It can’t be. No matter how much good intention there is still temptation. Even if we do not have the tendency you claim now, there would still be temptations to overcome and it would be ludicrous to think that we would never succomb. If Heaven is a place with no evil or harm then there must be constraints to ensure it.
Of course, I do not accept your assertion that we have the tendency to choose wrong by default now. It is only one step away from original sin and not a big enough one (IMHO). I object to the idea that I must perpetually fight an urge to make poor choices. It just isn’t true.
Of course, I do not accept your outright blatant lies about what I have asserted.
I have not only never said any such thing but frequently refute this common claim by others. It is pretty clear that the vast majority of Christianity do make this assertion. But I am not one of them.
How do I reconcile this with scripture? Do you even try? Yes scripture says nobody can claim they are without sin. But this only means that by the time we can speak we have sin. It is a demonstrable fact that human beings learn by imitation. Therefore the community in which we are raised make a huge difference. It doesn’t mean that everyone follows robotically. There are always those who rebel against the norm – and not just when the norm is good but also when it is wrong. But this is rarely the case one can rebel against more than one or two such bad examples and the number of self-destructive habits in human communities are far more numerous than this. For this reason none can say they are without sin.
So what about Jesus? Was He not human? Ah… but the difference in His case is that Jesus did have a community without sin. No not Israel obviously! Yes Jesus was human and He also learned by imitation. John 5:19 ““I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.”
Heaven is the place without the self-destructive habits of sin. It is not a place where nobody makes mistakes (that would be a place without life). But it is a place where people take responsibility and learn from their mistakes.
Heaven won’t be heaven if someone can still choose to do evil. Someone might object that then we won’t have free will. Nah – we will still have plenty of free will and good choices to make, things and activities to choose between, whom to talk to, when and where.
It’s kind of like YECs saying the first creation was perfect, but in reverse. Any place that evil can enter is not perfect. The Bible talks about sanctification – some have mentioned habits in that regard. If you like, we might say that we will be so habituated to making good and loving choices, an evil choice could never occur to us. Besides which, we will be surrounded by good.
Okay, so theoretically we could choose evil, to satisfy the naysayers who insist that we wouldn’t have free will if we couldn’t? But practically? No.
We would not have known about Jesus’ redeeming love nor have been able to praise him and our Father for it. We still will be praising him for it in the eternal future, more than we do now.
It is opening a can of worms because my response would be, take it up with God. He made predators and he made prey. A hunter is going to hunt. Are those birds vegan?
Vinnie
I’d say my efforts are better spent elsewhere ( I take care of my cat but he is not made in God’s image and if he was bigger than me and hungry, I would become food). If people want to devote a lot of time to petting cats, to each their own. life. My cat’s life couldn’t get any better. He is the king of the world. Or at least thinks he is. We also have 5 adults in my
home. Some are always there. The cat wanders and sleeps wherever he wants. He enjoys sunbathing on the upper deck. He also stands in front of the bathroom door when he is thirsty and we have to turn on the sink. He is way more interested in being outside than living trapped in a cage. Cats are predators. Designed and built that way from the ground up. If he brings me mice and birds he brings me mice and birds. All a part of evolution—the natural order of things, and there is nothing immoral about it.
Just to be clear, the conservationist’s argument against free-roaming domesticated cats in North America is not an argument against predators per se (I personally am a fan of predators) but a recognition that humans in this case have transported a novel predator (artificially introduced an invasive species) into an ecosystem where the local fauna have not evolved to cope with the pressure. And, as a result, entire species of birds are threatened. I see this threat to biodiversity as something that humans are responsible for correcting since they are the cause.
The vast majority of all species that ever lived on this planet are gone and extinct. I’m not caging my cat to stop one more. There will still be birds.
Change is inevitable and a normal part of life to me. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. And I always wonder how many houses, roads and buildings (schools, factories, stores etc) are built on areas where diverse wildlife once thrived. I wonder how many birds lived in all that land that got chopped up that we all use. This is a non-issue to me and a sign of a fat and lazy society that has nothing better to worry about so we invent causes and problems.
The vast majority of species in the past have gone extinct so it is a good thing for humans to accelerate the process?? hmmm…yeahh…OK…gee if that’s your philosophy then who am I to convince you otherwise?
Who is saying anything about gospel? Not me. And who said anything about giving up all pets? Not me. My view is based on an ethic of conserving biodiversity but if you think accelerating species extinctions is a good thing, I obviously can’t make you act otherwise. But I, personally, don’t think a choice to keep cats indoors is an onerous burden in the light of species extinctions.
That is kind of a bait and switch. I think having pets and allowing them outdoors is a good thing. And pet food warms the planet. I’m just not going to try to emotionally blackmail anyone over it.
This is a forum on a site for the intersection of faith and science. Most people in here accept scientific consensus on things. So as already mentioned, house cats are not native to USA. Most house cats have very little predators in their yards. There are things like foxes and coyotes and even owls but mostly they have little predators and overpopulate in subdivisions and find their way out into counties and begin to wipe out wildlife. There are several extinctions in the world contributed to cats as an invasive species. Scientists and those who care about stewardship and environmentalism lay out a few tips for those who are responsible adults to put in place.
Have your cats fixed.
Keep your cats indoors except for them you take them outside.
Create cat enclosures for indoor cats to be able to move outside without being free to cause ecological damage and to keep them safe. Just like responsible dog owners keeps their dogs within their property.
So this is not an opinion on if it’s better for the environment but it a fact developed through the data.
Secondly, you are also very uninformed on what veganism/vegetarianism is. It helps to pick up at least one book on a subject before sharing a thought. There is a difference between a triggered emotional reaction vs an informed opinion that differs.
So the focus of veganism is to reduce the harm to wildlife that humans bring about. So since I know I can live without animal products, and I can live on plants and fungi with the technology we have nowadays, I can consume a diet that does less to support the commercialization of animal corpses as food. In the same way I dont torture and kill dogs or cats, I extend that compassion to the best of my ability to all species.
I don’t want a snake to be a vegan. I don’t want an insectivorous bird to be a vegan. I don’t expect my cats to be vegan or spiders. It’s humans that are able to make the choice. So any argument centered around birds can be killed by cats and it’s ok because birds eat caterpillars is simply one that is ignorant of the actual discussion around this subject.
You also mentioned “ better time spent “ as if somehow your time is more important. It’s not. You are not more important than me. You are not more important than anyone in here. Your focuses in life is not more important than mine or an ecologists.
You’ve probably heard this ridiculous argument…… what if you were stranded on an island what would you eat….”…. Well there is another silly one.
FYI…. Biodiversity decline because of invasive species is a third world problem too……
Would you rather preach the gospel or make more environmentally sound choices? It’s silly because it’s like asking would you rather eat food or drink water. You can do both. It’s not a choice of sharing the gospel and going to church vs not littering or being a more responsible pet owner. Just like you don’t have to devalue the life of a pet in order to value the life of a person.
So what are your thoughts on free will in the restored world?
Bait and switch? Tell me how merely presenting facts of how cats reduce the biodiversity is misleading. And emotional blackmail? I can’t control how you emotionally react to presentation of facts, if you are reacting emotionally, that’s on you
And most normal people will be put off by telling them they are destroying biodiversity by letting their cat outside. People in the real world do
donor equal the small subset of people on the internet arguing over any and everything—including letting a cat go outside or not. I find this whole discussion comical to be honest.
Neither are humans. We should go back to Africa.
Exactly the reason why we let them outside. If there were a lot of predators in our yard they would get eaten.
I said “my time is better spent.” The key word being my. For me it is objectively true that there are far more important things to do in the world than pet cats I choose to lock inside.
You forgot the absolute best thing to do for the environment. That would be euthanizing our pets. Don’t stop short. Follow the science through to the end. I am not interested in virtue signaling from people on the internet…
I choose to not live without the use of animal products. I need to get to work on my tires and use a million other things that are animal products. Eating meat has been extremely beneficial for humans:
Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism and language. Larger brains benefited from consuming high-quality proteins in meat-containing diets, and, in turn, hunting and killing of large animals, butchering of carcasses and sharing of meat have inevitably contributed to the evolution of human intelligence in general and to the development of language and of capacities for planning, cooperation and socializing in particular. . . there is no doubt that the human digestive tract has clearly evolved for omnivory, not for purely plant-based diets. And the role of scavenging, and later hunting, in the evolution of bipedalism and the mastery of endurance running cannot be underestimated, and neither can the impact of planned, coordinated hunting on non-verbal communication and the evolution of language.
Maybe that is why we find this gem:
Genesis 9:3 “3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”
If we don’t have it we aren’t human and I honestly have no interest in being a robot for eternity. If we do have it then we will still make bad choices from time to time so heaven is a process and will have growth. The physics will probably be radically different than anything we can understand or process right now so it’s all just speculation through a dimly lit mirror.
I read the first few statements and realized reading the rest was pointless so I did not. Just letting you know so you’ll know what I’m not responding to it. Though it’s mostly because I’ve had this argument a dozen times a day everyday for over a decade.
Though I did catch the last one and agree. Spending life as robots would be rather pointless.
The opening question, IMO, approaches the distinction between free will and “no free will” by asking about (a) a hypothetical situation, i.e. free will in the future or (b) “after we are saved in Christ”.
The assumption in (a) is that heaven and earth will be “restored”, whatever that means. If there is no “restoration”, the jig’s up and the question has no practical or useful answer that any one can or should prepare for.
The assumption in (b) is that (i) there’s such a situation as ‘being saved in Christ’ and that (ii) anyone has been saved. If there’s no salvation in Christ, then–as Paul says–those who believe there is or hopes there will be are to be pitied. If there is salvation in Christ, those who think they’re saved in this world may want to rethink that assumption … cats aside.
If there is no free will, what’s the alternative?
Historically, as far as I know, the alternative to free will is “no free will”, commonly called “determinism”.
The following quotes address determinism and free will:
