules of engagment for city-states outside of the Promised Land and these are to have their women and children spared! Thirdly, the Hebrew word herem means to devote something to God. So, God was saying judge the evil, judge the culture, even take the children and devote their souls back to me.
Ultimately, I’m just not sure that blaming humans for fabricating the command is any more satisfying than incorporating the questionable aspect of the command into the problem of evil or trying to understand a sort of plausible reason to have the women and children killed during this judgment.
It certainly could do this. Maybe this is why they left the Midianite women and children alive. I’m not sure what their method of execution would be, but I think they understood enough about human biology to make execution quick and relatively painless. Just like they slaughtered animals by cutting their neck vessels leading to rapid unconsciousness. It’s a humane method of slaughter. Of course, it’s absolutely offensive of me to even compare these two. I recognize this as I sit here and type it. My point is, it’s not as if they tortured their victims. It was a religious act. It was herem.
I imagine the Israelite warriors struggled with this whole ordeal. They were afraid to attack Jericho. They didn’t want to carry out herem. God forbade murder but wanted this herem and they had to square with this. If God is good, then this command is justified and serves a high purpose. If not, they are mistaken and need a new deity. But, they also had something else in their memory. Something extremely important to weigh. Something that the author of Deuteronomy stresses frequently. God had just delivered them by great wonders, so they knew of his power and care. If God demanded herem, they had a choice to trust him or not. One thing is for certain (as any good paragraph ends), God doesn’t just deal out his chosen people an easy life, not them, not us.
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Dave, I don’t want to give you the impression that I think I have any sort of definite solution to these problems. I wrestle with them. But, I suppose what I have learned on my reconversion journey is that when I wrestle with God, I feel like there is an option to trust. Of course, that depends on having confidence that there is a possible way in which God is justified. Justified to allow humans to taint scripture or justified to demand herem or justified to request Abraham to do something absurd. Some way at the very least.
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Ruth,
That sounds like something my wife would say to me minus the j/k. 🙂
Believe it or not, I totally agree with you and think you’ve made an important distinction. It probably felt more like a “best of the worst” option to them. Really the justice part of the law was more of a patchwork that was specific to their reality. And, I think the justice aspect being a patchwork is also how our law codes works. I doubt incarcerating the rapist removes all of the torment of rape victim. I mean it’s better than the rapist going free, but it still does not rectify things like, say, returning a stolen item would.
Do you think the distinction you have drawn changes whether the ancient idea of justice for this offence was good or bad within its context?
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Sorry, I’ve got to leave out for now, I will be back to discuss the interesting Appreciation Theodicy and what you said, Nate. ;!
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Brandon,
I doubt incarcerating the rapist removes all of the torment of rape victim. I mean it’s better than the rapist going free, but it still does not rectify things like, say, returning a stolen item would.
I don’t think the two things are comparable. In a violent crime like rape there is no way to ever give the victim back the thing that was taken. Dignity, honor, trust, safety aren’t something a rapist can ever give back. There really is no restitution for it. You are right that incarcerating the rapist would never remove the torment of the victim. Now imagine having to marry your rapist. How much more torment would a person endure? If they were violent enough to rape to begin with I doubt their violence ends there.
Do you think the distinction you have drawn changes whether the ancient idea of justice for this offence was good or bad within its context?
I do. The law could have stated that the woman was owed the benefits of a wife without having to actually be a wife. Or better yet, the law could have stated that if a woman had been raped she was just as clean as she ever was before she was raped. Why couldn’t she have still been considered pure enough to marry? You see all of this boils down to the virginity of the woman. As if that was all her worth – tied up in a neat little hymen. Why make virginity of females so…important? It all comes down to property rights and in the end the woman is still treated as chattel.
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Yeah. Sadly, the “marry your rape victim” law makes sense in a misogynistic culture. And the stories about ethnic cleansing make sense in a very tribal culture. When trying to decide what best explains the OT stories, I think the simplest explanation is that they had no divine guidance at all.
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Brandon,
We could ask this same question about Hell. Since you don’t believe in an actual Hell, why would the creator deity allow certain passages to be placed in the bible that lead so many people to believe in an eternal place of torment?
Perhaps the Bible was not intended to become an object of worship as it almost is today. Perhaps the books that made it into the Bible should be regarded in the same way that evangelicals regard the Apocrypha. Then the blame can be laid back on humans for expecting too much from a book written by men and canonized by men.
Yeah, I see the problem here. I guess you could blame humans once again via the retroactive fall of humanity theodicy, but that’s not really satisfying. Why punish someone who’s hardly begun to live? This seems like a major flaw in the design of the grand chess player. Either the deity is not concerned with being benevolent or is not all-powerful or has a mysterious reason to let some children suffer and die without giving them the chance to “be willing to align themselves with God’s purpose and avoid annihilation”. This is the problem I realized my appreciation theodicy also suffers from – if an infant dies it does not have the chance to experience this universe. Do these children have no souls? Or do they have souls, but are for some reason exempt from whatever the purpose of this life is? I don’t really see an acceptable solution to this.
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Yeah. Sadly, the “marry your rape victim” law makes sense in a misogynistic culture. And the stories about ethnic cleansing make sense in a very tribal culture. When trying to decide what best explains the OT stories, I think the simplest explanation is that they had no divine guidance at all.
Exactly, Nate. The question is why it was such a misogynistic culture to begin with and many Christians(I am not saying you are one of them, Brandon) believe that this is the way their God intended it to be and are still today trying to live by these antiquated misogynistic texts.
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“Exactly, Nate. The question is why it was such a misogynistic culture to begin with and many Christians(I am not saying you are one of them, Brandon) believe that this is the way their God intended it to be and are still today trying to live by these antiquated misogynistic texts.
Especially since we now understand that the offspring are profoundly affected (gene expression and brain development — even in utero) by the way females (the very ones who give birth to the whole species) are treated in society. This has also been observed in troops of baboons.
The hub of 3 major religions have never learned to get along with each other, even within their own tribes — and have never been at peace.
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Nate,
I definitely agree with you! I think much of what we read is stories that have creative theological additions. That doesn’t mean that God did not literally speak with some humans in the course of history, but rather this was extraordinary. From my worldview, these cultures must have rejected what God offered them, whatever that rejection looked like, and they adopted their worship around these stones. This became canonized in the culture and their children inherited their ancestor’s folly. They adopted further abhorrent practices like temple prostitution and child sacrifice which may have been major factors in God’s wrath on them.
I agree with you on this too. I think saying that God can’t just fix something in a flash is not really understanding the idea of omnipotence. There must be a reason for this kind of historical arc, this moral progression. However, I also think the narrative of moral progress is illusory to some extent. If we take a modern human and insert them into an ancient environment, they would revert. Likewise, if we take an ancient and bring them here, I think they would assimilate just like any other human is capable. Whatever historical arc was created must have been intentional if an omnipotent being created it.
If we asked the ancients, why does humanity have a sinful nature, they wouldn’t say it was because God created it this way. They would say that it was inherited from Adam and Eve. But, we know this isn’t true now because of science. This is one of the reasons I have adopted the “retroactive fall of man” theodicy which would answer this same question by stating that our sinful nature (whatever that means) is something that humanity is all responsible before because God created a broken world because he foresaw all of humanity’s sin. It was retroactive in that sense. And, it was a curse for sin, which is something a wholly good being is entitled to do.
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I’m too tired to think anymore, sorry, I’ll be back tomorrow!
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Brandon,
If I was a masterful programmer and created an army of robots that were free to make choices and it turned out that every single robot made choices that I deemed were bad – who’s fault would that be? If I knew they were going to do this and decided to insert errors into the programming as a punishment would this be an example of perfect justice?
I’m just thinking out loud…
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Hey Brandon,
I’ve been following along some but haven’t had much time to jump in. I’m struggling to try and put together some of the ideas you have taken on. I held some of these ideas myself when I was a Christian, so whatever I write here is written both to you and myself.
You and I have talked about and agreed that a correct worldview is not easy to come by but that the best we can do is to try and rule out certain things that cause logical cognitive dissonance – some of the ideas you express here caused that for me back when I was a Christian.
Your language is hard to parse but I do see some expression of justification for the horrors of the bible. I’ll talk about the genocides (most notably and clearly stated in I Samuel 15:3) because that one hits home the most for me.
If there is a morality that is objective and Jehovah does exist and he actually did command these things as written then I believe Jehovah is a god that every human being should both fear and detest – if I were to believe in objective goodness and evil, and the existence of gods, then I would instead be searching for the correct god that truly does represent goodness and not be wasting my time with a god that is described as tribal and frankly quite scary for any human to look upon. Genocide is objectively scary – there is no doubt about that. It objectively creates suffering for 100% of the group that is selected including toddlers and babies. If objective morality exists I can’t see a way to fit that together with genocide being commanded by a being that is good.
We have modern day examples of genocide – Darfur, Rwanda, and the Holocaust come to mind. Toddlers and babies being hacked with machetes, toddlers being led to be burnt alive. I can’t see how these things could be objectively moral today or 3000 years ago no matter how bad a nation had become.
You’ve expressed your experience of God leading you out of cursing. I don’t see how saying words like shit or fuck could be anywhere near the horrors of genocide. Expressing a morality that declares curse words as off limits but somehow allows in genocide seems broken to me.
There are so many other options than justifying the horrors of the bible, some of them exist in other beautiful religions like Jainism, and some of them even still affirm Christianity -> if you haven’t read Thom Stark’s “Human Faces of God” I highly recommend it. The only difference I have with Thom is that I can’t get myself to see enough evidence in the world to come to his conclusions. But that’s different than the logical cognitive dissonance that belief in objective morality along with a justification of genocide would lead me to.
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Just want to say that I’m really enjoying this conversation. Howie’s last comment is especially good, and I’d like to second it. There are two other things from Brandon’s comment that I’d like to address as well:
So if God speaking directly to people was a very rare occurrence, how could other cultures reject what God offered them? It would seem that he wasn’t offering them anything at all. It doesn’t make sense to be angry at idolaters if they’ve never been exposed to the real God. Paul addresses this a bit in Romans 2 when he says that the attributes of God are clearly seen in nature. In other words, he believed that our existence was evidence of God. But that’s a far cry from knowing what such a god would want. And it’s misguided to condemn people for serving “false” gods — after all, they were simply responding to the same evidence that Paul was pointing to. Since they couldn’t explain our existence, they began to believe that gods were responsible. Having no direct communication from any, they did the best they could in filling the gaps with mythology. Why would this be a sin? Instead, it seems to be an effort to find god.
I think my biggest question is why is the arc there at all? If God didn’t communicate with man very much early on, then any barbarism that came about is on his shoulders. That’s why I don’t think Christians can argue that the Old Law was harsh because God was “meeting them where they were.” They never had to be in that spot to begin with.
I have to echo Howie a bit and wonder why you still hold to Christianity at all. To me, the overwhelming evidence points to this scenario: humanity developed through evolution; there was no deity standing by to guide us toward moral behavior; morality seems to have arisen through the same instincts we see in other social animals, which would explain why it was heavily influenced by “might makes right” for so long; the depiction of God in the Bible (especially OT) seems to fit this notion as well, since that god is so petty and tribal; sometimes bad things happen in life because there’s no supreme being up there holding all the strings.
You understand all these criticisms — you often state them more eloquently than those of us who are non-believers. So I’m puzzled as to why you still hold to Christianity. I’ve gotten the impression a couple of times that you sort of view faith as believing in something even when the evidence is stacked against it. Is that a fair assessment?
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Ruth,
I agree with much of what you are contending with a few important exceptions. When you say, “The law could have stated that the woman was owed the benefits of a wife without having to actually be a wife.” The ancient’s were inventive and there were laws that could have been used. For example, if a married man died, it was his brother’s duty to take his wife and have children with her (Genesis 38:8, story of Onan). Also, each Israelite village had to store food as welfare for widows and orphans. So, it’s not as if there couldn’t have been some sort of marriage arranged or welfare for living needs. There must have been something else going on, which brings us to your thesis: “Why couldn’t [the rape victim] have still been considered pure enough to marry?” This could be the explanation. Let’s just run with this idea.
We need to keep in mind that this was pre-Enlightenment and pre-scientific era. They might have thought that having intercourse with someone impure was like having intercourse with someone infected with HIV. That’s the best modern analogy I can think of. They might have actually believed something like this. Tamar was a princess (daughter of King David), so she had financial security. Why is it then that she cried out, “No. . . for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other you did to me.” (2 Samuel 13:16). Did she really believe that the only thing that could restore her purity was marrying Amnon? Maybe. If she really did believe this, then the law was good, it protected her interest.
But, I see what you are saying. Why not change the cultural conditions which oddly enough makes this law protect women’s interest? Why not decree a law to change the culture from the inside? I mean this is a legitimate question that really touches on the “moral progress” idea that Nate and I are talking about. I’m going to try to think about this further in a response to Nate.
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Dave,
You are correct, this could be human input misrepresenting the deity. Part of me thinks that a better explanation is that humans are just not coming to the correct interpretation. There are just so many philosophical reasons and scriptures which support annihilationism like when Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in [Gehenna]”. So, I think the questionable meaning of hell is not as strong of a case for human misrepresentation of God as commands for genocide or questions like, does God condone slavery, and is God a misogynist? I wouldn’t say these questions are necessarily not problems of interpretation as is hell, but at least they seem to be greater problems for us.
This is a good line of thinking. I agree that children dying is not punishment for their sins. Really, the retroactive fall theodicy says that not even all adults actually die because of their own sin directly. Occasionally we speed up the process by smoking or taking risks or whatever, but the fact that disease and death are part of the design is because of our collective sinning.
The real problem you raise is that children die before they are able to align themselves with God’s purpose. They suffer and die before they can choose. This is something I want to challenge for the sake of our analysis. I realize this seems like an unlikely and surprising place to challenge, but let’s try it. I have memories of when I was a kid having to make a choice when my conscience was convicting me. . . You know, maybe it does not matter what level of cognitive function we have: our memory, training, knowledge, experience, conscience, health, and so on. . . God, being omniscient, knows exactly what aligning with his purpose looks like for each person, no matter where they are. Of course, there needs to be some adequate level of input for God to judge, so the important question is, at what time/age can there be adequate input for God? What if this level of input is attainable at the precise moment an infant becomes conscious to the experience of pain? In this way, no human can consciously experience pain without also being able to align with God in some way that is meaningful to God even if it’s not obvious to us as a grand moral choice.
The more I think about it, the weirder the idea of moral culpability really is. For example, the “age of accountability” seems to be a pure construction. It is an age which we arbitrarily judge that most people are developed to make meaningful moral decisions. They can choose to give to charity or to steal. But, think about it. These are morally meaningful to us. What is God perceiving that we are not? Other things like this are legal ages of responsibility: 18 for tobacco, 21 for alcohol, 18 for military, 18 don’t need legal guardian, 35 to be POTUS, etc. Again, these are pure constructions, but based on the limits of who we want to operate freely in our societies. They are morally meaningful to us, but God is omniscient and whatever is meaningful to him may be radically different and more inclusive.
This also helps with another problem. Apologist William Lane Craig has suggested that the Canaanite children all went to heaven. This has been received as extremely offensive and I can see why. By this logic, why don’t we kill all of our children so they’ll all go heaven? Wouldn’t that be good? They can go to heaven and we’ll sacrifice ourselves and go to hell. But, if children don’t just automatically warp to heaven, this kind of offensive suggestion cannot be made.
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Be back tomorrow, everyone has great thoughts that require so much deep thinking!
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Hi Brandon,
I know you’re still trying to catch up to everyone’s comments, so I hate to throw a response in so soon, but there was something I wanted to mention about your latest comment to Dave.
I think your suggestion of God having a way to judge someone’s “alignment” (for lack of a better word), even when very young, is interesting. But I don’t completely agree that the ages we set on things are solely constructs. I think a certain amount of maturity is required for someone to make an informed decision.
For instance, if I found a scrap of paper with a doodle on it, I’d likely throw it away. However, if I found out it was a doodle from Picaso, then it suddenly becomes a thing of great value. Or if I found out it was something one of my children had drawn for me, then it would hold even greater value (for me).
In the same way, I think very young children can disobey their parents or break some other rule, but since they don’t understand the full consequences of it (including any potential spiritual consequences), it’s hard to hold them accountable to it. The Bible seems to support this in some passages — one of them being when God didn’t allow the Israelites over 20 to enter into the land of Canaan. He seems to have decided that those younger than that weren’t culpable.
Anyway, just something I thought of while reading. Talk to you soon. 🙂
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Nate,
That was good criticism, let me revise and draw out something.
I think you are correct about this, I was going too far by calling them “pure constructions”. I work in the healthcare industry and there is the idea of informed consent and the idea of competency (being in the right mind). It’s a big issue for things like end-of-life decisions. So, I agree with you that these are based on reasonable judgments that we have to make as a society and not just made of thin air.
When I started typing that thing up last night, I was wondering what kind of bible passages would interact with it. Definitely moral culpability seems to be part of reality. My dad told me a story once. When I was a child maybe 2 years old I had a toy fire truck. He was lying on a couch and I ran the fire truck off of a table next to the couch and it fell on his head! Apparently that hurt pretty bad! I have no memory of the actual event. Am I morally culpable? I don’t think so, because I can’t even form lasting memories about this to be part of my identity. For all I know, it’s just a story. So, moral culpability develops over time and this idea could be used to determine who is punished and not as in the case of the Israelites. But, this idea does not rule out something deeper like our lives being somehow aligning or not with God’s purposes. What I am questioning is whether this could be something that does not necessarily require a milestone in cognitive development. It could be individualized. Take for example someone that is mentally retarded. Because American Protestantism has driven into us that we need to accept a propositional statement as true, this means we need to understand it. What about the mentally retarded folks? What about those who cannot reach a level of understanding we deem appropriate? Like engaging in a bible class, then confessing in front of the congregation and being baptized and becoming a disciple. Are those who cannot do this how we want in our little scheme just robots doomed to rot in the soil and never resurrect? I don’t think so! I think based on their abilities, their particular level of cognitive development, they are able to align with God in a way that is meaningful to God even if we cannot perceive it.
I suppose what makes an idea like this attractive is two things. First, if children and pre-human hominids became conscious of the experience of pain at the same time they were able to meaningfully align with God, then their actual experience of pain is, in that sense, no different than an adult Homo sapiens who lives consciously and with moral culpability and who develops cancer late in life and succumbs to this horrible disease. Second, it allows God to fairly judge the Canaanite children who were apparently just innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of herem. God could request their lives and judge their hearts fairly, otherwise they never consciously experienced pain thus were not harmed by anyone. Also, children’s rejection of God’s purpose to whatever extent they were able to, has contributed to the retroactive fall.
I guess it’s getting complicated. *Sigh* I feel like talking about theodicy just sounds contrived no matter how one puts it. I wish it weren’t this way. . .
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Dave,
This is totally legitimate thinking out loud! Christopher Hitchens used to say something similar: “This God created us sick and commanded us to be well” and heavily criticize this scheme as immoral. Definitely many versions of Christianity are quick to emphasize what Paul calls our “sinful nature” that we have somehow inherited from our fall.
Quick side bar, because I love little side bars, in the 2000’s there was a raging debate among evangelicals about the atonement. One camp was arguing for “penal substitution atonement” and their reasoning was ultimately that it generated an experience, i.e. guilt followed by appreciation, that they thought this was the authentic Christian experience. They argue that we need ideas to generate this experience and that it is what God wants. Side bar over.
I seriously question this kind of interpretation of “sinful nature” just like you and Hitchens. Now, I will say this. I do think that our default state is to be selfish and think we are the center of the universe. We have to consciously transcend ourselves to love our neighbors. I really resonate with postmodern author, David Foster Wallace. If you have 20 minutes of free time, I highly recommend listening to his speech, This is Water, on YouTube. I think that underlying this “sinful nature” aka our egocentric hedonistic state, is something that is more free. We are free to allow ourselves to become robots and revert to this state. We are free to try and live consciously, to try to align ourselves with a higher purpose, that I ultimately think is God’s purpose.
I think a perfectly good deity is entitled to make a world like this, so long as deep down we have some degree of freedom, even if it finds itself difficult to express because of our individual weaknesses.
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