Originally posted by: jhu
Originally posted by: xirtam
Originally posted by: jhu
Originally posted by: xirtam
Originally posted by: jhu
Originally posted by: Zysoclaplem
If you died, and found out God was sending you to hell, would you join in Satan's war against God? Or would your claims of faith during life hold true after death? I hear it's hot down there.
that makes absolutely no sense. why is there even the possibility of a war with god? if god is omnipotent, he can just snap his fingers and stop any onslaught at the source.
He could, yet he doesn't, which must mean that the "war with God" is serving a purpose, namely allowing for individual freedom and meaningful choices.
ah, the grand illusion of choice...
Just because it's subjective doesn't mean it's an illusion. Even if everything is objectively predetermined, that predetermination doesn't have to effect our perception of human freedom, just because our choices seem real enough and effective enough to us from our own perspective.
But that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the topic at hand.
if everything is predetermined, our own perception of freedom is an illusion regardless of how we see it. i can stick electrodes in your brain and make you do the hokey pokey (or horizontal mambo, or whatever), yet you'd still think that you wanted and intended to do the hokey pokey.
now, if i were to post something on the topic at hand, i wouldn't be adhering to the standards of off topic now would i?
Well, assuming that we have the freedom to discuss off topic things in off topic threads, derailing the off topic with a new one, then no, you wouldn't be.
Perhaps there are merely different tiers of reality, and our version of reality only makes sense to us because of our own limitations... the very limitations which give us our freedom. Namely, the time/space limitation to which God is not subjected. Also, there's a difference between "predetermined" and "forced," as God's design seems to be in line most of the time with man's "illusion", if you want to call it that, of freedom. I can know that 2+2=4, for example, without explicitly making it so. And I can know that the sum will be 4 tomorrow, and I know that it was 4 yesterday, but my knowledge has absolutely no correlation to that fact. As the author of the rules that govern the universe, God would know all of our choices that we'd make under the guise of freedom, so in that sense, everything would be predetermined. But we still make a lot of choices on a daily basis without the imminent awareness that it's all determined, and thus, to the majority of humanity, our choices are free. There really isn't much difference between the illusion of freedom and true freedom in that case, unless you're assuming that God has a more active hand in inserting electrodes in our brains and making us do the hokey pokey. But in the sense that true objective freedom doesn't exist, I suppose I can buy into the idea of it being a "grand illusion," although it's a necessary one. By that standard, you'd have to agree that God doesn't have freedom either. In fact, we have more freedom than God, because freedom is based on our limitations, which God doesn't have. He can see everything that's going to happen (omniscience), and he's unchanging (immutable). With God, everything is set in stone. So perhaps this "illusion" of freedom is really the whole point of this human existence, because the events in our lives do appear to change us and we really seem to be able to make our own decisions on a daily basis with consequences that directly correlate to those decisions. Of course, even if freedom is illusory, it's the only perspective we have. We are condemned to be free, and therefore might as well live as though we have freedom.