In Genesis 45:5, Joseph tells his brother, don’t be distressed for selling me as a slave, for it was G-d who sent me ahead of you to provide.<\/p>\n
In a 1995 lecture on this, Dennis Prager says: Joseph says it was not you who sent me here but G-d. G-d’s hand is in all of it.<\/p>\n
If G-d did it, what responsibility do the brothers have for having done it? Are they guilty at all?<\/p>\n
I don’t have a beautiful answer for you. Did G-d do it or the brothers or some melange of the two? G-d wanted Joseph in Egypt.<\/p>\n
I never had a problem with the concept that G-d knows the future and we have free will. I can drive down the freeway and see the traffic is stopped in the opposite direction by an accident. So I know that all the drivers coming up to the accident will soon be stopped. They have free will but I know their future in this respect.<\/p>\n
If I were in the medieval Christian world as a Jew, and they were all yelling at me for being a Christ-killer, I would’ve said, it wouldn’t have helped, they would’ve just gotten angrier, but I would’ve said that on purely logical grounds, blame me all you like, but if the Jews didn’t kill him, you would have no religion. Because G-d sent his only son by classical Christian theology to be killed. If he had died in a nursing home, this story would be very different. You don’t die for people’s sins in your sleep. You die for people’s sins by being killed by bad people sinning. <\/p>\n
Secular life has its own arguments against free will — genes, environment, parents, health. A purely secular view of humanity argues that you have no freedom. <\/p>\n
Only if you believe in G-d, can you believe that humans have free will. <\/p>\n
I don’t believe that everything we do is because of genes and environment. <\/p>\n
The more secular the society, the less people are likely to blame criminals. If all we are is genes and environment, then it is not right to blame a rapist. It is not right to blame a murderer.<\/p>\n
It is the more religious in society who are the most advocative of punishing criminals. <\/p>\n
A religious person in Judeo-Christian culture tends to hold that people are responsible for their behavior. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Genesis 45:5, Joseph tells his brother, don’t be distressed for selling me as a slave, for it was G-d who sent me ahead of you to provide. In a 1995 lecture on this, Dennis Prager says: Joseph says it … Continue reading