Thank you for responding to that, actually.

I was wondeirng if anybody would defend what you defended there.

It's still not comprehensible to me that God would think that people could only make a free will choice if the choice was between good and evil, that God would feel he had to create evil simply to get us to struggle against it. That, to me, suggests a Godhead of immeasurable cruelty...one that would see those He created as characters in the video game He is perpetually playing.

It's not possible for me to ascribe that level of sadism to the divine, though.

It's not as if we', as humans, could only exhibit free will in having to decide not to be evil. God could have made free will an entirely positive thing- could have made it about people choosing exactly which ways each of us could spend our lives doing purely generous, creative, beautiful, transcendent and wonderous things. Free will never had to involve people needing to struggle against ugliness, inequality, misery, hatred and war. God could have created us purely to make the world He created perpetually better. There was no reason to include the option of being total bastards within the range of human possibility.