Children born with birth defects or HIV did not have much choice, didn't they?  What sin did the newborns commit?

You make as much sense as a hippopotamus explaining Shakespeare.

''God’s anger is rationally retributive. His anger is His direct, calculated response to sin.''

Actually, his 'anger' is nothing but rational. Consider this example, you know everything, you can do anything. A rock falls on your friend and kills him, do you get mad? Of course not because you could have prevented it, you allowed it to happen and you already knew thousands of years ago that it would happen so there is simply no logical reason to get mad. I understand humans have free will, so what? God created them that way and knew what would happen so again, no reason to be mad.

Also big logical inconsistencies, god wanted us to have free will but he himself killed millions.

Let me guess, God is not part of everything and you know this because someone like CoinCube told you. Lol.

You guys are comedians. You make shit up as you go.

An article in a recent issue of U.S. News and World Report begins with what would seem at first to be a rather odd question for one of our nation's major news weeklies. How, the article asks, did the universe begin and it proceeds to provide the following by way of an answer:

"In the beginning, there was no time, no matter, not even space. Then in some unfathomable way, a universe emerged from a dimensionless point of pure energy (U.S. News and World Report, March 26, 1990)."

This, the article assures us, is as close to a description of 'the beginning' as science can currently provide, and it is to probe deeper into the questions of cosmic origins that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans, on April 12, 1990, to place the 1.5 billion dollar Hubble Space Telescope into earth orbit on the most sophisticated scientific satellite ever constructed.

As I pondered the news weekly's description of creation, I was struck by what appears to be at least a superficial similarity to the account of creation provided in the Kabbalah. Indeed, the description reads almost as if it were a translation from a passage in the opening pages of Chayim Vital's Sefer Etz Chayyim, the classic exposition of the Kabbalah of the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria. Rabbi Luria, starting from completely different assumptions and operating in a universe of discourse which is, to use an unusually precise metaphor, light years away from the Hubble telescope, arrived at the very same conclusion: that the universe emerged from a dimensionless point which gave rise to a world of matter, space, and time. Only, for the kabbalists, that dimensionless point is not so much an impenetrable beginning, but is rather the end result of a process occurring within God Himself. This process, known as tzimtzum (divine contraction or concealment) is, according to the Lurianic scheme, the very essence of creation; it is the means by which an infinite unified God "makes room," so to speak, for a finite, pluralistic world. Through an understanding of the doctrine of tzimtzum we may, without ever turning our gaze upon the astronomical heavens, gain some genuine insight into how a universe of matter, space and time could emerge from a single point in a metaphysical void.

The kabbalistic account of creation is, to the uninitiated, a very strange, difficult and perhaps even disturbing notion. However, it is a notion which gives expression to a series of paradoxical, but deeply profound ideas. Amongst them is the notion that the universe as we know it is the result of a cosmic negation. The world, according to Lurianic kabbalah, is not so much a something which has been created from nothing, but rather a genre of nothingness resulting from a contraction or concealment of the only true reality, which is God. A closely related notion is the idea that it is the very unfathomability and unknowability of God and His ways which is the sine qua non of creation itself. Creation, the doctrine of tzimtzum implies, is, in its very essence, "that which does not know."

One cannot be expected to understand or accept such notions without some significant and serious explanation. In this essay I offer a philosophical exposition, commentary, and in some respects, elaboration of the concept of tzimtzum as it appears in the kabbalistic system of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534‑1572) and his disciples such as Rabbi Chayim Vital and later, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyadi. In addition, I offer an idealist and rationalist philosophical context in which these ideas can, I believe, be best understood.

Do you think god is all powerful and knows everything? Because if you do, your logic is seriously fucked, like really fucked.

And we are back to more outlandish conjectures...You are seriously deluded.

Using your logic you will always be wrong about everything in your life.  You will make shit up as you go and explain to yourself that you are correct, lol.

Up until now (several pages of) answers and replies to you have been simple logic and deduction essentially IF -> THEN statements. However, I am not wise enough to answer these last questions in the same definitive manner. The best I can do is share my opinions on these issues. Perhaps that will be helpful.

On the question of Adam and Eve...

Where these prehumans came from?  If they were not humans, breeding with Adam’s sons would not work.lol

Didn’t your God create Adam to be the first man, wait for it, from fucking dirt?

You are a hapless chap. You cling to your Christian cult no matter the obvious holes in its dogma.

Just admit that you will believe in your God no matter the evidence to the contrary.  Don’t pretend you are a rational person when you are clearly way in the Christian la-la land.

Why don’t you get off your high horse and tell me who did the sons of Adam and Eve marry?

Up until now (several pages of) answers and replies to you have been simple logic and deduction essentially IF -> THEN statements. However, I am not wise enough to answer these last questions in the same definitive manner. The best I can do is share my opinions on these issues. Perhaps that will be helpful.

On the question of Adam and Eve I believe the Bible/Torah is best understood as a functional document. It's intent and purpose is to redeem and rectify humanity.

For this to occur biblical wisdom must be conveyed in a manner that is both simplified enough to be understandable by primitive man while simultaneously accurately reflecting a truth which can be better understood as our wisdom grows. The best way to meet these two needs is via parable and metaphor.

(The reasoning below represents my opinions and speculations on these issues. I make no claims beyond that)

Adam and Eve in the garden can be looked at literally as a man and a woman walking through a garden and considering the fruit of various trees.

Or Adam and Eve can be looked at as a metaphor for our biological species progenitors. All choices were potentially open to our remotest ancestors but a singular choice namely the development of an intellect capable of understanding good and evil was "forbidden" as that choice is probably incompatible with long term sustained biological existence.

Many "punishments" outlined in the Bible are not necessarily outside intervention at all but simple cause and effect the inevitable consequences we bring upon ourselves from sin.

Let's look at the "punishment" women received as a result of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Genesis 3:16
"Unto the woman He said: 'I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children"

Why is childbearing in humans so painful? A religious man would have told you 1000 years ago that it was because Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It has taken science a very long time to catch up to this very simplified but according to our current theories essentially accurate description.

Current science theory states that the reason human birth and labor is so painful and dangerous is due to the physiological consequences of our large brains specifically some combination of the physical limitations of pelvic size when walking upright and the extreme metabolic demands a large infant brain places on a mother.

See:
Why Is Human Childbirth So Painful?
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/why-is-human-childbirth-so-painful

For the most part God doesn't punish us we punish ourselves with our choices. Sometimes these "choices" were made long before our time but the consequences nevertheless impact us.

Now unlike my prior posts which were simple logical deduction the arguments in this reply are opinion. They are one possible interpretation. I have not proven this opinion is fact and am not in a position to do so currently. I share them as a potential answer to your questions but the question is a spiritual ones and must ultimately be answered on a personal and individual level.

You have not presented any rational arguments. First define God, then make your argument.

Fucking evil fairy tale dressed up as a religion designed to extract people’s wealth and molest their children.

You have not presented any rational arguments.  First define God, then make your argument.

If you cannot define God, then the only rational position is to stop and say well, I don’t know, not jump to conjectures upon conjectures.

Christianity is a cult.  Human diversity we see today is not the result of incest in Noah’s family, 4000 years ago.  Who did sons of Adam and Eve marry? Angels, unicorns, dragons?

Fucking evil fairy tale dressed up as a religion designed to extract people’s wealth and molest their children.

It is our duty as intelligent human beings to expose the bullshit all religions sell.  Utter nonsense.  All of them, no exceptions.

Are you sure you understand the “big” words?  Maybe you should stick with comic books and other fairy tales you are so fond of.

Your constant blabbing about nothing is nauseating.

You realize that the majority of Atheists in North America come from your cult, don't you?

Indoctrinating children into your cult is child abuse.

Christian parents in China have shared how their schoolchildren are being taught that Christianity is an “evil cult” and encouraged to “hate God” as the officially atheist country continues to tighten its grip on religion.

According to Chinese persecution watchdog Bitter Winter, since the Regulations on Religious Affairs legislation was implemented last year, schools around China have adopted “unprecedented measures” to keep students away from Christianity. Schools in China are government-controlled, and therefore Communist in ideology.

The policy has resulted in difficult situations for families as children are encouraged to question the beliefs of family members and report those closest to them to authorities.

Several Christian parents shared their stories with Bitter Winter, revealing the magnitude of China’s animosity toward Christianity.

“My teacher says that Christianity is an evil cult,” one boy explained to his mother. “[That] if you believe in it, you will leave home and not take care of me. You might set yourself on fire, too.”

Another mother shared how, after discovering an anti-Christian school textbook in her son’s backpack, she hid many of the items that identified her as a believer to help her son with his anxiety.

A month later, when her son found another religious leaflet in his mother’s bag by chance, he “angrily took a fruit knife from the kitchen and fiercely poked several holes in it,” according to the outlet.

He then threatened his mother to give up her faith because “Christianity is an evil cult” and she “mustn’t believe in it.”

“Before starting school, I told my child about God’s creation, and he believed it,” the woman explained. “But after being taught at school, my child is like a different person. In atheistic China, these pure and innocent children have been taught to hate God.”

Kindergarten and primary schools are also teaching children how to oppose religion. In late April, a primary school in Xinzheng city in the central province of Henan encouraged young children to refrain from believing in any deity.

“If your mom goes to church and believes in God, she doesn’t want you as her child anymore,” one teacher said.

Another school screened a propaganda video in which Jesus followers were depicted as big scary monsters. After the presentation was complete, a teacher warned that Christian relatives might “cast spells” on the youngsters.

One of the parents at the school said that as a result, her son actively opposed her reading religious books in the family home. Another student was terrified that his mom was going to be led away by police.

Others students were advised to “supervise” their parents to ensure that they don’t practice their faith.

“It leads to a dead-end,” one young student said of his father's Christian faith. “If you attend gatherings, you will be arrested.”

China introduced revised regulations on religion in February, which included banning under-18s from attending church or receiving any religious education.

The new regulations have also forced primary schools in Henan to warn parents that they are not allowed to breach the country's laws on the practice of religion.

"No one may use religions to disrupt social order, harm citizens or impede the national education system," read a letter by the Ninth Primary School of Linzhou city of Anyang and the First Primary School of Chengguan town of Xingyang city of Chengzhou.

"It is an offense for any organizations or individuals to guide, support, permit and condone minors to believe in religions or participate in religious activities," it warned.

Officials have also reportedly claimed schools are places "for the state to foster students to build up socialist society," with parents told they have an obligation "to nurture children in accordance with national laws and social requirements."

China ranks as the 27th worst nation in the world when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USA’s World Watch List. Open Doors has expressed concern that the religious affairs in China now “lies with the Communist Party.”

Faith is not a reliable method to discover the truth. The scientific method is.

The only thing you showed is how faith indoctrination can lead to delusions.

I'm not assuming anything, you are. Your arguments show humans cannot determine whether something is true or not. It's also really easy to prove that using the scientific method works far better than simply using your reasoning and logic. For example:

Let's say you don't know much about anything. An apple falls on your head, you start to think about it, why does that happen? Will you ever be able to determine it's gravity only using your logic without performing any experiment or gathering evidence? Of course not. In fact logically, the earth could simply be accelerating upwards, that would make sense logically and would explain the apple falling.

Humans cannot be “ideal” anything. We can’t be ideal parents or ideal employees. We cannot be ideal athletes or ideal mathematicians.

We may not be able to achieve perfection but we can approximate it to the best of our ability. Yes we are guaranteed to fall short but to the degree we succeed everyone benefits.

First define God. Then go from there.

Embrace God? What are you talking about?  You make no sense.

It is like me saying embrace Goo Goo.

Rational thinking is objective. Problem is that very few people can stay objective.

For example, faced with no evidence in the existence of the supernatural, some people “deduce” that it might exist, yourself included.

Logical, objective conclusion should have been “we cannot say that the supernatural does exist in lieu of any evidence”. PERIOD.

To help us stay objective we have developed the scientific method.  It is the best epistemic tool we have.

You should use it to stay objective.

As a philosophical matter it seems nice but not as science. A logical truth is 100% true in all situations, right? That can exist, the problem is, how can you know that? Have you been in all of those possible situations and if you haven't, how can you claim it's a logical truth?

Except that there is absolutely no historical evidence that this mythological Jesus person ever existed.

And you base your “truth” on this fact, how gullible can you be?

Superrationality is a special application of non-causal decision theories – that is, theories of rational decision making that not only take the causal implications of an action into account but also other information that making this decision would give us. In the case of superrationality, that information is always about the other agents.

Importantly, superrationality itself falls under this general rule. That is, if you do something for superrationality-related reasons, then this does not tell you anything about how people who do not accept superrationality would behave. As a trivial example, consider playing a donation game against 19 people whom you all know to make fun of superrationality whenever the opportunity avails itself. Attempting to superrationally cooperate with those people seems rather fruitless.

Superrational cooperation requires no reciprocity. That is, none of the agents who benefit from our cooperation have to benefit us. Recall the basic argument for superrationality as based on non-causal decision theories: given that we are friendly, it is more probable that other agents facing similar choices will be friendly toward us and our values. Crucially, this argument does not require that the agents whose choices we acausally affect are the same as those who benefit from our own friendliness.

Only helping superrational cooperators helps you superrationally. Cooperation usually excludes agents who are known to be unable to reciprocate. Yet superrationality does allow for cooperation with non-reciprocating agents if helping them makes it more likely that other agents help us. There is, however, at least one limitation on the set of our beneficiaries that comes without negative side-effects. We can exclude from superrational cooperation all agents who do not cooperate superrationally at all. After all, every superrational cooperator knows that this exclusion will not affect her, and the exclusion appears to be symmetrical among all superrational agents. That is, it makes it more likely that other superrational cooperators make the same choice (rather than incurring some other limitation that excludes us).

What kind of agents can join multiverse-wide superrational cooperation (MSR) at all? In particular, what sorts of values do they need to have, independent of whether or how many such agents or value systems actually exist in the multiverse? We already know that only helping superrational or correlated agents benefits us. However, the values of the superrationalists must also be open to the opportunity of gains from compromise.

In some cases, it will not be in our power to help other value systems at all. Since any will to cooperate with these agents cannot possibly be action-guiding, we do not have to help them. Other agents in the universe may have other resources available to them and thus choose to behave in a friendly way toward these values. If, on the other hand, agents know that nobody else can help them to achieve their goals, multiverse-wide superrational cooperation (in particular, any version of it in which they just give resources away) becomes less attractive to them. One example of a value system that we cannot help is the following version of speciesism:
...
The Namuh-centrists. One day, scientists inform you about a highly intelligent species of extraterrestrials known as “Namuhs”. Like us, the Namuhs have built a flourishing civilization with art, trade, science, language, humor, philosophy (including advanced decision theory research), and so on. However, the Namuhs do not live in our universe, but in a distant part of the multiverse, completely inaccessible to us. In fact, they could not even exist in our part of the multiverse, as their bodies require slightly different laws of physics to function. Knowing about superrational cooperation, you hasten to ask whether they have thought about problems analogous to Newcomb’s problem and the donation games between similar agents. A trustworthy scientist explains that their minds are indeed prone to thinking about such topics – much more so than those of humans, in fact! Understandably thrilled, you ask what values the Namuhs have, and specifically what values are held by those who have thought about acausal cooperation. The scientist then informs you that all Namuhs are very narrowly focused on their own species. They are Namuh-centrists who do not care one bit about anything that does not involve fellow Namuhs. For example, they shrug at the thought of non-Namuh suffering, the flourishing of non-Namuh civilizations, or non-Namuh well-being. In fact, they are so strict that they do not even care about simulated Namuhs or other approximations.

Learning about their values, you may be disappointed. There is nothing that you can do to help them and it is therefore irrelevant whether they use a decision theory similar to yours or not.

(They have adopted a value system incompatible with larger scale superrational cooperation)

Which moral views correlate with superrationality?

The issue of existence and justification of the Supreme Being is constantly approached by Immanuel Kant in his entire work. For Kant, the ultimate goal of the nature created by God is man as a moral being: the world was created according to man's moral needs. This is why it is said that, after Kant, teleology leads to a moral theology, one that is not about the possibility of proving rationally God's existence but which is about stating that moral life is possible only if God exists. Under these circumstances, though the “idea of God” is presupposed in most Kantian works, we insist, below, particularly on what is debated when appealing to practical reason. In the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason, the idea of God as Unconditioned, as a being that is absolutely necessary, is seen as a transcendental ideal determined through an idea as a prototype of perfection necessary to everything that is contingent and determined in our sensible world: what we can do to conciliate sensible experience with the Absolute Being is to presuppose an extra-phenomenal reality designated as transcendental object: we presuppose its existence but we cannot get to know it. Later, in Critique of Practical Reason, God is postulated (together with soul's immortality) as a condition of the supreme value of moral life, the Sovereign Good (union of virtue with happiness). Since in the sensible world moral conduct does not warrant proportional happiness, the virtuous ones has strong reasons to believe in the reparatory intervention of a superior power: God, as moral ideal and warranty of moral order. “Morality leads, inevitably, to religion, through which it (morality) extends over a moral Lawgiver”

The problem is that you are mixing religion and science.  Religion is faith-based while science is data-based.  Faith means you believe in something in the absence of evidence and Science involves building explanation solely from evidence.    There is no scientific explanation of God and the concept of God is in no way scientific.