Imperfection, “˜free will’ all part of God’s master plan

Caballero is a graduate student in electrical engineering.

By Eric Caballero

Jennifer Shane’s letter “Religion
used to promote agenda,“ (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, Nov.
26) was misinformed on a couple of points.

First Shane stated, “The Bible says God is incapable
of committing flaws ““ why then, does he supposedly despise
gays if he created them? Did he make a mistake? Does this then make
him capable of flaws?”

The Bible never says that God despises gays, or anyone for that
matter. Rather, the Bible makes it clear that it is the
“sin” (in the sense of a moral wrong) that God
disdains. As for the person committing the moral
wrong, the Bible actually shows God as being hurt and saddened
by that person. Therefore, just as a parent may
completely disagree with their childrens’ choices yet still
love them, God’s relationship with His creation can
likewise follow the same line. If a parent raises a child the best
way that he or she can, but the child still makes bad choices in
life, is it the parent’s fault for the child making
the wrong decisions? No. In the same spirit, the
Bible claims that mankind can do wrong, but God can still be
held without fault.

This brings us to Shane’s second
misunderstanding. She maintained that, “If there is a
God and he knew we were capable of making him unhappy by acting on
certain sexual orientations, why didn’t he use his
“˜omnipotence’ to prevent those orientations from
occurring in the first place?”

The Bible suggests that, beyond all other gifts, there is one
gift that God has given to men that is by far the most
precious: an absolutely unhindered ability to
make our own choices. This “free will” as
many choose to call it, includes all of the necessary mental
facilities to think freely, including creativity,
abstract thinking capabilities, the capacity to sustain
complex forms of communication, etc. It is these gifts and
others that truly put the entire world
at humans’ fingertips. With this free will, and
all of the facilities that it entails, humans can
pretty much think up, desire and do anything under the
sun. Therefore, it’s no surprise that there are people
with homosexual orientations, heterosexual orientations or other
types of orientation. In this regard, Shane wonders why God
didn’t just stop certain orientations in the first
place, assuming He did not like them.

Well, if God did stop these desires and all others that He
disagreed with, He would not be giving us much of a free will now
would He? Mankind would consist of a bunch
of carbon-based automatons who could only think and
desire what they were programmed with. Instead, the Bible
states that since the beginning of time, God decided that
it was more just and loving to infuse people with a
capability to think and act however they wanted, even if there
would be humans that would use such a
gift to act contrary to God’s will.

Consequently, in order to make sure that humans understood which
thoughts and actions were right and which were wrong, God gave
us the Bible.

The Bible proposes that the ball is pretty much in our
court. It says that mankind has choices to make, given the
plethora of desires in each of our hearts. These choices can
either be in line with God or opposed to Him. Either way, the
Bible warns, a free will should never be misinterpreted to
mean a free will with no right or wrong answer nor
consequences thereof.

I hope Shane sees that God can permit immoral desires in humans
and yet still be perfect, loving and just. The question of why
homosexuality is deemed wrong in the Bible and by Christians, Jews
and Muslims is a different issue.