We are free to choose, but we are not free of the consequences of choice.
That is the condition of 'freewill'.
Freewill is refuted even by Einstein. A refutation the complexity of which you will not understand without reading or studying what is known in academia as 'on the problem of freewill.'
'Do as you say or else', however, is not an adequate - but rather childish - refutation of freewill. It alludes only to the hindrance of the will by a command to it. However, the will is free not to obey that command. Hence it is free.
So I give assent with my ‘slight’ expansion of your proposition that you are to a limited degree correct, Gnome.
However, having said this, the 'or else' is generally told to you by someone who knows the consequences of that choice or can see it and you cannot . . .
Just kidding with you, Gnome. Nothing wrong with being American. There isn't one Country that I can't ruthlessly attack for political/historical atrocity.
Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her? For her hair is given to her for a covering. (1 Corinthians 11:14-15 NAS)
(P.S. Every painting of Jesus that I have seen has him with long hair.)
VERY VALID POINT THERE, TRISH!
Long hair is by instinct in man frowned upon in man, and man would like-wise frown by instinct upon women with short-hair, or these are at any 'not the norm' even today.
It's a reversal of our instinctual aesthetical values.
Google Darwin while you're at it as well, because you say you want to be enlightened, but when I quoted his accounts of Indian genocide you refuted their validity!
Now you’re starting to scamper around. Wake up my man!!!
I find that if can't you hurt anyone in any way you will be very limited in what you can do. You would have to live in a padded room, so you couldn't even hurt yourself.
In the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded. And then there was something from which everything came.
Just disproving the logic of The Big Bang Theory with my immodest brilliance.
BUT:
On the other ankle . . .
Seems to be as good - or as absurd - an explanation for existence as: in the beginning there was God (or the spirit hovering over the deep), and then there was something from which everything came (and it all came from HIM).
Is that not just as circuitous in its logic?
But if the logic is that something must exist to make something exist, what made God exist?
God is merely the name given to that inexplicable something from which everything came which we may one day know or may never know in so far as it may forever be beyond our powers of comprehension.
But how was there God before nothing in the same way as how was there nothing before God?
Well, the God-heads argue: it is beyond our powers of conception.
So, I take it then, that BECAUSE it is beyond our powers of conception, we should take it then as a given-
That it was God?
That is how I see their argument FOR God. That is how I see their argument – against God.
Since we are touching on the subject of war and it ties in nicely to religion . . .
Sometimes I wonder you know, Trish, if there IS any other way than war, IF peace is really possible - since 'civilization' so-called IS founded on war. As a rule, the more a civilization it is – that is to say, the bigger - the more war it is founded on.
America simply has to go to war to meet its economic requirements or decline and crash economically. As its economy grows it HAS to feed its growing rate of economic consumption/growth. So, totally hypothetically of course (since this isn’t anything in the way of what might really happen or have happened), say for instance they form . . . something in way of an alliance in the middle east by arming a faction with American weapons to secure huge oil contracts by terms of agreement, that alliance ends up using those weapons (whoa, where did our enemies suddenly get those tanks from?) by blowing men, woman and children apart and to pieces with them. . . and the next thing you know . . . what the?- . . .
BOOM! BOOM!
Two planes are flown into the world trade centres ot of the blue by an 'evil man' for 'no reason' whatsoever – except ‘evil’. Or madness.
Rage maybe, but NOT madness.
You arm my enemies, they blow my woman and children and newborn babies and my people to pieces all around me with your weapons while the world turns a blind eye or has an eye elsewhere!?
Ah, but we know, Trish, do we not, that the reasons go, as it were - BEYOND good an evil?
And we become 'aware' of these reasons or that something in the way of a big reason must be behind such desperate measures of men?
Good and evil, a very interesting concept. Since every side thinks it is the good side, and every side is wrong. Just as every religion thinks every other religion is wrong and all are right.
It's a stuggle for growth, influence and power on all sides, and always has been. It's a stuggle to procure reasources; NEEDS. For growth.
It's called WAR
under whatever guise it may go . . .
And eveything lives by consuming eveything else to survive, live and proliferate . . .
In such a world so constituted . . . how can peace be possible?
You find intelligence a massive turn on? Why thank you, Trish.
Don't worry; soon I'm going to hit this thread with a big controversial wisdom-bomb that's going to have everyone running for cover or reaching for arms.
Ah, but you see . . . it's the implications of the question being asked that I'm more interested in. And evidently the more academically minded are on the god-thread.
Because the truth is like a rugby ball and all the members that comprise the two teams are heaped up on top of it.
And you're either in the stadium watching or you're in the game.
Because there IS a rugby ball under there.
But really, I'm interested in the implications of the question: why are all those bodies heaped up on top of THIS one ball?
What is the value of attaining it? What does its ultimate possession reveal? Why is it so important? Who is playing by the rules, who is not? What is it being used for, this game? Certainly everyone in the stadium is paying tickets to watch. What is it a symbol of?
Maybe . . . it's the symbol of a war between good and evil, true and false, right and wrong, real and ideal etc . . .
It's the implications of the question that I'm more interested in. Don't even care about the answer to it. Just the implications of the question.
The ultimate possession of the ball is illusory. The guy holding onto it is never getting out from under that mass, as you have alluded to. So what are the implications of the game? What are the implications of not playing? What are the implications of not watching?
Who is breaking the rules and appearing to win by cheating etc?
Hey, not a bad metaphor. Well, it’s not that good, but it’s not that bad either.
Well, my self-appointed nemesis and refuter of everything in every single post I've ever written, wandering gnome, DOES - because he IS all the things I said he is.
And he IS going to learn that, to whit, he who laughs longest laughs last.
Because either one of two things are infinite: the out-come of the God debate, or Wandering Gnomes stupidity - and I'm not so sure about the outcome
Yes, Gnome, I'm still laughing at your childish arrogance because, at 24 I'm entitled to laugh a little childishly at a man of fifty defending what is false - and calling false what is real.
And, no, Darwin DOESN’T belong with Stephen King, because Darwin was a break-through evolutionary biologist and Stephen King is an American horror novelist. Darwin wrote about some horrors he saw on his voyages that are far more terrifying than anything Stephen King has ever come up with; and Stephen King may develop his characters better, little wise wandering gnome, but Darwin’s ones are REAL.
Oh, and one last difference:
Stephen King stories will always have more popular appeal!
A wise man once said: ‘No one who seeks the truth need fear the wrath of 'God' - only the wrath of men, and their thus compromised constitutions’ – a wise man.
Yes little wandering gnome, it makes a pretty good trench.
Life is like a trench in world war one, little wise wandering gnome, and there are precisely not that many atheists to be found in it for that reason. Not many BRAVE trench-goers.
Sleep tight, little gnome.
Shhh, don't wake up the gnome. Guardian of the troll-bridge: no intelligence may pass!!!
No rational explanations/principles allowed passed the troll-bridge
Shhhh
let us creep by unperceived . . .
shhhh
sleep tight, little gnome
P.s. you are going to love the integrity of Trish, my man! This a woman who knows Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and philosophy and psychology and sociology; she knows her stuff, my little gnome.
WELCOME BACK TRISH!!!
AT LAST ANOTHER BLESSED TENANT OF ACADEMIA!
How’s the BA going Trish? You still going to go for the PHD?
EastbayRay Forum Posts (781)
RE: God, fact or fiction -The Sequel.
I'm sorry falling man, but since Gnome has become the voice of reason, I want to know how America is proudly founded on Christian morality?Because this is a refutation of Trish's ideas on Christian moralities and morality in general.
She believes a reprisal of values is in order.
So do I.
We can’t stick to a system of morality that no one conformed to now or even before, or a constitution that is not TRUE to those values.
For if it is not true to those values either those values or that constitution must be reconstituted.
PERIOD.