>Define "slavery" and then contemplate the relationship demanded of you, or else.
I did in my previous response:
"Love? God is the one who created Adam with the freedom to choose. He chose unwisely because he listened to the doctrine of the Serpent handed to him by his wife, all based on the first lie. That is anti-intelligence and not free will at all, since when Adam ceded his dominance over the earth by bowing to the will of the Serpent, he became the slave of sin. Slavery is not 'free will'."
It is being a slave of sin. This means one cannot help but sin, and the Devil holds men in Death through sin.
Myself: "That's implying God didn't want Man to learn and that He wanted Man to be as you describe. Only in Christ is true freedom…"
>Try again without immediately redirecting to a different topic.
But the context was the Garden:
>Go back to the Garden, as well. >Who loved us more? >That which gave us intelligence and the ability to exercise free will?
There were two trees in the Garden that were special, not one. The other was the Tree of Life, and that Christ said of Himself, I am the Life and the Light (the true Wisdom of God).
>Do you know your Gnostics?
That wasn't my question to which you responded:
>You're either thinking of Zoroaster types, or don't know what you're talking about.
Yes, Zoroaster, but from that well arose others, such as Mithraism. Gnostism has the same basic elements of dualism, having adopted "wisdom" from many those same "wells", cloaking it as a philosophy, or "science so called".
Myself: "God commanded the Darkness separated from the Light in order to show the Man he could not possibly survive without his Creator."
>Mmmmm… that was done well in advance of people showing up.
Of course it was done in advance of Man, though not "well in advance". Man was created on the sixth day, only a few days afterward. God did it to prepare for Man.
Myself: "The first time Man ate from that fig tree, the world was covered in Darkness, and the Serpent became the Prince of the Power of the Air, standing between Man and God as a barrier in Dearth through Sin."
>You really need to look up what the Demiurge is.
Why? And I already have. Christ Jesus is God the Word made flesh. God the Word is not a subordinate god. There is only one God. That God one Being, but three persons ("being" is not the same as "person".) Since there isn't any other god, God the Word cannot be "subordinate".
>>10798650 (You)
>Why did God make so much evil and corruption, anyway?
God didn't "make" evil. Evil entered into the world when Man willingly chose to disregard the Light that guided him into the way of Life.
>Why does he harden peoples' hearts against Him and then punish them for having hardened hearts?
>Muh Prodigal Son
According to Romans 9:
22 What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,
23 and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?
Besides, the hearts of the unreformed are already hard, as they are "stone", dead, unable to be shaped by the hand. When God "hardens" such a heart of stone, this means He is hardening them in their sins against Him. Even stones in nature can be hardened, from being sandstone to being marble. He is making their rebellion cemented so that they will do even more unrighteous and unjust deeds to the point they are no longer hidden behind a facade of an "angel" of light, so others will see and know the difference between that which is good and that which is evil. This must be done because evil presents itself as an angel of light.
By hardening their hearts so that they increase their evil deeds, God is removing the mask of their falsity, revealing them to the world as the evil they are.