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Oh, no....you are putting your very life at risk.

With the Israelites being regular offenders of breaking the Sabbath, its not unreasonable to think that others had been working on sabbaths prior,

scriipture says they didn't know what punishment to dish out to him for working on the sabbath, so they consulted the Lord.
but why?.....surely with so many offenders breaking the sabbath, they already knew what was the appropriate penalty?

which makes me think they may have been allowing many Sabbath blasphemers to skip appropriate punishment leading up to that incident.
[ie;] if stoning was the regular punishment for blasphemers, they would not need to consult the Lord, .. it would just be a par for the course
process to stone him....yet they were in two minds.

according to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 41a), it says that he was first warned by witnesses for his blasphemous actions , but he continued
collecting wood.....Thus had he stopped at the first warning , would they have shown leniency and not arrested him?




Firstly, The matter /outcome is not entirely dependent on God.
had they decided themselves not to stone the offender, what was God going to do about it ?...come down and do the stoning Himself?

Even after consulting the Lord, the offenders fate ultimately rested in the hands of his fellow Israelites.

What coercion? Subscribe to doctrine or don't. Anyway coercion doesn't vitiate free will. In Syria, today, people are coerced to death to disavow Christianity and they make a free will decision not to.

coercion
(noun)
the action or practice of persuading someone to do something by using force, intimidation, or threats.
synonyms; force, compulsion, constraint, duress, oppression, enforcement, harassment, intimidation, threats, insistence, demand, etc

according to you the church stopped all that with Aquinas?

You're deflecting. The issue is free will and yes, that's been a basis of Western thought since before Aquinas.

BTW, I am not coerced in the least.

Not from the fact I originally stated,...The church employed coercion [well prior to and well beyond Aquinas.]




Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
..hence there can be no such thing as church coerced free-will, since the two are contradictory.

Therefore we describe [as coerced] the will which does not incline this way or that of its own accord
or by an internal movement of decision, ...but is forcibly driven/influenced by an external impulse.

Coercion and free will are not mutually exclusive, you have free will to defy coercion. Ask any willful child.

Oh, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith does stop by every few weeks with their hot pokers but I've only been racked a few times.

With respect, please do some study on the subject of free will before making these claims. You are making and asserting your own rules.

Did the church not use coercion to rape and sexuality abuse children around the globe?

Or did all the children simply submit to such abuse though unimpeded free will?

The priests , brothers and bishops didn't use their authoritative and intimidating coercive powers?

I have, many these long decades. Ever since Philosophy 101 which centered on metaphysics. Free will has nothing to do with coercion. A choice may be coerced or not but it is still a choice. You are free to pick your alternative.

What does that have to do with the Church? Those are the acts of individuals, acts the doctrine of the Church condemn.

influenced /coerced choice [vs] actual unimpeded free will choice,

you are ignorant of the difference.

its like cops forcing a person to sign or make a false statement they don't really want to.
they can be made/influenced to do it against their own free will by threats and intimidation.
otherwise known as coercion.

Perhaps they wanted to make an example of him as a 'serial offender' (expulsion may have been an option), yet however you look at it, the Creator of the Universe ordering his death by public stoning still contradicts the claim of that same Creator being the God of Love.

Does this describe a God who would have someone killed;

''Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.'' 1 John 4:7-8

The church system conducted systematic covert up of sexual abuse and went to great lengths to protect the many perpetrators.

many rational people outside the dumb catholic crowd, would say the church is highly complicit.

You fail to distinguish between the ability to make a choice and the act of making a choice. Here's a short, incomplete but workable definition: "Free will, in humans, the power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints."

Again the work of individuals, in defiance of the teachings if not the doctrine of the Church (I'm not a cannon lawyer).

No, being coerced is not considered to be a decision freely made. Nor does this definition consider the nature of decision making within the brain, social conditioning, etc.

which ever way you look it, the churchy system and its prominent clergy members allowed sexual abuse to continue and
protected the in-house perps....Those clergy members form the body of the church do they not?

You can talk about the ideological doctrine- teachings , but they are not the church.

FACT remains the many perpetrators we're coercive in their ways toward abusing children.

Nature of decision making is an altogether different topic. Free will and a decision freely made are completely different things.

Look again at the definition (snitched from Encyclopedia Britannica) free will is 1) a capacity of the human intellect 2) to choose independently of natural, social, or divine restraints (different than coercion). "Free will" has nothing to do with actually making a decision or how we decide.

If they commit a grievous sin and have not repented they are not part of the body of the church. And the Church is defined by it's doctrines and teachings - that's the point of having a church. Yeah, there were and I'm sure are bad actors in the church. There are bad actors everywhere. Maybe we should condemn all of humanity and be done with it?