>>10393010Sorry the thread got deleted anon. Here's the response I typed up. Maybe you'll see this.
>>10392896>the origins of manThe lovely thing about scripture is that it can interpreted in different ways. This is undoubtedly by design; if God would have wanted us to interpret scripture that was absolute and without any wiggle room, he would have revealed scripture with greater strictness and/or inspired more prophets in the modern day.
There are a number of different interpretations for the Garden of Eden, perhaps more than any other part of the bible. They range from mostly literal to completely alegorical, or anywhere in between. The most common (re)interpretation held among all abrahamic faiths is that the 7 days of creation were more than just 24 hours each, each lasting millions of years, which accounts for the age of the earth.
Of note, this includes the seventh day when god rested! Humans were made on the sixth day, and god rested on the seventh, giving a period of arbitrarily variable time for hominids to develop. This interpretation fixes a lot of issues, such as where all the people came from; Cain was certainly afraid of being killed by other other people, which means there HAD to already be other people.
>free willThis one's easy. God has infinite power, but he also has infinite wisdom to temper his infinite power. God *could* divine your whole life before you were born, but he chooses not too, since he knows that the experiment that is humanity will only work if humans are given the free will to choose to be good.
>which godthe short answer - not the one you were looking for, unfortunately - is that christianity is wrong on this point. It doesn't fucking matter what religion you follow, as long as you are a good person. Even a child is able to see that "join our religion or else you'll be punished" is something that a just god wouldn't say, but a charismatic cleric would.
The only religions God has a problem with are truly evil religions - religions like the cults of Ba'al, Moloch, and Dagon.
Hope some of this helps.
