They are ANGELS, they respect free will and consent…
i’m not a christian, but isn’t it satan who canonically respects free will, and uses it to tempt people? while god is kind of like “don’t eat this apple”, “kill your son for me”?
when you put it that way it kinda sounds exactly like what Satan’s supposedly doing. Except with less honesty.
Have you read the Bible? Because telling someone what you want them to do isn’t “not respecting free will”. It’s setting a boundary for a relationship. The story of the “sacrifice” of Isaac is interesting. Knowing some other ancient mythologies, it seems like folks at that time would expect a god to be demanding and cruel. “Sacrifice your son” wouldn’t be something they would consider unusual for a deity to ask. But the substitution of the ram demonstrates that God is different.
I wasn’t disagreeing with that. I was disagreeing with the idea that this type of respect for human free will is any different from Satan’s behavior.
Both “tempt” the humans to do things that may be wrong– whether it’s by outright asking for a human sacrifice, or by telling them not to eat an appetizing fruit that he’d intentionally made and put right in front of them (when he hadn’t given them the knowledge of good and evil and thus the ability to know whether disobeying him was wrong.)
In either case the humans could have chosen differently, but he made it very difficult for them to have any reason to do so. Perhaps more so than any of the times Satan tempted humans.
I have read the Bible, I just don’t see any reason to take it as literal truth.
Now, there are mentions of demonic possession in the Bible, which are at odds with other portrayals of how Satan influences humanity.
…Though, arguably, there’s the same for God. Because if we are to take the Bible as literal truth– and believe that every single person who transcribed it throughout history was not only divinely inspired to do so, but was somehow 100% prevented from using their free will to do so in any way that could introduce falsehoods– then we pretty much have to believe God does “possession” sometimes too.
