Jene Sai, no offense taken. I am merely trying to stimulate some intellectual thought here.
Your comments are valid, since these have been formulated from your experience and your faith. I would not presume to question them, but--with your permission--I'd like to prod you a little bit. Put some of those thoughts to the fire, if you will.
Interesting analogy of the wheat and tares. Yes, a tare is a weed, but it is necessary for the sustainment of other creatures. I suppose that humans have eaten tares in the past when food was scarce. And, this parable--remember it is but a parable of the harvest--was meant, as Jewish teaching is custom in its approach and execution, as a warning to people that they will be judged at the harvest time as to being wheat or tares.
To make the jump as some people already being tares when they are born, IMHO, is to admit that God isn't really a loving God after all. He makes some to live "happily ever after" with Him. He makes others to languish eternally as some kind of sport.
I also don't want to dismiss the omnipotence of God. If we were to talk in this vein, then what would be the point of God doing anything, much less we humans. I mean, it's like being a writer (which I am) who has complete knowledge of every detail of the book. My character or characters are going to do things as I direct them. Now, what if one of my characters suddenly came to life, as it were, and told me in person that didn't like how I was directing my life and he/she did not see the point in continuing since the end was known (think ghastly as an extreme).
"You're gonna die, so I don't really care," could very well be one response. "I made you, and this is the way it's gonna be. You don't have any recourse. I am the judge and jury on the way things are gonna turn out."
So, in my hypothetical example above and in conjunction with my earlier comments, how would I feel if I believed so strongly that I was a stalk of wheat when all along God was laughing at me because I really was a tare.
I personally cannot believe in such a god. Please note the small "g." My God cares about every living soul and does His darndest (mostly through other people, you understand) to have each and every soul return the "touch."
One bugaboo I have is that we have one central, immutable fact for doctrine or dogma or whatever you would like to call it: Christ died for all. Not some or a few but all.
Then, over the last two millenia, we have had theologians pick this immutable fact apart like proverbial rabbis over one word in a particular Bible passage. These developing offshoots of the one immutable fact then become more dogma until we have created a Heinz 57 variety of Christian factions, sects, and the like. To protect one "brand" of Christianity, we build fences and walls to safeguard what our leaders tell us is the One and Only Way. And, when that happens, we naturally have people who will ardently proclaim that someone's belief is is error--and away we go back to the early days of the church when Christians were literally killing each other over an idea other than the one immutable fact.
