Yes, I can read. And between your insults I read what you used as an example for your point:
Or to put it another way: if I give my sister-in-law a gift of some tickets to the New York Knicks game and she angrily refuses them because I forgot to pass a message on from her to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law is now not speaking to her, my "gift" to her has become nothing but a pair of tickets. Had she received them, I would have gifted her and she would have been gifted and grateful. True, my intent to gift her, to be kind to her, is still very real and true even if she refuses to receive. But as real as my intent is, she has received no gift--no gift-reality exists, no gift exists. She was offered one, true, but she has not received it and no gift was given.
You clearly condition the existence of a gift to whether it is accepted. I merely pointed out to you that you were wrong about that, the gift exists regardless of whether it is accepted. The nature of the gift is independent of whether it is accepted or "received". You are the one who made up this "gifting process" out of thin air, but that is independent of what a gift is.
And in your answer to the wrong question you implicitly concede my point, though you didn't realize it. Your answer presumes that a gift can be refused because we all know that gifts can be refused and that a "giver" who will not permit his gift to be refused is not truly a giver but a raper, an imposer, someone who does not give generously and give without caring whether his gift is refused but a "giver" who rapes the freedom of the recipient of his "gift."
An interesting reference to God, but it is consistent with your other insults. Of course in the normal course of life we see gifts that are accepted and refused. But some gifts cannot be refused. When I buy socks for my child it is because he needs them. I give them freely and out of love because I know he needs them. I expect nothing in return. The child is uninterested in the socks, but since I have the full authority as the parent, he is not free to refuse them. I know what is best for my child, so he shall have socks.
Would a better analogy be that a gift can be given and remain boxed and unused? Or has that already been argued, and thought to be too simple or basically the same thing?
In the first excerpted portion from my posting I distinguished between an offered gift, an accepted gift, a refused gift. Only an accepted gift is fully a gift. The modifier "fully" has been part of my argument from the beginning of this sub-topic on this thread and I repeated it in the posting to which you are now replying.
In the second excerpt, where you claim I am inconsistent when I make gifting "conditional" on acceptance, you fail to carry over the "fullness" qualification. So between excerpt one and excerpt two you have changed the terms and thus are doing apples and oranges.
In your assertion that follows you use "gift" unqualifiedly. I would agree with you that an incomplete gift exists independent of acceptance. But a complete gift does not. You are talking about "gift" in an unnuanced and imprecise way. Your point carries but only in an incomplete and imprecise way. You have not laid a finger on my point because you refuse to engage my qualification.
And your socks example actually proves my point. Of course your child is free to refuse them. If he does, you may punish him, of course. But have you never had an ungrateful child? If the child is uninterested in the socks, he does not see them as your gift. Your intention to gift him with them cannot make him see them as a gift, as you clearly admit. They are not a gift in the full sense unless he is grateful for them and recieves them knowing them to be a gift. If he is not interested in them he is refusing them as a gift, refusing to let them be a gift in the full sense. At that point, they are a half-gift, an incomplete gift, a refused gift, which is exactly what I said in the earlier postings.
And nothing you can do can make him grateful. Your threats or blandishments cannot make another person be grateful for what you intend as a gift. Your intent alone cannot make him grateful. And until he is grateful, the gift process is stymied, incomplete.
You still have not grasped the point, even though you and all of us have experienced this again and again. Okay, I intend to make a gift. From the giver's end, from my end it is a gift (your point) but not completely so (my point). The giver's intent can at most make it an offered gift. If the recipient refuses it it remains a refused gift--gift, yes, in a restricted way, but not a true and real and complete gift. Indeed, a refused gift is scarcely a gift at all. Have you not truly experienced a situation of thwarted gifting when the recipient is ungrateful and considers your intended gift to be bad or dangerous (in other words, refuses to see it as a gift)?
If you want to live with this limited kind of gifting as the sufficient to explain "gift," you are free to do so. I can't make you accept my gift of a fuller understanding of gifting and giftedness.
But in practice, you know very well the difference between an offered but refused gift and a gift gratefully accepted. That's the only point I was making. You actually know my point to be true in practice but you have let a stubborn mindset (denial of freedom) overcome what you know very well from practice.
The conclusion to all this is that we all know from plain experience that human beings are free, that we cannot be forced to be grateful, that if someone is ungrateful, the connection that was intended to be established by the loving intent of the giver is thwarted. That's just another way to say that God cannot make us love him, be grateful to him, against our will. The free-will-denying theology shatters against the reality of human experience, as your own "socks" example demonstrates.
You have refuted your own anti-free-will position in the very example you gave but you refuse to see it. And I, unlike you, believe you are free, so I won't insist that you see what you refuse to see, that you understand what you refuse to understand.
And I do not intend to insult with this. I'm bluntly trying to show you the fallacy in your non-free-will position, that it is refuted by your own experience and even by the example you cite. But I also believe that you are free, so I can only state it as plainly as I can. That you choose not to understand it is your own free choice.