Does God make us sin?

[cfiott]

Does God allow us the freedom to live the life we want or does he manipulate us into doing right or wrong as he deems fit for whatever purposes he might have? The following passage from Exodus strikes me quite negatively:
Ex. 7:2 Thou shalt speak all that I command thee: and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of his land.
Ex. 7:3 And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.
From this it is easy to deduce that Pharaoh failed to give in to God's (Moses's) demands not out of his own free will but because God had conditioned him (hardened his heart) to act that way. God could have decided to soften Pharaoh's heart and the Jews would have left Egypt in peace. Instead God decided to prove how powerful he is by creating a villain, punishing untold numbers of innocent people, and causing all the horrible disasters that followed.
Are we responsible for our sins, or is God "hardening our hearts"?

[Blood On Your Hands]

god makes rules that are impossible to follow. The seven deadly sins are instinctual to human behaviour and can't be avoided. This makes us have to beg for fogiveness. Its a power trip.

[Goat]

god makes rules that are impossible to follow. The seven deadly sins are instinctual to human behaviour and can't be avoided. This makes us have to beg for fogiveness. Its a power trip.

The seven deadly sins are not biblical .. it is Catholic tradition that lists them.. but they are not 'biblical' in nature.

[OnceConvinced]

The 7 deadly sins are mentioned in the bible, if not all lumped together like the 10 commandments.

I think BOYH has a good point. Things like lust, envy, jealousy, pride etc are all part of human nature. The bible calls them sins of the "flesh". These are things we are born with. You just have to look at the behavior of babies if they don't get what they want.

God supposedly designed us and determined what our personalites would be, before we were born (I don't believe this now, but it's what most Christians believe and the bible seems to back it up). God determined what our strengths and weaknesses would be. He has preprogrammed us with certain traits. It's in our genetic make up.

Does that mean he makes us sin? Maybe not technically, but it certainly creates a huge barrier for us to overcome, a barrier, that if we don't overcome, will make God very angry and result in us being executed by him (if you believe Hell means death). God definitely puts the barrier, there, but in the long run it's up to us as to how we deal with that barrier.

Can God make us sin if he wants to? Well scripture shows that God will violate freewill when he wants to. The Exodus scripture above about Pharoah is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want an even better example of God making people sin, see the story of Gideon where God turned the Midianites against each other, forcing them to slay each other.

[Blood On Your Hands]

If god wanted to he could erase the traits that he sees so unfit or change the rules to accomodate human nature, but instead, he tortures us by making us give up human nature and beg for forgiveness when we use it.
Why is it so wrong to be human?

[wilfongconrad]

This is obvious people...
we made the original sin to come here. So we choose to sin. God doesn't choose to sin for us.. He has no control over our sin. All he does is give us the freedom to choose to come here or not. He tells us not to ask what the tree of whatever is in the garden of eden but we eat from it anyways ( basically this could be interpertated as we show interest in this thing) We have the freedom to do this and we have the freedom to not do thos. God tells us that if we do not do this we will be much more happy and no good will come from this sin, but we choose to reject this so we go to this place < earth, our world> we are then mortal. Whateve ryou do I wouldn't blame god.. but this is me, you may think different, may be programmed or designed to think different.

[Rathpig]

This is one of the oldest contradictions in the doctrine of Christianity and it creates a self-contradiction that semantic equivocation can't overcome.

Either "God" is in control as the all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good deity or humanity has "freewill". Asking for both is contradictory, and any system that contradicts itself is a logical failure.

The problem is that Abrahamism was designed to be the "best religion on the block" so as it evolved in competition with various other local religion the Hebrew adherents ascribed ever more grandiose characteristics until ever increasing contradictions were built into the system. This is what happens when you don't clearly notate code that others will have to delve into: at some point someone's kludge doesn't compile and all the sauce in the world can't help that spaghetti. Abrahamism is a poorly documented code that is contradictory beyond repair.

An early Bible coder wrote this gem:

And the LORD was with Judah; and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron. Judges 1:19

Early version Yahweh was powerless before the dreaded "chariots of iron", so version 2.0 had to be developed.

[Beto]

This is obvious people...
we made the original sin to come here. So we choose to sin. God doesn't choose to sin for us.. He has no control over our sin. All he does is give us the freedom to choose to come here or not. He tells us not to ask what the tree of whatever is in the garden of eden but we eat from it anyways ( basically this could be interpertated as we show interest in this thing) We have the freedom to do this and we have the freedom to not do thos. God tells us that if we do not do this we will be much more happy and no good will come from this sin, but we choose to reject this so we go to this place < earth, our world> we are then mortal. Whateve ryou do I wouldn't blame god.. but this is me, you may think different, may be programmed or designed to think different.

You simply can't get around the "fact" that "God" told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge between good and evil BEFORE they had acquired said knowledge. I find it amazing how some people still claim they should've known it was wrong because "God" told them, regardless of not being able to tell the difference between right and wrong. Of course once this is understood, they start arguing about the difference between "right" and "good" or "wrong" and "evil". It's quite a stretch, though.

[Rathpig]

You simply can't get around the "fact" that "God" told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge between good and evil BEFORE they had acquired said knowledge.

Now that is a darn good point.

One day in the Garden of Eden, God says, "Hay guys, you won't have a clue about anything I am going to say because you have zero knowledge about even the basic concepts, but anyway if you do this stuff, I am going to get really mad and make you wear leaves, k?"

Adam whispers to Eve, "What's 'e on about".

"Like I'd have a clue?", Eve replies, "I'm just the help, remember?"

"And one more thing, again that you won't understand, but", God pauses, "That tree over there. It's a something something something tree, so leave it be, even though you wouldn't know what the whole "disobedience" thing is about, but just .... whatever. Name some animals or something."

And God goes back to resting.

"Ya know Adam, I really think the old boy is a bit of the manic, but that snake says we can have apples for dinner."



According to the Christian cosmology, the divine creator of the universe is either a grand jokester or a serious sociopath. It is analogous to giving an infant the run of the house and blaming the baby for eating the drain cleaner.

[Greatest I Am]

This is obvious people...
we made the original sin to come here. So we choose to sin. God doesn't choose to sin for us.. He has no control over our sin. All he does is give us the freedom to choose to come here or not. He tells us not to ask what the tree of whatever is in the garden of eden but we eat from it anyways ( basically this could be interpertated as we show interest in this thing) We have the freedom to do this and we have the freedom to not do thos. God tells us that if we do not do this we will be much more happy and no good will come from this sin, but we choose to reject this so we go to this place < earth, our world> we are then mortal. Whateve ryou do I wouldn't blame god.. but this is me, you may think different, may be programmed or designed to think different.

If God could not keep sin out of Heaven, Satan, then why would He think that He could keep sin off the earth.
His failure at both must mean that He did not fail. Failing is ungodly.

If He did not fail then things are as they should be. It is to us to then recognize that things are Perfect. This is as a God would have it.

Regards
DL