Thanks for the explanation, that's helpful. One problem I've always had with religion is that it can feel like a refusal to accept responsibility - if God created everything and is directing everything, then none of your actions (or inactions) are really "yours" at all... you are behaving, for good or evil, exactly as God made you to behave.
God gives you your choice. Sure, we are all under constraints and restraints. But we have choice in lots of areas.
I know you're talking about free will, but is anyone truly free if they have a brain that has been built for them by God? And thought patterns that arise in that brain?
Similarly, if heaven is the reward for living a good life, can your actions really be considered "good", if you know that you'll be rewarded for them? How do we distinguish between a religious person performing a good act because a) they are genuinely being kind and simply want to, or b) they have an expectation of being rewarded for it in the afterlife, and are willing to do anything it takes to get that reward?
Let's go to math. Mathematics is purely virtual. 1 + 1 = 2, right? Yes, right. But only virtually. Never in what we call real life. Why not? Because you can't find any two things in the whole universe that are exactly the same so that we can add them together thereby making 1 + 1 = 2. It's virtual. It's all in our mind.
Why can we add 1 + 1 = 2 if it's virtual? Simple. We are virtual, aright along with God, because we are His children. The Earth and Universe are our fallopian tube. We aren't even down into the uterus where we can take hold of the wall of the uterus, and attach ourselves to it to get nourishment from Mother Jerusalem in Heaven, through the placenta, through the umbilical cord.
Until you figure some of these things out, there's way more things in life for me to do than to be your unpaid tutor.
