[OBW]

zeek,

The problem with your dismissal of the free will argument is that it was a result of the exercise of man's free will that God chose to take restraints off of the "natural" and even off of the already existing evil in the form of Satan and his followers.

Our problem in deciphering the issues surrounding God and evil is that we constantly presume that a particular characteristic of God is overriding in all ways, especially in the ways that we would want them to be overriding.

So God is righteous, but we demand that love override it in its entirety.

Yet we want God to exercise his righteousness on those we see as willfully evil.

In other words, we want God to decide everything in the way we would. In another discussion, we would have God smite the Muslim extremists, and the workers at abortion clinics, and the gays and lesbians. Or the Mormons. Or the Catholics.

It's a little like the people who holler about having to submit to searches before getting on airplanes, but will blame the government if something happens on an airplane because a terrorist made it through security. We want God to exercise the judgment he has reserved for the end times. And we want it to be the way we would have it be.

I would suggest that if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, we don't have a very healthy love for ourselves.

You may not have spoken on any particular one of these issues. But th idea is the same. We want God in our image. We don't want a God that is beyond our comprehension. We want to both comprehend him, and somehow prove that he thinks just like we do and therefore whatever we think is right is . . . well . . . right.

We don't want a God who decides to exercise restraint with respect to how nature behaves. How genetics, environment, and evil work to produce poverty, sickness, and more evil. Or how the greedy manage to keep getting more while we righteous ones keep getting less. Solomon said it best. Life is what it is. There is good and evil. There is grief and happiness. Serve your God in it all.