“Keep going, I’m still not convinced..”
How 'bout this. I’ll wait a while before i commit (i troll these days having learned that forum debate is fruitless), and meanwhile, you might end up familiarizing yourself with the formal arguments of determinism.
So “evil” is whatever harms humanity.
Sounds…..inter-subjective. Convenient.
Earthquakes are now…”evil.”
And who is to blame?
Humans…..and their rejection of god’s will….
Free-will in the bible is a warning.
Whatever free-will you have, individual, sacrifice it to the collective, i.e., god.
All suffering is an evil on some living being.
Notice the self-deprecating, self-hatred being expressed.
Shame is weaponized by Judaism….and adopted by Islam and christian cucks.
Notice the self-deprecating, self-hatred being expressed.
Shame is weaponized by Judaism….and adopted by Islam and christian cucks.On the other side…..the atheistic version…..denial of personal agency, so as to attain salvation without having to do a thing…..without self-repression.
From shameful or shameless….the two sides of Arahamic nihilism.
So feeling guilty or shame for causing another living being to suffer is “self hatred”? I don’t see that. I see that as simply not doing to others what you would not want done to yourself. If you love and care for yourself, then you will wish no more harm on others than you do on yourself.
How about I don’t? How about I familiarise myself with your arguments.
You can cherry pick from determinism, and I can deal with them one at a time. Otherwise, the best course of action would be extensive reading and creating a new topic with my thoughts on the subject, but I’m not here to discuss the validity of determinism, not yet at least, I’m here to analyse your statements and evaluate the logic you present, and if I disagree, present my own.
Does that make sense?
“Why is it assumed that He is directing everything?”
Because you can’t build a clock without knowing exactly how it will work. If it works as it should and you don’t stop it, you are then allowing it to work as it does and are fully responsible for it.
Now, you may fail to grasp this because you are reverse-anthropomorphizing: you say that a watch maker will build a watch and intend it to work a certain way but he has no control over the environment in which it works… so he can’t be sure about what it will do. Therefore, god, a creator like the watch maker, is in the same circumstances, you argue.
No. God created everything, including the environments and forces that would affect the watch and its functioning.
The Abrahamic feels ashamed for being alive…for existing…..he is the source of ‘evil’ by existing.
Why?
Because to continue to live is to harm another life….
Ouroboros….
On the other side of the same coin, Epimythean…..after the fact, claiming to feel no shame….no guilt…because all is determined and we are all spectators of our own lives.
There is no shame because nothing they do is a mistake…..or due to a bad judgment call….it is all inevitable.
Fatalism.
God’s will is replaced by absolute cosmic order. - Determinism.
And they achieve this end through logos….in the way they define words….
They ALWAYS begin with the METAphysical….never the physical; never the experienced act….the ideal….a Platonic ideal - god or will…..god’s will or simply will.
That’s stupid. People feel shame for harming others, not for themselves being alive. Where are you getting this “self hatred” nonsense from? It’s idiotic to think people who have conscience are “self hating.”
Once again, an inorganic object used as a poor example. The clock does not evolve further hands and hour indicators all by itself. The clock does not suddenly decide to run backwards, to simply find out what would happen.
I agree! But why does that invalidate the assumption of free will?
If God knows what will happen and cannot be wrong or fooled, then the future is pre-determined. If the future is pre-determined, then we do not have free will. “Determinism” is the opposite of “free will”.
You seem to picture God as the director of a movie. Have you ever run “Conway’s game of life” on a computer? Did Conway anticipate every outcome possible? No, he laid down the rules and off it goes.
So much presumption about God.. that’s a big leap to base an argument upon..
I mean, if you want to believe that God knows all, including the future, then you basically sacrifice “free will”. And if God knows ahead that you will do wrong and doesn’t do anything to prevent it, then God knowingly let evil happen. If you don’t think God knows all, then that’s fine so long as you also believe that God is not omnipotent. If God knows all, then God is not benevolent if evil occurs.
And if you want to say that anything is possible with God, then you leave open the door that God could have made a world with both free will and no suffering.
I don’t believe that God knows the future. I believe, personally, that even God himself is subject to one single thing, something everything in the entire Universe is subject to. Something that cannot be altered or manipulated, even by God.
Time.
OK. So you don’t believe God is all knowing (omniscient) and you don’t believe God is benevolent. However, if a person doesn’t believe in God, they will be eternally punished, is that correct?
No Gary, all that is exactly what I don’t believe. I believe that God *is* all knowing, but has no control over time, and therefore cannot divine the future.
The person not believing in God.. you haven’t read the topics I’ve posted on here, what you just stated is also the exact opposite of what I believe.
How can God be all knowing if he doesn’t know the future of what will happen in the universe he designed? And if God has no control over time, then God is not omnipotent.
God is omnipotent over all of His creations. However, he didn’t create time. Time, like the infinite void, logically existed before even God.
“If God knows what will happen and cannot be wrong or fooled, then the future is pre-determined.”
That’s a non-sequitor, but you’re on the right track, G. Knowledge of something doesn’t entail making it happen. In god’s case, it does, but only because this is a special case where the future is predetermined anyway if god exists by nature of his nature. I just mean in general; i can know the car will run out of gas but not determine that it does.
The ‘being wrong’ thing is munition against the freewill + God argument. It’s funny because where religious folks most think they will have freewill (as creatures made by a god), they would, in fact, have it the least.
But yeah, you got the idea. So far, there are two reasons why there can be no freewill if god exists. The clock-designer problem and the omniscience problem: if god knows you are going to fart in five minutes, you are not free to not fart. If you were, and did, it would mean that god was wrong about what he thought would happen. A god can’t be wrong. Ergo, freewill does not exist.