Vinterland

If you're still confused, this statement by someone on another forum will elucidate God's system:

"What we choose to do is what determines what God's foreknowledge is about what we choose to do."

This answers all your questions.

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And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

kschmidt91

You know I've never really looked at it that way.

But that still raises more questions. I was told God has known what each and every one of us will do at any given moment from the beginning of time. Yet clearly no one has been around since the beginning of time. So that leads me to believe that all of our decisions have been made before we were even born. So that being said, how are we truly free to change any of them? If the omnipotent God knows that we are going to do some action how can we not do it? I feel as if I'm kind of going around in circles, but I just can't let it rest

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"To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society" -Theodore Roosevelt

Vinterland

Here's a different perspective; you can't surprise God because he is all-knowing, but you can still change your mind. Say you're pouring Reese's Puffs Cerial into a bowl and are about to add milk, but then you change your mind and decide to have candy for breakfast. It's been taken into account; you changed your mind and it became history to God.

Another example is, open a history book, say it's about an American president and it has a snapshot of him outside of his house wearing a hat and in another photo he is not.

Why is that? The history book didn't make him choose to wear a hat in one photo and not the other. The truth is that what he chose to do and it became history and it's the same way to God. God knows our history because to Him, it's already happened. How many times we can't tell because God isn;t subject to time anyway.

You're going in circles, but I think you're almost out of the spin.

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

WilliamBlue

Except in the act of creation itself, he had total control, being omnipotent he knew that he was creating a creature that he would have to punish for sins that he knew we were going to commit. This makes no sense whatsoever, so why would the Christian god do this(if that is the the one you are speaking of?)?

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When you dance with an elephant it's up to you to not get stepped on.
How can we be so arrogant and egotistical to believe that the whole Universe was created just for us?

Vinterland

God had to create evil in order for us to truly appreciate good. He wants us to have the will to do whatever we like, even if it means we learn to prfer evil. The point of God making us with the intrinsic propensity to sin is so that we learn and grow to love God, to choose God over evil. If this didn't happen, then the best we'd be able to do is choose one cerial brans over anothe rin the morning which wouldn't change the outcome of our decisions anyway. It would be like a symbolic election in a dictatorship, choices are made but when the results come back nothing has changed.

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

Og

So.... Who created the rules that god "had" to follow?

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Vinterland

You would understand if you read my paragraph as a whole.

Yes, God didn't have to do anything, but He did.

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

Og

So it should read "God created evil and good and created us such that we would appreciate good only if we experienced evil."

The way you put it seemed to indicate that it was out of god's hands. I think your assessment of the alternative options is a bit limited. Good and evil are illusions. There is only what is. God created neither... We did.

That's the point of the garden of eden myth and the point of Christ's sacrifice. It's what the buddha represents. Christ's body on the cross and the communion is the fruit of the tree of eternal life (the other tree) that frees us from the act that cast us out. By eating that fruit, you "become as god" just as yahweh declared when he kicked us out of the garden.

"God" is an aspect of your psyche and it is that aspect that is the guardian of the gates of eden. "God" placed the cherubim there. "God" is the one who keeps us in exile. "God" lives within you.

This question of free will is full of absurdities. They exist in the fact that most people do not understand the source of god (i.e. within yourself).

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Vinterland

Chemical reactions in the brain allow humans to experience that which is neither good or evil, or good, without evil. So if God had created a universe in where good had no counterpart, we would still be able to know, to some extent what good is.

However, if such a world exists, it is one where its inhabitants do not have free will. The choices we made in that world, between good and good or neither good or evil, would be equivalent to a dictatorship holding symbolic elections. People would make choices, but the result would be the same, all working towards the dictators(or God in this example where he doesn't allow free will) favor, his will. We'd essentially be robots, incapable of doing what we want, even if it includes turning away from God. We'd be forced to stand in His reflection.
Good and evil are not illusions because they're mentioned in Bible. God even said He created Good and evil as well (even though the mss is highly disuputed).
I don't know what you're talking about. What book did you read that influenced this opinion? Could it be by Joseph Campbell?

__________________
And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, "This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea." And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.
And my soul said, "Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment."
—Gibran Khalil Gibran, “The Greater Sea.”

Og

This keeps on appearing like you're casting things higher than God. Like these notions of good and evil. Like they're things that god is bound to.

This is a literalists interpretation of the bible. Which is absurd.

He's one of them. There's lots of other sources as well that aren't necessarily written in books. Lots of experience with biological systems that exhibit complex behaviors and then understanding the underlying signals involved in the neural networks.

Free will is an absurdity... Good and evil are creations of the human mind to help us interact in our society.

They are illusions. Useful though they may be, the notion that they have some real and ultimately meaningful definition on a cosmic scale is false.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are