Kardain wrote:
Bastardking3000 wrote:The whole The Sims thing...
The main flaw in your logic is this, although it was interesting to read:
By using The Sims as your basis of human existance, each person would be bound by the programming, which can be manipulated by the creator of the game. By having that manipulation point in place, the poor little sprites no longer have any free will, regardless as to whether or not the programming is manipulated.
To have free will, they must be able to break the programming.
Quote:
apparently some are gonna say "it was my will,"
Removal of free will from human existance.
See, here's what I don't understand about the xtian religion. Well, religion in general...
You cannot believe in a higher power that is both omniscient and omnipotent and believe that free will exists. Reason being, they cancel each other out. Your god would know what you are doing every measurable time of your life. Meaning no free will.
I disagree. I CAN and DO believe in both a higher power and free will simultaneously. They do NOT cancel each other out. To know something does not manipulate anything. This includes the future, as well as the past. Consider that as you may know things of the past aka history, that does not detract from the free will of people who lived long ago. Even if you knew EVERYTHING that once happened, you cannot manipulate anyone's will.
Predicting the future is only a matter of mathematics. Casinos know this all too well, as do card cheats. Knowing what cards have been played etc, helps predict what is most likely going to compose the coming hands. And this is without knowing ALL the variables, so its just best guess but more accurate than not. Now if you knew the exact way the dealer was gonna shuffle card-for-card (for example - and other unknown variables like player actions etc of course) you could perfectly predict how the game would play out. Of course even knowing with 100% certainty what will happen won't change anything. If you play and choose to use your knowledge you could walk away a wealthy man or woman. Of course that's you're choice. If you don't play you don't manipulate anything. Even if you do, you still aren't forcing the dealer to shuffle the way he/she does - even if you knew how they where gonna do it, so they still have free will.
Equally in war for example, you can make a move knowing just how your enemy will react(say you fed them false info - see WW2), you ARE manipulating them but still you aren't taking away their free will.
Even human thought is only a matter of mathematics.
Chamillionaire wrote:Kardain wrote:Quote:
and all power doesn't make your arguement either as pointed out before by driving my car 55 mph does not negate my ability to drive it 75 mph.
That accident your god says you are going to cause is going to happen regardless as to whether you drive 55 or 75. Driving faster will just make it happen sooner. You are predestined to get into that accident, meaning what boys and girls, no free will.
You're wrong. Stop spot picking the bible and the beliefs birthed from a relationship with Christ. The Christian belief system is to be embraced as a whole, not just bits and pieces to make your Atheist ideals fit.
I'm a christian, and I must say that is just as inaccurate as it is arrogant
IMO. Since you seem to think that you get to speak for an entire faith. Consider the fact that their are so many different denominations of which disagree on many things(all of these denomonations are 100% accurate BTW - LOL). Now if denomination "X" can have their own views, why can't Kardain?
And suppose someone basically had the same beliefs but doesn't choose to call themselves Christian. So what? A rose by any other name...
I even accept the possibility that certain parts of the Bible are probably not as accurate as they ought to be - be it from human manipulation(for commercial interest and control), at the very least you must consider that there has been much translation. There have been MANY varied translations to English alone(which is why the King James version - for example - came to being - he decided that their should be one interpretation for his people to read - and one that he approved of
BTW).
I've never heard of this "part throttle" before. Does it just bolt on?
Don't say I didn't warn ya... You just had to hear the whole argument didn't ya?
Not my work.
Free Will and the Christian Religion
The problem of free will assumed quite a new character with the advent of the Christian religion. The doctrine that God has created man, has commanded him to obey the moral law, and has promised to reward or punish him for observance or violation of this law, made the reality of moral liberty an issue of transcendent importance. Unless man is really free, he cannot be justly held responsible for his actions, any more than for the date of his birth or the colour of his eyes. All alike are inexorably predetermined for him. Again, the difficulty of the question was augmented still further by the Christian dogma of the fall of man and his redemption by grace. St. Paul, especially in his Epistle to the Romans, is the great source of the Catholic theology of grace.
Catholic Doctrine
Among the early Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine stands pre-eminent in his handling of this subject. He clearly teaches the freedom of the will against the Manichćeans, but insists against the Semipelageians on the necessity of grace, as a foundation of merit. He also emphasizes very strongly the absolute rule of God over men's wills by His omnipotence and omniscience--through the infinite store, as it were, of motives which He has had at His disposal from all eternity, and by the foreknowledge of those to which the will of each human being would freely consent. St. Augustine's teaching formed the basis of much of the later theology of the Church on these questions, though other writers have sought to soften the more rigorous portions of his doctrine. This they did especially in opposition to heretical authors, who exaggerated these features in the works of the great African Doctor and attempted to deduce from his principles a form of rigid predeterminism little differing from fatalism. The teaching of St. Augustine is developed by St. Thomas Aquinas both in theology and philosophy. Will is rational appetite. Man necessarily desires beatitude, but he can freely choose between different forms of it. Free will is simply this elective power. Infinite Good is not visible to the intellect in this life. There are always some drawbacks and deficiencies in every good presented to us. None of them exhausts our intellectual capacity of conceiving the good. Consequently, in deliberate volition, not one of them completely satiates or irresistibly entices the will. In this capability of the intellect for conceiving the universal lies the root of our freedom. But God possesses an infallible knowledge of man's future actions. How is this prevision possible, if man's future acts are not necessary? God does not exist in time. The future and the past are alike ever present to the eternal mind as a man gazing down from a lofty mountain takes in at one momentary glance all the objects which can be apprehended only through a lengthy series of successive experiences by travellers along the winding road beneath, in somewhat similar fashion the intuitive vision of God apprehends simultaneously what is future to us with all it contains. Further, God's omnipotent providence exercises a complete and perfect control over all events that happen, or will happen, in the universe. How is this secured without infringement of man's freedom? Here is the problem which two distinguished schools in the Church--both claiming to represent the teaching, or at any rate the logical development of the teaching of St. Thomas--attempt to solve in different ways. The heresies of Luther and Calvin brought the issue to a finer point than it had reached in the time of Aquinas, consequently he had not formally dealt with it in its ultimate shape, and each of the two schools can cite texts from the works of the Angelic Doctor in which he appears to incline towards their particular view.
Thomist and Molinist Theories
The Dominican or Thomist solution, as it is called, teaches in brief that God premoves each man in all his acts to the line of conduct which he subsequently adopts. It holds that this premotive decree inclines man's will with absolute certainty to the side decreed, but that God adapts this premotion to the nature of the being thus premoved. It argues that as God possesses infinite power He can infallibly premove man--who is by nature a free cause--to choose a particular course freely, whilst He premoves the lower animals in harmony with their natures to adopt particular courses by necessity. Further, this premotive decree being inevitable though adapted to suit the free nature of man, provides a medium in which God foresees with certainty the future free choice of the human being. The premotive decree is thus prior in order of thought to the Divine cognition of man's future actions. Theologians and philosophers of the Jesuit School, frequently styled Molinists, though they do not accept the whole of Molina's teaching and generally prefer Suarez's exposition of the theory, deem the above solution unsatisfactory. It would, they readily admit, provide sufficiently for the infallibility of the Divine foreknowledge and also for God's providential control of the world's history; but, in their view, it fails to give at the same time an adequately intelligible account of the freedom of the human will. According to them, the relation of the Divine action to man's will should be conceived rather as of a concurrent than of a premotive character; and they maintain that God's knowledge of what a free being would choose, if the necessary conditions were supplied, must be deemed logically prior to any decree of concurrence or premotion in respect to that act of choice. Briefly, they make a threefold distinction in God's knowledge of the universe based on the nature of the objects known--the Divine knowledge being in itself of course absolutely simple. Objects or events viewed merely as possible, God is said to apprehend by simple intelligence (simplex intelligentia). Events which will happen He knows by vision (scientia visionis). Intermediate between these are conditionally future events--things which would occur were certain conditions fulfilled. God's knowledge of this class of contingencies they term scientia media. For instance Christ affirmed that, if certain miracles had been wrought in Tyre and Sidon, the inhabitants would have been converted. The condition was not realized, yet the statement of Christ must have been true. About all such conditional contingencies propositions may be framed which are either true or false--and Infinite Intelligence must know all truth. The conditions in many cases will not be realized, so God must know them apart from any decrees determining their realization. He knows them therefore, this school holds, in seipsis, in themselves as conditionally future events. This knowledge is the scientia media, "middle knowledge", intermediate between vision of the actual future and simple understanding of the merely possible. Acting now in the light of this scientia media with respect to human volitions, God freely decides according to His own wisdom whether He shall supply the requisite conditions, including His co-operation in the action, or abstain from so doing, and thus render possible or prevent the realization of the event. In other words, the infinite intelligence of God sees clearly what would happen in any conceivable circumstances. He thus knows what the free will of any creature would choose, if supplied with the power of volition or choice and placed in any given circumstances. He now decrees to supply the needed conditions, including His corcursus, or to abstain from so doing. He thus holds complete dominion and control over our future free actions, as well as over those of a necessary character. The Molinist then claims to safeguard better man's freedom by substituting for the decree of an inflexible premotion one of concurrence dependent on God's prior knowledge of what the free being would choose. If given the power to exert the choice. He argues that he exempts God more clearly from all responsibility for man's sins. The claim seems to the present writer well founded; at the same time it is only fair to record on the other side that the Thomist urges with considerable force that God's prescience is not so understandable in this, as in his theory. He maintains, too, that God's exercise of His absolute dominion over all man's acts and man's entire dependence on God's goodwill are more impressively and more worthily exhibited in the premotion hypothesis. The reader will find an exhaustive treatment of the question in any of the Scholastic textbooks on the subject.
Free will and the Protestant Reformers
A leading feature in the teaching of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, especially in the case of Luther and Calvin, was the denial of free will. Picking out from the Scriptures, and particularly from St. Paul, the texts which emphasized the importance and efficacy of grace, the all-ruling providence of God, His decrees of election or predestination, and the feebleness of man, they drew the conclusion that the human will, instead of being master of its own acts, is rigidly predetermined in all its choices throughout life. As a consequence, man is predestined before his birth to eternal punishment or reward in such fashion that he never can have had any real free-power over his own fate. In his controversy with Erasmus, who defended free will, Luther frankly stated that free will is a fiction, a name which covers no reality, for it is not in man's power to think well or ill, since all events occur by necessity. In reply to Erasmus's "De Libero Arbitrio", he published his own work, "De Servo Arbitrio", glorying in emphasizing man's helplessness and slavery. The predestination of all future human acts by God is so interpreted as to shut out any possibility of freedom. An inflexible internal necessity turns man's will whithersoever God preordains. With Calvin, God's preordination is, if possible, even more fatal to free will. Man can perform no sort of good act unless necessitated to it by God's grace which it is impossible for him to resist. It is absurd to speak of the human will "co-operating" with God's grace, for this would imply that man could resist the grace of God. The will of God is the very necessity of things. It is objected that in this case God sometimes imposes impossible commands. Both Calvin and Luther reply that the commands of God show us not what we can do but what we ought to do. In condemnation of these views, the Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent co-operate with God, Who excites and invites its action; and that it can thereby dispose and prepare itself to obtain the grace of justification. The will can resist grace if it chooses. It is not like a lifeless thing, which remains purely passive. Weakened and diminished by Adam's fall, free will is yet not destroyed in the race (Sess. VI, cap. i and v).
Free Will in Modern Philosophy
Although from Descartes onward, philosophy became more and more separated from theology, still the theological significance of this particular question has always been felt to be of the highest moment. Descartes himself at times clearly maintains the freedom of the will (Meditations, III and IV). At times, however, he attenuates this view and leans towards a species of providential determinism, which is, indeed, the logical consequence of the doctrines of occasionalism and the inefficacy of secondary causes latent in his system.
Malebranche developed this feature of Descartes's teaching. Soul and body cannot really act on each other. The changes in the one are directly caused by God on the occasion of the corresponding change in the other. So-called secondary causes are not really efficacious. Only the First Cause truly acts. If this view be consistently thought out, the soul, since it possesses no genuine causality, cannot be justly said to be free in its volitions. Still, as a Catholic theologian, Malebranche could not accept this fatalistic determinism. Accordingly he defended freedom as essential to religion and morality. Human liberty being denied, God should be deemed cruel and unjust, whilst duty and responsibility for man cease to exist. We must therefore be free. Spinoza was more logical. Starting from certain principles of Descartes, he deduced in mathematical fashion an iron-bound pantheistic fatalism which left no room for contingency in the universe and still less for free will. In Leibniz, the prominence given to the principle of sufficient reason, the doctrine that man must choose that which the intellect judges as the better, and the optimistic theory that God Himself has inevitably chosen the present as being the best of all possible worlds, these views, when logically reasoned out, leave very little reality to free will, though Leibniz set himself in marked opposition to the monistic geometrical necessarianism of Spinoza.
In England the mechanical materialism of Hobbes was incompatible with moral liberty, and he accepted with cynical frankness all the logical consequences of his theory. Our actions either follow the first appetite that arises in the mind, or there is a series of alternate appetites and fears, which we call deliberation. The last appetite or fear, that which triumphs, we call will. The only intelligible freedom is the power to do what one desires. Here Hobbes is practically at one with Locke. God is the author of all causes and effects, but is not the author of sin, because an action ceases to be sin if God wills it to happen. Still God is the cause of sin. Praise and blame, rewards and punishments cannot be called useless, because they strengthen motives, which are the causes of action. This, however, does not meet the objection to the justice of such blame or praise, if the person has not the power to abstain from or perform the actions thus punished or rewarded. Hume reinforced the determinist attack on free will by his suggested psychological analysis of the notion or feeling of "necessity". The controversy, according to him, has been due to misconception of the meaning of words and the error that the alternative to free will is necessity. This necessity, he says, is erroneously ascribed to some kind of internal nexus supposed to bind all causes to their effects, whereas there is really nothing more in causality than constant succession. The imagined necessity is merely a product of custom or association of ideas. Not feeling in our acts of choice this necessity, which we attribute to the causation of material agents, we mistakenly imagine that our volitions have no causes and so are free, whereas they are as strictly determined by the feelings or motives which have gone before, as any material effects are determined by their material antecedents. In all our reasonings respecting other persons, we infer their future conduct from their wonted action under particular motives with the same sort of certainty as in the case of physical causation.
The same line of argument was adopted by the Associationist School down to Bain and J. S. Mill. For the necessity of Hobbes or Spinoza is substituted by their descendants what Professor James calls a "soft determinism", affirming solely the invariable succession of volition upon motive. J. S. Mill merely developed with greater clearness and fuller detail the principles of Hume. In particular, he attacked the notion of "constraint" suggested in the words necessity and necessarianism, whereas only sequence is affirmed. Given a perfect knowledge of character and motives, we could infallibly predict action. The alleged consciousness of freedom is disputed. We merely feel that we choose, not that we could choose the opposite. Moreover the notion of free will is unintelligible. The truth is that for the Sensationalist School, who believe the mind to be merely a series of mental states, free will is an absurdity. On the other side, Reid, and Stewart, and Hamilton, of the Scotch School, with Mansel, Martineau, W. J. Ward, and other Spiritualist thinkers of Great Britain, energetically defended free will against the disciples of Hume. They maintained that a more careful analysis of volition justified the argument from consciousness, that the universal conviction of mankind on such a fact may not be set aside as an illusion, that morality cannot be founded on an act of self-deception; that all languages contain terms involving the notion of free will and all laws assume its existence, and that the attempt to render necessarianism less objectionable by calling it determinism does not diminish the fatalism involved in it.
The truth that phenomenalism logically involves determinism is strikingly illustrated in Kant's treatment of the question. His well-known division of all reality into phenomena and noumena is his key to this problem also. The world as it appears to us, the world of phenomena, including our own actions and mental states, can only be conceived under the form of time and subject to the category of causality, and therefore everything in the world of experience happens altogether according to the laws of nature; that is, all our actions are rigidly determined. But, on the other hand, freedom is a necessary postulate of morality: "Thou canst, because thou oughtest." The solution of the antinomy is that the determinism concerns only the empirical or phenomenal world. There is no ground for denying liberty to the Ding an sich. We may believe in transcendental freedom, that we are noumenally free. Since, moreover, the belief that I am free and that I am a free cause, is the foundation stone of religion and morality, I must believe in this postulate. Kant thus gets over the antinomy by confining freedom to the world of noumena, which lie outside the form of time and the category of causality, whilst he affirms necessity of the sensible world, bound by the chain of causality. Apart from the general objection to Kant's system, a grave difficulty here lies in the fact that all man's conduct--his whole moral life as it is revealed in actual experience either to others or himself--pertains in this view to the phenomenal world and so is rigidly determined.
Though much acute philosophical and psychological analysis has been brought to bear on the problem during the last century, it cannot be said that any great additional light has been shed over it. In Germany, Schopenhauer made will the noumenal basis of the world and adopted a pessimistic theory of the universe, denying free will to be justified by either ethics or psychology. On the other hand, Lotze, in many respects perhaps the acutest thinker in Germany since Kant, was an energetic defender of moral liberty. Among recent psychologists in America Professors James and Ladd are both advocates of freedom, though laying more stress for positive proof on the ethical than on the psychological evidence.
THE ARGUMENT
As the main features of the doctrine of free will have been sketched in the history of the problem, a very brief account of the argument for moral freedom will now suffice. Will viewed as a free power is defined by defenders of free will as the capacity of self-determination. By self is here understood not a single present mental state (James), nor a series of mental states (Hume and Mill), but an abiding rational being which is the subject and cause of these states. We should distinguish between:
spontaneous acts, those proceeding from an internal principle (e.g. the growth of plants and impulsive movements of animals);
voluntary acts in a wide sense, those proceeding from an internal principle with apprehension of an end (e.g. all conscious desires); and, finally
those voluntary in the strict sense, that is, deliberate or free acts.
In such, there is a self-conscious advertence to our own causality or an awareness that we are choosing the act, or acquiescing in the desire of it. Spontaneous acts and desires are opposed to coaction or external compulsion, but they are not thereby morally free acts. They may still be the necessary outcome of the nature of the agent as, e.g. the actions of lower animals, of the insane, of young children, and many impulsive acts of mature life. The essential feature in free volition is the element of choice--the vis electiva, as St. Thomas calls it. There is a concomitant interrogative awareness in the form of the query "shall I acquiesce or shall I resist? Shall I do it or something else?", and the consequent acceptance or refusal, ratification or rejection, though either may be of varying degrees of completeness. It is this act of consent or approval, which converts a mere involuntary impulse or desire into a free volition and makes me accountable for it. A train of thought or volition deliberately initiated or acquiesced in, but afterward continued merely spontaneously without reflective advertence to our elective adoption of it, remains free in causa, and I am therefore responsible for it, though actually the process has passed into the department of merely spontaneous or automatic activity. A large part of the operation of carrying out a resolution, once the decision is made, is commonly of this kind. The question of free will may now be stated thus. "Given all the conditions requisite for eliciting an act of will except the act itself, does the act necessarily follow?" Or, "Are all my volitions the inevitable outcome of my character and the motives acting on me at the time?" Fatalists, necessarians, determinists say "Yes". Libertarians, indeterminists or anti-determinists say "No. The mind or soul in deliberate actions is a free cause. Given all the conditions requisite for action, it can either act or abstain from action. It can, and sometimes does, exercise its own causality against the weight of character and present motives.
Proof
The evidence usually adduced at the present day is of two kinds, ethical and psychological--though even the ethical argument is itself psychological.
(1) Ethical Argument. It is argued that necessarianism or determinism in any form is in conflict with the chief moral notions and convictions of mankind at large. The actual universality of such moral ideas is indisputable. Duty, moral obligation, responsibility, merit, justice signify notions universally present in the consciousness of normally developed men. Further, these notions, as universally understood, imply that man is really master of some of his acts, that he is, at least at times, capable of self-determination, that all his volitions are not the inevitable outcome of his circumstances. When I say that I ought not to have performed some forbidden act, that it was my duty to obey the law, I imply that I could have done so. The judgment of all men is the same on this point. When we say that a person is justly held responsible for a crime, or that he deserves praise or reward for an heroic act of self-sacrifice, we mean that he was author and cause of that act in such fashion that he had it in his power not to perform the act. We exempt the insane or the child, because we believe them devoid of moral freedom and determined inevitably by the motives which happened to act on them. So true is this, that determinists have had to admit that the meaning of these terms will, according to their view, have to be changed. But this is to admit that their theory is in direct conflict with universal psychological facts. It thereby stands disproved. Again, it may be urged that, if logically followed out, the determinist doctrine would annihilate human morality, consequently that such a theory cannot be true. (See FATALISM.)
(2) Psychological Argument. Consciousness testifies to our moral freedom. We feel ourselves to be free when exercising certain acts. We judge afterwards that we acted freely in those acts. We distinguish them quite clearly from experiences, in which we believe we were not free or responsible. The conviction is not confined to the ignorant; even the determinist psychologist is governed in practical life by this belief. Henry Sidgwick states the fact in the most moderate terms, when he says:
Certainly in the case of actions in which I have a distinct consciousness of choosing between alternatives of conduct, one of which I conceive as right or reasonable, I find it impossible not to think that I can now choose to do what I so conceive, however strong may be my inclination to act unreasonably, and however uniformly I may have yielded to such inclinations in the past (Methods of Ethics).
The force of the evidence is best realized by carefully studying the various mental activities in which freedom is exercised. Amongst the chief of these are: voluntary attention, deliberation, choice, sustained resistance to temptation. The reader will find them analyzed at length by the authors referred to at the end of this article; or, better still, he can think them out with concrete examples in his own inner experience.
Objections
The main objection to this argument is stated in the assertion that we can be conscious only of what we actually do, not of our ability to do something else. The reply is that we can be conscious not only of what we do, but of how we do it; not only of the act but of the mode of the act. Observation reveals to us that we are subjects of different kinds of processes of thought and volition. Sometimes the line of conscious activity follows the direction of spontaneous impulse, the preponderating force of present motive and desire; at other times we intervene and exert personal causality. Consciousness testifies that we freely and actively strengthen one set of motives, resist the stronger inclination, and not only drift to one side but actively choose it. In fact, we are sure that we sometimes exert free volition, because at other times we are the subject of conscious activities that are not free, and we know the difference. Again, it is urged that experience shows that men are determined by motives, and that we always act on this assumption. The reply is that experience proves that men are influenced by motives, but not that they are always inexorably determined by the strongest motive. It as alleged that we always decide in favour of the strongest motive. This is either untrue, or the barren statement that we always choose what we choose. A free volition is "a causeless volition". The mind itself is the cause. (For other objections see FATALISM; ENERGY, THE LAW OF THE CONSERVATION OF; and the works referred to at the end of this article.)
NATURE AND RANGE OF MORAL LIBERTY
Free will does not mean capability of willing in the absence of all motive, or of arbitrarily choosing anything whatever. The rational being is always attracted by what is apprehended as good. Pure evil, misery as such, man could not desire. However, the good presents itself in many forms and under many aspects--the pleasant, the prudent, the right, the noble, the beautiful--and in reflective or deliberate action we can choose among these. The clear vision of God would necessarily preclude all volition at variance with this object, but in this world we never apprehend Infinite Good. Nor does the doctrine of free will imply that man is constantly exerting this power at every waking moment, any more than the statement that he is a "rational" animal implies that he is always reasoning. Much the larger part of man's ordinary life is administered by the machinery of reflex action, the automatic working of the organism, and acquired habits. In the series of customary acts which fill up our day, such as rising, meals, study, work, etc., probably the large majority are merely "spontaneous" and are proximately determined by their antecedents, according to the combined force of character and motive. There is nothing to arouse special volition, or call for interference with the natural current, so the stream of consciousness flows smoothly along the channel of least resistance. For such series of acts we are responsible, as was before indicated, not because we exert deliberate volition at each step, but because they are free in causa, because we have either freely initiated them, or approved them from time to time when we adverted to their ethical quality, or because we freely acquired the habits which now accomplish these acts. It is especially when some act of a specially moral complexion is recognized as good or evil that the exertion of our freedom is brought into play. With reflective advertence to the moral quality comes the apprehension that we are called on to decide between right and wrong; then the consciousness that we are choosing freely, which carries with it the subsequent conviction that the act was in the strictest sense our own, and that we are responsible for it.
CONSEQUENCES
Our moral freedom, like other mental powers, is strengthened by exercise. The practice of yielding to impulse results in enfeebling self-control. The faculty of inhibiting pressing desires, of concentrating attention on more remote goods, of reinforcing the higher but less urgent motives, undergoes a kind of atrophy by disuse. In proportion as a man habitually yields to intemperance or some other vice, his freedom diminishes and he does in a true sense sink into slavery. He continues responsible in causa for his subsequent conduct, though his ability to resist temptation at the time is lessened. On the other hand, the more frequently a man restrains mere impulse, checks inclination towards the pleasant, puts forth self-denial in the face of temptation, and steadily aims at a virtuous life, the more does he increase in self-command and therefore in freedom. The whole doctrine of Christian asceticism thus makes for developing and fostering moral liberty, the noblest attribute of man. William James's sound maxim: "Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day", so that your will may be strong to stand the pressure of violent temptation when it comes, is the verdict of the most modern psychology in favour of the discipline of the Catholic Church.
Chamillionaire wrote:You're wrong. Stop spot picking the bible and the beliefs birthed from a relationship with Christ. The Christian belief system is to be embraced as a whole, not just bits and pieces to make your Atheist ideals fit.
I don't recall "spot-picking" the xian bible. In fact, and feel free to browse the 6 pages, I have not quoted one phrase from the xian bible. What I am "spot-picking" is one of the aspects of the xian god that most that belong to that following will agree with.
Taken from a xian website: (one of your own fellow followers, so this has to make sense to you)
goD is Omniscient
Definition:
The attribute of god by which god perfectly and eternally knows all things which can be known, past, present, and future. god knows how best to attain his desired ends.
Meaning:
This, like omnipresence,
demonstrates that man cannot hide from god because god knows all things. hE knows the number of hairs on each head, he knows the heart and thoughts of every man. Just because no man is around to see us do wrong doesn't mean nobody saw it happen - god did. The proverbial tree falling in the forest that doesn't make a sound because no man was there to see it or know about it falling at that time, god sees and knows
edit: That is assuming that the xian god exists. The tree falling in the woods thing has already been disputed.. Our intentions in the things we do are known to god.
We need to be sure that our attitudes are congruent with our actions because god knows when we are doing things for the wrong reasons or motives.
<insert various xian holy book phrases here>
Conclusion:
goD knows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. hE knows when we do things for the wrong reasons and when we do things for the right reasons. All things we do should be to serve him and bring glory to him.
Application:
Since god knows everything I do and the reasons or motives I have for doing them, I will commit myself to doing everything as if I were doing it for god himself. I will yield myself to him daily, that I may do what he wants me to do and be what he wants me to be.
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< end torturous cut and paste > -- various excerpts bolded by me, not by the original page author.
Sounds to me like this xian is supporting my atheistic ideal, that there is no free will.
Chamillionaire wrote:Quote:
I'm a christian, and I must say that is just as inaccurate as it is arrogant IMO.
Show me an inaccuracy in what I stated. As a Christain you should know that you cannot just pick and choose things out of the bible to fit you. It MUST be embraced completely because of the MANY scriptures that coincide.
Quote:
Since you seem to think that you get to speak for an entire faith. Consider the fact that their are so many different denominations of which disagree on many things(all of these denomonations are 100% accurate BTW - LOL). Now if denomination "X" can have their own views, why can't Kardain?
I speak from what the bible tells me, not from what man believes or would like me to believe...you should know that too as a Christian. I never questioned his belief system nor told him he couldn't have one did I?? He made a comment on mine, therefore I counter. Especially when there is not an understanding of what you're speaking about, which is VERY evident in those posts.
Biblically speaking, God's word is never-changing. Holy Spirit.....
Ha ha ha - yes I CAN pick and choose. It's easy if you consider that the word in a book are NOT the direct words handed to us by God. If I though they where then that would be another matter. Although I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to most of it, I think about things, understanding that God is both a logical and just being, as well I pray for the truth in things. Simply put if I wonder, I pray for the truth/answer, and I do receive that answer in some form or another.
Now as you say "God's word is never changing." While this may be true enough, the Bible is not God's literal direct-from-mouth word, as most would like to believe. It does, and has in fact has, changed many times in numerous ways. If that where not the case - I ask why there would be multiple versions?! And how do you get past the problem of translation? Some meaning is ALWAYS lost/altered in translation. You do know that the God's word was NOT given to us in English, correct? And of course that is the best case scenario.
I am fairly suspicious that generations long ago(esp in the early church) made a few minor(or worse) changes to better suit themselves. Just because God's word is infallible, doesn't mean we can blindly trust the middlemen who passed the word along. Say for example if God gave me a message to give to everyone. Now suppose I sent GAM(for example) an e-mail with this message, and also told him to send it to you, and then he sent you that same email. Now how do you know that GAM sent you the same (unmodified) e-mail that I sent him? Sure he can say this e-mail is from me and he's just passing it along, but how do you know for sure? Well short of asking me if this email as you got it was exactly as I originally sent it out, you can't. Now you can blindly trust GAM sent you the unmodified e-mail, but that's pretty umm... trusting of you. Now this email instead went through like 1500 people between me and you, an suppose some of these people stood to gain considerably by altering my e-mail message, and eventually you get it. Still think it should be blindly believed? Even if you knew for FACT that I was passing along God's direct word? Nope still gotta question it. If you don't then you're pretty damm naive.
Now with this whole existing outside of time thing... I don't believe there is any such thing as "time." I think that's just an abstract idea we created - a measurement and nothing more. Good only for graphs, record keeping, etc. Both the past and the future are only imaginary things, they don't exist. The "past" does not still exist because everything that used to comprise it(matter) still exist(perhaps in another form) today although in another place. All that will compose the "future" already exist. So in a manner of speaking, since all the matter which comprises us always has and always will exist, we all exist outside of time.
God does not have any need to exist in both the present and future simultaneously to know what will happen. As I already said, what will be - is only a matter of mathematics. I think God knows everything that is - as of right now - and as such can see the future as he seeks fit simply by doing the math. If I had
all the variables and infinite (or just VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY HIGH) mathematical processing ability, I could do the same. Any part of the past unknown to me could be found in the same manor(but of course you would use the equation different).
I've never heard of this "part throttle" before. Does it just bolt on?
[quote=Keeper of the Light™]Let me go back about God and Free will--even though I see God in the monotheistic sense as a fundamental implausibility.
A lot of you are arguing based upon only 3...maybe 4 dimensions. We can assume that there are a nigh-infinite amount of dimensions--so then, it can be inferred that God can have precience to the level of not only seeing what you do, but eveything you could do/could have done (assuming that everything that can happen does inded happen but our consciousness only can see that which happens in the plane of reality in which we inhabit). As such, free will doesn't necessarily negate God being able to see everything.
However, then we have some problems--which level consciousness, in the Christian terms of reality, is judged (after all, in one level of consciousness, let's say, pretjah could have been a bigger rate
(rat?) bastard than even my depraved mind could see), and if it isn't the only one--does that mean that you can go to heaven and hell at the same time?
The interesting thing about your this idea of yours is an implied assumption that each of these near infinite dimensions is going to be filled with (different versions of) the same people. I find it hard to believe that if there are additional dimensions(and assuming they have all the same physics laws we gave - which is a big assumption), that the same people would actually exist. In fact - short of direct intervention aka God etc - there's a good chance that there may not be any forms of any life (let alone the "human" incarnation of life form) in all in most of those alternate dimensions. I would further doubt that the same planets and stars etc have formed, rather matter collected in a different manor/location etc to form alternate stars, planets etc. Now even those dimensions which human life would inhabit, it's further unlikely that they're gonna be inhabited my the same people.
Consider that YOU(on the genetic level) personally exist because the correct(out of millions of potential) sperm(each having a unique sample of your father's DNA) combined with your mother's egg(which like the sperm each have a unique sample of your mother's DNA). That egg also is a variable since your mother had a different one every period cycle - so even when your father impregnated your mother is a variable. Of course how many times your dad released sperm is also a variable. As well as the chemical balance in both of their bodies at all times - etc etc etc. Also take this down the bloodline you have to assume the same thing at your grandparents, your great-grandparents, your great-great-grandparents, their parents. their grandparents, their great-grandparents etc etc etc.
Now take this further, considering that in every dimension that is populated by humans(again assuming that the original humans in each dimension all had the exact same DNA), the humans in each dimension don't necessarily have to act the same. The original humans in each dimension will make alternate choices. Those choices will affect the outcome of both their lives, and the lives of other people. Those outcomes would determine who/when they had sex. It could also determine at which times in which they had sex that someone got pregnant. Now if your great great great great great great grandfather never got it on with your great great great great great great
grandmother, you aren't gonna exist.
However, EXTREMELY UNLIKELY does not = impossible by any means. Now suppose that in any given alternate dimension, pretjah(on a genetic level) does also exist. However, there is more to an individual than simple genetics(oxymoron since genetics is anything but simple). Personality etc is also part of who we are. That individual personality has been forged by everything that happens to someone, as well as their own personal decisions. So even if world events around alternate pretjah where identical to this world, pretjah
may still be a completely different person, or at least a slightly altered version of the one here. Therefore they are two different people(equally with two different souls) - which negates the heaven/hell problem you spoke of. Of course even then, who's to say that an individual heavens and hells do not exist on each dimension?
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I'm putting this here simply to give a break in this long-ass post. I think it's well needed.
Now I have my own idea about alternate dimensions. Consider that the only reason that matter(as we know it) cannot occupy the exact same space is because of magnetic fields. If you punch a brick wall, the wall itself is not stopping your fist. Rather, the magnetic fields of the atoms(rather their sub-atomic particles) that make up the wall, are stopping the magnetic fields of the atoms that make up your hand. Because of magnet fields,
MATTER NEVER COLLIDES - well at least matter as we know it.
Now take away those magnet fields, or rather what if those magnetic fields could not "see"(for a lack of a better term) each other. Now there is no reason that matter could not exist in the same space. That's an idea that can take getting used to, since we traditionally thought otherwise. But it is, in theory, possible if you could get around the magnetic field problem.
Well as for alternate dimensions, should they exist - I think that they would consist of matter - existing in the same space we do - but out of "phase" with us(for a lack of any real term). Rather suppose that if this matter has anything equivalent to magnetic fields, that they simply don't interact/interface/whatever with our magnetic fields. Same with gravity etc. Therefore a planet(or whatever may be the equivalent) could hit you, and you would pass right thought it completely unaffected and unaware that any such thing just happened.
Now for this matter, and the alternate dimension(s) as a whole - I would not assume that it's physics laws are identical to our own. Perhaps it's equivalent to gravity is weaker/stronger than our own, and perhaps it has no equivalent to gravity. Maybe their are 3(or maybe 15) different "magnetic" poles in another dimensions physics. Perhaps their are physics concepts unimaginable to us because we have no equivalent.
And perhaps the difference between dimensions boils down to their base sub-atomic particles(perhaps broken down smaller than quarks). That (whatever the smallest units are - I'll refer to then as "X"s for the rest of this post) each have different properties, and different combinations there of will also follow different principles(aka physics laws). Perhaps matter as we know it is a result of a combination of particular "X"s. Perhaps some of the "X"s which are part of our version of matter - are also combined with alternate "X"s to form alternate matter. This idea is similar to how elements work. Element 1 combined with element 2 produces a vastly different chemical than element 1 combined with element 3 for example.
This is just my personal theory. But after having read what I wrote, I came to the conclusion that maybe - just maybe - I think way too much.
I guess I have to balance out for those people who think way too little.
[quote=Keeper of the Light™]Further, it doesn't incluse how God could be omnipresence, but not the universe itself.Well perhaps God is the universe, or rather the universe is a part of God, perhaps he created us as a part of himself. I don't feel like going into detail, but that's what I think - perhaps I'm dead wrong though.
I've never heard of this "part throttle" before. Does it just bolt on?