Re:Orthodoxy - fair enough.

Original Sin

The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however.

Ok, that’s an interesting take. If man is not guilty of the sin of Adam then why does he bear the consequences of the act? Why punish someone for something you don’t believe they did?

Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden.

Yeah but then he followed them around? Adam praises god on the birth of his sons, they give offerings to god and even talk to him, etc. And if Adam’s sin is transmitted to all mankind then Cain and Abel were sinful too, so it kinda seems like god didn’t have a problem being in the presence of sin?

This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life

This doesn’t fly with me, because god created Adam and Eve as they were and they (assuming omniscience) couldn’t choose to do otherwise. So not only is god punishing them for a sin of his own making, he’s punishing everyone else despite, in the Orthodox version, them not being guilty of that sin. And then to call pain and suffering a mercy because it gives us the ‘opportunity’ to ‘earn’ back what you took? Nah, I’ll take a hard pass on that one. Sin but not guilt is kind of worse actually. It’s like telling your kid, ‘I know your brother was the one who took the cookie, but I’m going to spank you for it too.’ See also: pettiness and tyranny.

Heavenly beings are in a static state … the state of [Satan’s] soul cannot be changed

If it was static, how did it change from ‘angelic’ to ‘damned’ or whatever after his act of rebellion? Was it the act itself that somehow changed the unchangeable, or did god decide to rewrite reality just this once? If that’s the case, rewriting someone’s soul just so you can eternally punish them for one mistake is kind of a dick move.

Free Will

This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will.

I don’t think so, though I concede that there might be definitions of free will that render it thus, I’m using the pretty common definition of having the ability to make choices.

Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things … foreknowledge ≠ predestination

I whole-heartedly disagree, foreknowledge precisely equals predestination. He doesn’t have to orchestrate things; merely knowing ahead of time that I will turn left instead of right at the next intersection means that it is definitionally impossible for me to turn right. If I was able to turn right anyway that would definitionally preclude foreknowledge: you can’t know that I turned left if I turned right.

God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time.

Even if I grant this for the sake of argument, humans do not operate outside of time so foreknowledge of human futures, again definitionally, must necessarily be knowledge about the future of the time that humans operate in. But even if that wasn’t true, if god exists outside of time then he also definitionally exists outside of causality and cannot influence or be influenced by human choices within time, which precludes foreknowledge of human futures.

Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it, but according to the most widely-accepted definitions if man is free to choose then god cannot have forenkowledge of those choices.

Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. … We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love.

If he’s not outside of causality (as implied by the participatory element here) then he’s not outside of time, because those two things mean effectively the same thing. You say he allows it out of love, I say he allows it out of lack of foreknowledge, because that’s the only thing that is logically consistent.

What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth.

Logic doesn’t presuppose god, it merely presupposes consistency. Objective truth can arise from the structure of reality itself without requiring a divine source. We have mountains of evidence that logic is internally self-consistent; that’s not the case for pretty much any holy book I’ve read.

Vengeful/loving God

This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins

That doesn’t render it invalid. Also: primarily, but not uniquely as you point out; I was personally puzzling over this stuff back in the 80s before anyone but the editors of a few science journals had ever heard of Richard Dawkins.

The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety.

I don’t dispute that he is also loving, I dispute that he is exclusively loving as of the New Testament. He just goes on and on about how vengeful and angry he is in the OT, and there’s some of that in the NT too, though I think it’s all said by others since (IIRC, it’s been a while) god doesn’t really have a speaking part in much of the NT. Also I don’t think you get to send your PR team out to call you a ‘loving god’ after slaughtering innocents and children (and advocating the same) over and over again.

NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers

I wouldn’t count that as wrath, and I also wouldn’t attribute it to god. We know he’s capable of turning those tables over himself if he wanted to, but he didn’t. :P

This is more of a squishy critique than the other two

That’s fair, it’s definitely more of a vibe-check thing, I’m not sure there’s much space to discuss there.

(cont, TIL lemmy doesn’t have that high of a maximum post length.)