It may not be so bad, depending how one sees it.
But I also agree too that he played his 'role' in the narrative, so to speak. A role..
he chose for himself! Judas is understood in context to be a
reprobate ( he didn't ask for forgiveness etc.).
Did they all choose their own roles? Thomas decided to play the 'doubting Thomas,' Judas the betrayer,' Peter the Rock, etc?
What ever roles they ended up with... they had all made the decision to follow Jesus on their own accord.
Okay, but did God preordain that they would make that decision? Which means before they were born, as you know.
In light of omniscience, I can kinda/sorta work my brain around a being knowing what another being will do in the future, based on probability and magnitude: scientists can predict what a rat will do after a gazillion (give or take a few) experiments, though they cannot be absolutely certain that one rat (after the first gazillion) will do what they predict. But an omniscient being would know, with absolute certainty.
In light of omnipotence, God can influence anyone anywhere, at anytime (see below), in the universe; so, I cannot remove God from responsibility for whatever happens, anywhere, to anyone or anything.
In light of omnipresence, meaning, I believe, that God is literally in ALL places, at ALL times, meaning all individuals, any region on Earth, and any region or atom or inch of empty space in the universe, anywhere, all the time, simultaneously, I cannot remove God from responsibility for whatever happens, anywhere, to anyone or anything, since God is omnipotent (see above).
The main problem, which I left out of my last comment (because I am terribly forgetful
and a numbnuts
), is the idea of omnibenevolence. If God is all loving, all forgiving, all merciful, then He She or They, what or whoever, cannot be less loving, less forgiving, and less merciful than I am, one of his pitiful creatures. If I am aghast at the idea of a superior being purposefully and
autonomously causing another being to suffer FOREVER, with no prior reason or event having wholly caused and determined it (which such a being
would be capable of given an ordinary layman's conception of free will), then an omnibenevolent entity would be far more aghast than I could ever be, or ought to be, in my tiny little bleeding-hearted opinion.
I will pass over* (get it?) my idea of omnijokescience (OM/neh/JOKE/shints): the idea that God MUST be the funniest being in the entire universe. If God is infinite, and contains infinite attributes (see Spinoza, below), then God is necessarily much funnier than I am, and even funnier than Zero Mostel, Steve Martin, Richard Prior, or even Brian Regan. Right? And he must
absofrigginlutely be funnier than Tom Brokaw, the Pope (any of 'em, except perhaps Pope Hilarious) or the wretchedly unfunny Bill Maher. Right?
Of course, I could be utterly wrong, and some super-duper theological wizard of a human has this all figured out and has explained it in detail, understandable to all - which I imagine such a great wizard of theology ought to do, to the best of their ability, lessen the stupid folk and the various numbnutses of the world have it bass-ackwards, and could potentially influence the innocent. But if such a person exists - and I have read a lot of apologists, Craig and Plantinga, and many others - I am as yet unaware of such a person.
I do think there is a person I know of who explained his conception of God in a way that geniuses and numbnutses alike could understand, if they bothered to read his work closely, and that person was Spinoza. Naturally, there is a great deal of division among scholars about what exactly that conception was, even among
Spinozists.. But this is inevitable.
Einstein famously said, "I believe in the God of Spinoza"; but that didn't make him a theist, as some like to claim. Or a Spinozist, for that matter.
The philosopher Hegel famously said, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Many people insist that Spinoza was an atheist, that his conception of God was driven primarily by the concern that he could have been killed for being an atheist. But he insisted that he was not an atheist, and if one reads his letters in particular, one can see how busily he goes about defending his God concept. Even to close friends who so much as intimated it, he could get fiery, but he was never shaken, and never swerved from his ideas.
As a Jew, he knew Hebrew inside and out, even wrote a book on it; he wrote in Latin and Dutch as well. He was offered a chair at a university, but declined. He made his living as a lens-grinder, because he wanted to devote as much time and mental energy to his writing. He was not interested in gaining wealth, though he understood and declaimed the value of money and the importance of free trade. He was not a Christian, but he defended and explained the gospels in his own way: without prejudice, and without fear.
*Crap, I didn't pass over it at all!
