Reply #50: Then I'll put my tomatoes back on.

[trotsky]

Without forcing me to repeat myself, why would Christianity be tenable up to a certain point, but then have to 'collapse' because you woke up one day with a toothache?

That's not even remotely close to what I'm saying, and I don't appreciate you distorting my statements. The theist who acknowledges a problem of evil, and presents the free will defense as a response, then must (if he believes in a god that loves and cares for us enough to minimize the amount of suffering we have to endure) be able to demonstrate that the current amount of suffering IS at a minimum. And my challenge to that demonstration is suggesting possible worlds (or scenarios) where a little divine intervention without affecting anyone's free will is possible.

What other questions?

Here you go:

A person's body is capable of killing others that they can overpower, but not those they cannot (unless they employ tools like a gun, but that's not relevant). We are not on equal footing with other human beings to make moral choices, so how can you say god cannot "make" certain moral choices off-limits? He already has!

But even so, why can't we ALL start out in a paradise and live there until our moral choices expel us from it? A&E got that opportunity, but no one else. Why are the consequences of the bad choices of the fathers visited upon their innocent sons?

So you have an easy way to tell if someone is a good Christian (or good Catholic) - they're always happy and rewarded by god. Uh, right? So poor and suffering people are that way because they have turned away from god? Stunster, are you a Catholic or a Calvinist?

Your god's options in limiting the suffering of the Holocaust were endless. How about making one of the death trains skip the tracks, allowing thousands of Jews to escape? Let a guard have a heart attack at a crucial time, allowing a whole camp to escape. Your god, being infinitely powerful, would theoretically have an infinite number of options available to it. Why are you limiting what your god can do?

On edit: the above questions all came from Post #42, if you want to go back and review the context.