Is this a serious question, or just a way of being condescending? Do you honestly think that everyone who has a different perspective than yours arrived there via lack of thought?
Or course not. But you arrived at those adjectives not from my views of God but from assumptions you made about what a certain doctrine necessarily entails. You didnât actually present an argument to arrive at a conclusion, and if you had, Iâm sure you would find people had legitimate complaints with your premises.
I think you are confusing omnipotence and omniscience here, and contrary to your insinuations, actually way too much thought has gone into the question of Godâs foreknowledge of sin. I kind of doubt you have stumbled upon the magic bullet that resolves all questions there.
Philosophically, this caricature of the situation sidesteps the issue of freedom and free will and relationship and how they apply in a way that is worlds away from an engineer or inventor creating flawed products and more products to fix the flawed ones.
Well, the alternative to allowing people to be mistaken is forcing them to be correct. Is that a less manipulative view of God?
To reiterate, you donât know what I mean when I say âoriginal sin.â I do not think that two people in a garden ate magical fruit God put there to tempt them knowing they would eat it, and on the advice of a talking snake, they destroyed Creation and passed on sin genes to all their offspring.
But I do believe there is something essentially damaged and broken about humanity that we cannot escape on our own. I believe we are born into a sinful identity, our enculturation and personal choices further actualize and entrench our identity as sinners, only a new identity in Christ can reconcile our relationship with God, self, and others.
Because he loves us and wants to relate. Like Romans said, the law was a babysitter.
Why wait 2000+ years to return and reign? I donât pretend to understand Godâs timing. I donât pretend to understand the whole idea of âchosennessâ either. I find aspects of it disturbing and hard to reconcile with other ideas I have. But you do realize that our ideas about fairness and justice are culturally dictated, not absolute? I do not have good answers for a lot of my questions about what God does with people who donât know Christ. But I do not find some general universalism where all sincere roads lead to salvation to be intellectually satisfying or compatible with my other beliefs.
And you are perfectly free to have that view. But stick to discussing the merits of ideas, not disparaging the character or thinking skills of the people who hold different ones.