As far as I've gone in my journey of deconstructing the fundamentalist Christian beliefs that I've been raised with, one issue that I haven't gotten over, and probably never will, is the notion of how letting humans exercise their free will would make God more just, while that also makes people more deserving of their damnation.
I'm talking about this reductive rhetoric often preached in evangelical sects, which goes like this: "God gave humanity the gift of free will, and we all have the choice to obey him or not, so if anybody chooses to defy God or reject him they shall bear the consequences of their own actions (with this often referring to condemnation to hell)". While this could apply to behavior (i.e. murder, assault, greed, adultery etc.) which is morally and ethically unjustifiable, it's also used to denounce morally neutral facets of being human that the church just deems wrong– like being queer, or exercising bodily autonomy.
All debates on the logical fallacies present and how hell is an ill-defined concept (trust, I can write a whole spiel on this) aside, this assertion would make the nature of God...truly confusing.
The implication that having the agency to sin equates to having full comprehension of its consequences is just false, when the consequences of sin aren't even defined so clearly. I guess the most prominent example would be the original sin AKA Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Good and Evil. Sure, we know it's forbidden, "when you eat from it you will certainly die" (Genesis 3:17), and that's about it. Why? How? What does death mean? What would it be like? So many questions about this command are left unanswered. That's partly also why the serpent could tempt Eve into eating the fruit— because she had misunderstood its connotations. The choice to sin is not an informed choice at all, when its repercussions are incomprehensible to humans. And yet God's children are supposed to bear full responsibility for this?
If this is true, I can't reconcile this notion with an all-loving, merciful God.
