| kaneada said:
Control over his creations. Rules, at their most basic, are nothing more than set controls. That's not to say that some rules aren't valid and perhaps universal truths; but all rules have a manipulative component to them. The real question here, is why give the gift of freewill? The idea and principle behind freewill is that it creates an autonomous individual that of which makes its own decisions independently. To impose rules against that freewill, with the steep penalties for not following those rules; to include the loaded decision to relinquish that freewill to the rules set by another person or deity makes it a manipulation due to the fact that both the action of giving freewill and subsequently the rules that directly oppose the principle of freewill a contradiction. So one of the following could be assumed: A) A) God is not all knowing. B) God is manipulative. |
I can't answer everything here, but I'll just say that the fact that God knows what a person will do does not make that person's behavior pre-meditated by God. All it means is that God knows all. But the choice is still the person's, who doesn't know all.
God pre-meditatingly makes a creation knowing the basic foundations of its workings and works off of that foundation. What happens afterwards is up to the creation. Even if God knows, it was left entirely up to that individual.
When you add this to the complexity of choice and non-determinism, and then the infinite complexity of the saving grace offered by Christ, in the context of salvation what a person chooses (either to have faith in the saving act of Christ or not) is imho something impossible on which to state that God is manipulative, as it is at the crossroads of infinities. God is great enough to know it in the end which will be chosen, but it doesn't discredit the completely free choice of the person that did have faith or refused to have faith.
