Balder,
You said
I agree with you that love that is forced or controlled is not love. But if someone tells you, "I have built a furnace. If you do not love me, on my own terms, I am going to throw you in it," how is that not exhibiting force or control?
And right off the bat I see we are using two different understandings of what "force" and "control" mean. To control someone according to our previous and mostly consistent examples is to force someone to comply to your will quite regardless if it is "for" or "against" their will, reducing their will to a non issue, or in fact completely violating their will. Last I checked, warning someone of a real danger is a good thing. And no, God did not create the danger, good and evil are real issues that God allows people to experience, and again, since (godly) love is the ultimate, then He can not rightly force and control people to love Him. He has to let evil people be the way they are, unless He can persuade them to change for the better.
Previously you said something to the effect of, why not just reincarnate everyone until they all finally love God. Or why not just keep giving second chances until everyone gets saved. Both exhibits complete control over the other person's will, only spread out in a gradual manner. It's, love God and become His, or keep being reincarnated until you finally do. And I said the more direct approach, a puppet and a puppeteer can not be in true love, you must respond to a love offered according to your own free will, love can not be forced.
But now you say, if you warn someone of impending danger of eternal consequences, that that is somehow controlling!?! The fact is that even by your own admission, from the Christian view, many people are not controlled into loving and worshiping God, instead most are eternally damned, so you are arguing against yourself. Which is it? The Christian God is, or He is not, a control freak?
Secondly, would you look at a loving God who came and died for the world so that everyone could be saved and who clearly warns everyone about the impending doom of damnation if you don't follow His gospel unto salvation,,, as being anything but loving and right and good and demonstrating a desire to influence people to do what is right and good?
I mean, would you fault a firefighter as being an unloving control freak for warning people to stay away from a terrible fire?
Then you said
Isn't that the ultimate control? Love me, and proclaim my son king over your life, or I will put you into a place I've made where you will suffer unimaginably forever. If a man made a marriage proposal to a woman on those terms, don't you think she would feel a little coercion?
You seem to think that good and evil are not absolute issues, or that they are either nominal issues, or that evil hearts can not remain evil for eternity. I think issues of good and evil are absolute issues. And if a heart is good or evil, then it will be that way according to it's own nature, but God gives us an entire lifetime to repent and love Him instead of letting hatred and evil and sin consume yourself and how you treat others.
God explains that His enemies do not want Him in their lives no matter what, so then what makes you think reform might happen when the nature of evil is so terrible and consistently illogical? It makes no good sense to do or be evil, you can never justify it, it is irrational. To do good is good, but to do bad is bad, yet people do bad and it makes no (good) sense why people prefer to be evil. If God sees that we have honestly accepted His gospel unto salvation, then we have responded rightly to a real danger and a real love. But if God sees a person who has rejected His gospel unto salvation, then that person has responded wrongly to both a real danger and a real love.
You also said
Because God set up the whole show: he built the Lake of Fire himself, and one way or another, he will sustain those who reject him in a condition of unending conscious torment forever. He could have done things a different way, and for whatever reason, he didn't.
Remember, according to the open view, God does not sustain any evil, God only lets you be evil if you will not of your own free will submit to that which is the ultimate good, God. Good and evil are not arbitrary or temporal issues. Try it sometime, and please pick something that you can handle because I don't want you to have bad flashbacks just because I asked you to theorize about evil. Try understanding evil. You seem like a person who is concerned with right and wrong. I mean, try to understand someone who is involved with committing some terribly evil thing. It just makes no sense, especially when you consider the nature of things that are good and right. Things that are good and right have an innate sense of goodness and righteousness in them. When a mother cuddles and protects her baby and keeps it warm and well loved, is there anything evil or unrighteous about that? No, it is absolutely good and loving to care for others in such a wonderful way.
So I submit that goodness and righteousness are absolute issues. They come from a God who is eternally good and righteous. And evil and sin are that which go against God's goodness and righteousness. So evil and sin are actually spoiled or rejected goodness and righteousness. To do good or what is right makes perfect sense, it promotes life and joy and happiness and personal fulfillment. But to reject these things is bad, and is harmful and detrimental to life, and as such is quite illogical. Yet people are evil all the time.
It's like their hatred for God means more to them than their love for life and goodness.
LOL, a California nut. I hope you live in the south part because, I'm a southern boy at heart, I really dislike cold wintery weather. You know that a huge aspect of the Christian faith is shown by the fact that believers were willing to die for their faith instead of being forced to exhibit anti-Christian confessions and beliefs. Do you find it was honorable and good to torture and ultimately kill Christians precisely because they would not be "forced" against their will to cease from worshiping the God of the bible? (I realize you would not approve, just trying to hammer home the point.)
