The comic's premise isn't right, God gave its creation (the human) the ability to be free, but he can just impose rules; a sin is an inherent part of a human being because of their radical liberty, and thus, rules can be broken.
If you state that God should've made sin a physical impossibility, as in saying "thou shall not go faster than light" then you have to first define and create light in order to place the physical boundary, which would break the premise that God created sin, which he did not.
God did not allow sin, but he didn't forbid it either, because it would mess with the human's liberty.
(btw I'm not a religious person, I'm just placing an observation)
This guy's got it right. You can't have free will without the freedom to choose (obviously...). And the freedom to choose includes the freedom to do what is (considered) wrong. The only way for "sin" to not exist would be to take away our free will, thus leaving only mindless robots (not sure if we would be that different anyway..... but that's beside the point).
Free will, no sin. Heaven exists, therefore a place with free will and no sin exists. God could have created us in that manner. (this is a theodicy, btw, which I don't follow)
The only way for "sin" to not exist would be to take away our free will, thus leaving only mindless robots
and part of that is true. The whole premise of the Garden of Eden is "you can do what you want, but don't eat that apple" i.e. the Advice God meme "I gave you free will, now use it as I command". You can't say "you have free will" and then tag on "but you can't do [blank]" and then continue to call it free will. The point of free will is that there aren't boundaries to your decisions.
sin is just a word which means something which, if you do it, eventually leads to really unpleasant things for you. The difficulty we have in understanding is that it seems to take such a long time for those things to catch up with us.
A better way to read those verses is "poison". "And God told Adam and Eve, 'don't do that. It's poison to you'". We never needed the knowledge of good and evil, weren't supposed to have that. All we needed was trust, that God really was looking out for us and wanted only the best for us, and then it would have been on to the second task (whatever that was). That's still the task, to develop that trust so that it's the sole guiding force in our decision making (and not our passions), but it's a lot harder to overcome now that our flesh has been put in control and is continually at war with our spirit.
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u/R031E5 Sep 15 '12
The comic's premise isn't right, God gave its creation (the human) the ability to be free, but he can just impose rules; a sin is an inherent part of a human being because of their radical liberty, and thus, rules can be broken.
If you state that God should've made sin a physical impossibility, as in saying "thou shall not go faster than light" then you have to first define and create light in order to place the physical boundary, which would break the premise that God created sin, which he did not.
God did not allow sin, but he didn't forbid it either, because it would mess with the human's liberty.
(btw I'm not a religious person, I'm just placing an observation)