7477	Forums / Theology Forum / Forgotten People: God Left This Place	on: May 07, 2007, 07:17:14 PM
In your account however, as I understand it, we screw ourselves. We screw each other. We have choice. We turn our backs on Him. God’s ticket out of Dodge so to speak (again, as inscrutable as it is) therefore becomes amazing kindness. That which leaves space for our suffering also leaves space for real love. It is not a vacuum. We are not Killer Robots. We have free will. But the freedom involves us being able to choose what pleases us most. The reason we are pleased with sin is because we are sinners. There are moral consequences for the choices we make. Even unbelievers have moral choices. The can be very moral. But the point is since the fall there is no one good, there is no one who seeks God, all have turned aside, their throats are open graves, and the poison of vipers are on their lips. Men devour Gods people like they are eating bread. What we need to see is, that the equation of free choice falls short of the full awareness of ones own soul, and what kind of ability one has in his free choice. When we think in terms of free choice and our view of ourselves making choices , we are always more gracious to ourselves and less gracious to the others. So we are starting with a view that is full of flattery. The point is that we must have truth from a source outside of our ability to measure our freedom, and it is the word of God. So when we are meditating on the word of God, we are not looking at our freedom in terms of how we are moral or not, but we are looking at a perspective that we are much worse than we view ourselves and we are less able than we think about our ability to choose. It is the Spirit and the word that bring us to our senses about our view of our free choices. This warped view of our freedom is shown in the process of our memories. And we have a thousand thoughts that go into our degenerate hidden areas. We lust, hate, and covet most of the time we are insincere enough so that we do not go out of our way in mourning with those who mourn, and rejoicing with those who rejoice. We are not really loving others as they would want to be loved, even tho we consider our loving actions acceptable. Even when we communicate the pain we are experiencing, we trust in the experience of that process so that it comes more from selfish motives, rather than letting scripture determine and define our deep hypocrisy in our motives, so that we learn to process knowing ourselves in the initial light of divine revelation rather than in community. What we are always doing is trying to believe we are better than we are, and others are worse than they are. We live in this corrupted mold, so much, that we really only get to the roots of our inward freedom in a millimeter at a time. We love to think that we can change faster than what really happens. We flatter ourselves thinking that if we follow some kind of program, then we are going to get better faster. As long as we can feel better about ourselves than we really are, and keep others in the same steps we are taking to get better, then we are feeling better about ourselves in a very shallow society. We never like to think that we sin alone. We are always looking at others sins and getting relief from feeling that a lot of other people do the same things , so its not so bad. We love to keep from feeling alone in our own sin. It is so ingrained in our sinfulness that we cannot find our way out of our own flattery even tho we think we have found the truth. Thats why we will remain in this finite sinful existence until we get to the other side. On this side there is not a day in which we are not embattled with multiple sins, deep lack of awareness of ourselves, a lack of feeling toward others, and a constant comparison in our guilt. Its just what we are . Much worse than we think we are.