Prescience, Time, and the limitation of God

I have to say Skip, that you have a contrastingly negative view of people, dangerous even. I think that in order to allow hope to even exist in this post Pandoran world we must hold on to it, and protect it from a systematic understanding of the world that ever assaults the hope of something better. It is a choice that people make, an attitude of an open hand instead of a closed fist. If we are so quick to dismiss people's potential for good, we becoming willing to label them, we are inured to their injuries, we become in danger of thinking them as lesser. If we think lesser of them we are able to justify all measure of inhumanity against them.

Here's something different to think about, why are we so eager to give God all the omni traits? This All powerful being is not exactly the God of traditional Abrahamic religions, which is the target of the arrows cast with omni bow. God, perhaps, abdicates some of his power in order to allow us choice. In order for Him to be good, he must let us chose to reject a morality based on the good cast by Him or accept it. This is a limitation on His power. This isn't however a limitation on His sovereignty. If anything it demonstrates an organic, dynamic, living God where He reacts to our choices, where were are in dialogue with Him through how we choose. He is aware of the outcome of our choices, the thread of our lives, the warp and woof, how that thread gets tangled. He acts, maybe, in how we are aware of the gradations of our choices, how moral it is that we chose.

Testament of his direct action as are understood in the Old Testament Bible, or in the Torah, could be interepreted in a more sympathic version than pure revulsion at the destruction of whole peoples. I agree these are not easy things to disconjure, or explain away. People have tried, and I would say it's worth listening to them, but I find myself uncomfortable with a God that destroys cities based on the sexual choice of the inhabitants (or perhaps they truly were evil cities), or whole nations that happen to choose the wrong God to follow, especially as Abraham's God seemed to be one in a host of gods at the time.

There seems to be a fine line that can be walked between determinism and free will, a sense of free choice bracketed by causality, and situation. There's room for God in there.