Because you said, "There were no demons whispering to Eve," and whether or not Eve was whispering back to any demons was not in dispute, and that's all that was happening in verses two and three, so I skipped them because they were irrelevant to the point.
They are ENTIRELY RELEVANT to the point!
You are committing the fallacy of special pleading.
It's where you deliberately ignore aspects that are unfavorable to your point of view.
Verses 2-3 destroy your overall position.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won't prevent it from sinking.
YOU SAID:
Seems to me that without demons "whispering" to Eve, that she could have obeyed God and avoided that tree.
1) there were no demons
Lucifer was not a demon, at least, not at that point he wasn't.
2) avoiding the tree was never wrong to begin with, and thus not necessary.
You've confused what Eve said to Lucifer in verses 2-3 with what God ACTUALLY prohibited, which was ONLY eating it. Thus, by IGNORING those two verses, you try to skirt around the issue, and in doing so have come to believe something that is not true.
Genesis 3:2-3:
2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”
EVE WAS INCORRECT IN SAYING "NOR SHALL YOU TOUCH IT."
And BECAUSE of this error, Satan was able to decieve her.
So we're in agreement then that she was lied to by a demon?
No.
She was deceived by Lucifer, an ANGEL, and an archangel at that.
The moment he caused Eve to sin, he fell.
Keep in mind this response was to my, "He was flat lying and enticing her and tempting her and trying to persuade her through deceit. He was a flat liar." So when you begin here, "The deceit was ... " you're acknowledging and agreeing with me that there was deceit,
Lucifer's lie was a lie of omission. His deceit was leaving out the "if you touch it" when he told Eve that she wouldn't die.
Get it right.
coming from the demon, right?
False. Supra.
Does He have the ability or power or authority to physically intervene and stop a rape in process, JR? I say Yes.
Yes God could grab a rapist and pull him away from a woman he's about to rape and prevent him from raping her. But then He wouldn't be loving or just.
Again, love is the commitment to the good of someone.
Love must be freely given. If a person does not have the ability to hate (eg, if God prevents them from hating Him), then they do not have the ability to love.
What about the people being raped?
What about them?
They're suffering from the consequences of somebody else's action.
We live in a fallen world, Idolater. God isn't going to step in to protect people from the consequences of sin, because it would teach them that they can sin and not have to suffer the consequences.
The law is for the unrighteous.
What justice, what being made whole, looks like for the woman who is raped, is the execution of the rapist.
If that is not carried out, then righteousness is not being enforced, and yes, the woman will suffer, and every other woman as well, because then they will start to fear that they too will be raped, and they will expect that they will not be made whole.
The consequences of the rapists actions are, in a just society, that he be put to death.
In an unjust society, rapists receive in themselves the penalty of their error which is due (Romans 1). Sin has consequences,
even physical ones.
All I'm saying and all I've been saying, is that this is significant to theodicy and the problem of evil, nothing more.
Evil exists because men choose to rebel against God.
God is not the author of sin.
OK. But isn't there a difference, in some way, between someone who freely decides to disobey God with full knowledge and completely freely, and someone who was cajoled or pressured or tricked into doing so?
Yes.