If there’s no free will, there is no righteousness, there is no sin. Punishing people for sins, is punishing them for being as God made them. Which is perverse. Indeed, the whole idea of a judicial system breaks down if there is no free will. It would be ludicrous to try and punish the wind for blowing down someone’s house, but with no free will, what is the justification for punishing someone for knocking down someone else’s house illegally ? They would have no more responsibility for their actions, than the winds do for theirs.
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Only one of the many stupidities of this forum.
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I feel like we’ve had this discussion before, Arrendis. But I’m not entirely sure. I know we’ve hit upon theological points before though
The thing is that there’s another thing an all-powerful God won’t be limited by: logic as we humans understand it.
God knowing what each action or each outcome will be in advance doesn’t mean that you aren’t free to make the choices you will. You absolutely are. You could have made another choice. When a being exists everywhere, at all times, the restrictions of time, space, and the mind are void. He’s not governed by the same laws we are.
You have choices and can freely make them and He’ll know which choices you will make, but you’re free to make another one. He’ll just know that too as He exists everywhen in addition to everywhere.
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There is no free will.
God has in fact ordained and established Mizhara and Arrendis and all Minmatar for some purpose. In the now former religion of Naupliusism, this purpose was believed to be nothing more than to glorify God all the more in their ultimate destruction. Currently, however, I have no strong opinion as to the purpose of the Minmatar; only that it will somehow glorify God in the end.
Then what is the point of anything?
Then how can you criticize anyone?
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In other words, God has not preordained that I shall spend tonight in good company with a fine bottle of cognac, nor was I built specifically for this destiny. But I am me, we are blessed with cognac, and it doesn’t take God to make prophecy come true.
Just because God has created the capacity in us for evil and knows that evil tends to justify and compound itself certainly does not mean that God does not understand the basic trajectory for the universe. There is a Path, and should we as a people move together and we look down upon evil, we shall slowly purify each other of sin in order to create an ever more Heavenly Empire. And, no matter how much evil we do, God has also created in us the capacity to surprise and make our people proud through repentance.
A most strident theological point, Lady Arsia!
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No Free WIll? Then I guess you won’t get mad at me when I throw a custard pie in your face the next time I see you, cause you were pre-destined to eat PIE?
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He just doesn’t want to be held accountable for his actions. I doubt he actually believes there’s no free will.
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This thread got too heavy lol.
Went out with the wife and her sister last night for sister-in-laws birthday and we played bowling and some laser tag, like we were all 12 years old again lol! My wife loves the arcades as much asI do and we whooped a bunch of ass and got tickets and I picked up this prize yo-yo… I’ve not been able to put it down since. Now i’m youtubing yoyo tricks and thinking of upgrading already.
Praise the lord
This speaks to ramifications for humanity’s religious and social constructs only. It has no impact on whether or not the conclusion is inescapable, given the two conditions.
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No, you couldn’t. At all points in the past of that configuration, you were going to make that same choice. All of the things that led up to it were going to be the same. There is nothing that would have influenced you in any way it did not already. You may see other options, but there was no possibility that you would choose them.
It’s a Magician’s Choice, writ large. Multiple roads appear to be offered, but in the end, the guy running the scam controls what you’ll get, every time.
Now there’s a good question for the faithful to consider.
Your god’s awareness is not limited to the ‘basic trajectory’ for the universe, though. He knows the unknowable: the current position, state, and motion of every single piece of matter and energy, perfectly and without error. Clinging to the illusion of free will in such a scenario is desperation, and denial.
Ah, a faith in and of itself. That if you could just know where everything is and what it’s doing, that you will understand the entirety of the universe.
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No, only a statement that under the principles of your faith, your god’s knowledge is not, and cannot be limited to merely ‘basic trajectory’ nonsense, but rather must extend to an intimate awareness of literally everything.
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And if you’d like to learn a little about that faith, you’ll soon learn that the “everything” you’re talking about isn’t really all that much. For what is the sum of Creation that we can see, touch, and evaluate? Simply because God knows everything in all of Creation does not mean he has written your store before it is wrote, He simply has infinite perspective. It gives him a strident advantage, but your decisions are still yours to make.
Just because God can see from all angles does not mean we can abdicate responsibility for our choices and shrug away their weight. It simply means we must approach all our lives beneath the gaze of, if even no other, at least One Great Witness.
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Lack of free will is Sansha doctrine. And I mean, not in claiming absence of free will, but rather enforcing it, turning humans into “space zombies”, flesh drones, mere biological machines serving his own whims.
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Except that’s not the ‘everything’ I’m talking about. It’s the part of ‘everything’ I reference, but that’s only because it’s the bit of your ‘everything’ that I can accept as existing because it can be demonstrated to exist. Under your framework, your god must be intimately aware of, and ultimately responsible for everything. The everything you mean when you say everything. Because all of it was made by him, at his will, exactly the way he wanted it. All of it unfolded according to the principles he established. And before establishing those principles, he knew precisely what that would result in. Which means those results are what he decided they would be. Because he chose the conditions and behaviors that would, inevitably, lead to them.
And no matter how you try to weasel through and avoid that simple construction, you can’t. Yes, he ‘wrote your story’ before it happened, because he decided exactly what conditions would be and what rules their unfolding would follow.
If I build a cannon, and place it in a room whose walls I constructed, at intervals and angles of my own choosing, load it with a projectile and propellant of my own choosing and am perfectly, innately, capable of knowing precisely where that projectile will land after multiple ricochets, wherever I aim it…
Then when I aim that cannon, I am choosing where the projectile lands.
Similarly, if I build a maze, and in it leave myriad subtle cues and markers, scents and sights and sounds that I know will influence the observer going through the maze into turning left or right at specific points… then I have chosen their route, even before they’ve entered.
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Well, that’s kind of what God has done.
And yet many people get lost in the maze or decide not to even try to find their way through. Some choose to go their own way and others follow others instead of the signs. It’s still up to us.
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God is responsible for Creation, Arrendis, not ‘everything’. To us, Creation is ‘everything’. If you, for example, breed a dog that never leaves the homestead, its owner seems to know ‘everything’. That owner may have trained that dog well, known it all its life, and can know much of what that dog does. And yet, can that owner truly know every foot it will place? How it shall always react?
There is no weaseling involved. I would love to know that, whatever my choices, I am always acting in God’s name. That would mean that I could not act against God, or that to sin would be impossible. However, we are told, quite plainly, that both of those are quite possible.
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Except they don’t. They’re not making those choices. Those choices were made for them, before they got there, under the Amarr faith, even if the Amarr faith tries to claim otherwise.
If I know… 100% inerrantly cannot be wrong know that ‘If I do X, Y will happen, Y cannot not happen. And if I do not do X, Y cannot happen’, and I choose to do X?
I am responsible for Y happening. Me. Not the poor schmuck I leave holding the bag and blaming themselves.
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