I have no particular interest in debating predestination with the folks on this forum that I debated at length some months ago. However, you might find some good reading at this link:
http://evangelicalarminians.org/
FWIW, I left the Baptist church I was a member of last spring when the Sunday School teacher said God forced men to sin. The pastor rejected that claim later, but I told them the bottom line was this: When you walk thru a Mall and see lost men, are they men God loves and wants to have repent, or are they men God hates and looks forward to sending to hell?
If we couldn’t agree on whether or not the mission T-shirt should say “Jesus loves you” or “Maybe Jesus loves you”, then we needed to part company. The Baptist Church I joined a few months later has a Presbyterian pastor, but he agrees that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
Only a fool would think the latter.
Straw dogs abound.
I meant “straw men.”
I must have Obama on my mind. 8~)
"If we couldn’t agree on whether or not the mission T-shirt should say “Jesus loves you” or “Maybe Jesus loves you”, then we needed to part company."
That's where I end up also. Argue over interpretation all you want, but if you end up disagreeing on that foundation, well…
The reason God is not be the author of sin and evil is that he limits his power in relation to creation. By his own choice he is not, in the inimitable words of Baptist theologian E. Frank Tupper, a "do anything, anytime, anywhere kind of God." He could be, because he is omnipotent, but he chooses not to be that kind of God. Why? For the sake of having real, rather than imaginary, relations with human persons…