The God Conundrum and Multi-level Marketing

Here is just one of the many things that has baffled me over the last while.

According to the evangelical, biblical point of view, God created man 'for his pleasure'. To quote the bible, Revelation 4:11 says, “Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” According to everything I was taught, God's desire is for us to freely choose to love him, not just serve him robotically, so when he created man, he also gave him 'free will' so that man might willingly choose to love God, to set aside all self-interest and serve him and him only.

But having this gift of free will from God also means that man can potentially say to God: 'Well, thanks for creating me (in your image with all these amazing attributes such as the ability to love and care and think and reason and create and all), but actually I think I'm going to choose to be captain of my own fate, master of my own soul."

So, the question is this: why then would God turn around and say: "Sorry, you made the WRONG CHOICE! You were supposed to choose to love me! Now I'm going to punish you by casting you into the eternal (eternal, mind you!) burning fires of hell?" (If you believe that hell literally exists of course!) If that's the case, then what the heck is the point of having free will in the first place? We should all have been created with an in-built, incorruptible love for God then there would have been no need for messy lakes of fire and judgement calls and God could have taken all the pleasure he wanted from us all along without having to send the billions who never 'accepted Jesus into their hearts' to eternal damnation, which must be really hard for him to do seeing as he says he loves us all equally.

And another thing: what is the purpose of punishment, anyway? To correct someone who has gone wrong, surely? Or to wipe them out once and for all, no second chances, no opportunity to make things right, to be redeemed?

And about the idea of us being created solely for God's pleasure. Isn't that kind of one-sided too? Sometimes the evangelical viewpoint makes me feel so manipulated:

You are born. You grow up and after a while you learn that you are a sinner - albeit a sinner with free will. You go along, living your life doing good stuff and bad stuff. You learn that God loves you even though you are such an ugly dirty sinner and he wants you to love him. But at some point you learn that the good stuff isn't good enough for God, you'll be going to hell when you die unless you make some major changes. And to help you along the way, the spirit of God sneaks into your most private thoughts and makes you feel really bad about doing the bad stuff. So you say sorry to God and choose to put your self to death and to live only for him. Now he's happy because you are loving him and being obedient to him and all the other Christians out there rejoice because - you've arrived! "Welcome to the club! "

Now your new mission in life is to get all the unsaved billions out there to join the club too - for their own good of course..... doesn't this sound an awful lot like multilevel marketing?

Too many questions, too many doubts, too few answers.... but the good news today is that my new book arrived! The God Theory by Bernhard Haisch. It looks like a long, slow read ... but it looks good.