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I spent awhile writing this as a response to a thread where people are probably only gonna post or read one liners so I'm just gonna post this as a blog because I'm evil.
recent realizations of mine.
1: All the people I've met so far in my life are on some level interesting and perhaps on another,if not the same, good natured.
2: Ok so if you imagine human beings as a program, free will seems a lot simpler. It's essentially boils down to a to a 50 50 percent chance of either more immediate short term, to quasi longterm, good being done than bad(I say short to mid long because its had for us to bear the blame for events we could have never possibly imagined happening as a result of our actions, like your uncle dying because a year ago you left a banana peel in his basement and he just now slipped on it) as opposed to the alternative just as likely possibility of more short to quasi long term bad happening than good.
So imagine your selling a computer that can shut down or fuck up at any second, who would buy that computer? More so, who would design it? He'd have to either be a pretty shitty builder or he'd he'd have to have some ulterior potentially malicious motive for creating the shitty laptop(yeah its a laptop now).
Further more, no matter how badly the shitty laptop fucks up, you cant exactly say its the laptops fault, after all it was made that way(hurray for a guilt free scorpion!). So whatever the shitty laptop does(by the way lets just say for one crazy second that the designer is in fact an all powerful being for whom a hundred years may seem a second, so the laptop fucking up in terms of shutting down(although I assure you there are plenty of other ways this particular laptop can fuck up) although being a most certain inevitability may take a lifetime to occur, leaving the shitty laptop a good deal of time to both fuck up and do tidbits of good)(forgive my excess use of brackets within brackets) be it good or bad, both outcomes of the laptops deeds can be attributed as either the fault or success of the designer(you can also factor in perception and grand scheme/plan if you want but I'm to lazy).
Basically, if you designed something down to the last decimal, how is its crimes not yours? God is not a parent, he is a creator, he has absolute control over the making of his creations. The whole thought is far from original, I know, just the laptop thing was a funny way for me to look at it all and it was a pleasant realization on the whole( it to me while I was walking my dog). Even free will can be seen as an intelligent but random simulator with various degrees of risk vs reward per decision, also the system lacks any kind of concrete method of foresight making the state of it even more deplorable as far as intelligent designs go.
So why would god give us faulty free will? Well I would imagine that he fancied his gift too powerful so he limited it somewhat, all so that his creations would still love him and regard him as unknowable/perfect purely because he had decided Not to give them the capacity to comprehend/know him. He refuses to let his creations free, even now they/we are expected to rely on him for guidance because we are imperfect and always will be just as he intended(meanwhile god laughs an evil laugh atop mount terror, it reaches the ears of every man or woman but not one actually hears its fowl ring).
or maybe ... god isn't real, which is much lamer than imagining him with a big curly stache, a cape and an evil lair.(also would be the lamest realization ever)
Oh and anyone who is either highly religious or dislikes extreme theory craft please disregard anything I've said and I'm sorry if I've caused you offence.
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As an addendum to #1, evil is created in our minds by movies, television and other forms of mass media.
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On September 28 2011 08:35 HowitZer wrote:
As an addendum to #1, evil is created in our minds by movies, television and other forms of mass media.
I disagree, the mass media had to get the evil from somewhere.
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I don't really understand your point but I'll give a quick run down of how I think it works very generally in Christianity.
God made humans with free will knowing that they could turn evil because if they turn good it means so much more. For example Angels are beings created by God without free will for the purpose of serving him, but that's kinda boring because they have no choice about it anyway, hence he made humans.
Your idea that you can have free will but not be at fault for your actions I think is a contradiction. There's two distinct ideas about how the world works;
1. We have free will and while everyone is put in different situations because of genetics/environmental situations, we are all ultimately responsible for our actions. That is in the exact same situation with the exact same 'everything' two different humans would make two different decisions based on their own unique bias of good or evil.
2. Everything is determined by factors and ultimately no one is responsible but just a victim or hero of their circumstances. In this idea Mother Teresa would have done the exact same thing as Hitler if their souls were switched but everything else was exactly the same.
Strangely enough there's a large branch of secular Christianity that actually follows the second idea, and then you have militant atheists who are against determinism because of the true randomness that exists at the quantum level so it's all pretty messy.
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Well my argument is simple, if you have absolute control over a design. Its faults are a translation of your mistakes, also there are things we can do that are considered fundamentally wrong(eg murder rape) generally its hard to factor moral relativism in the face of such cruelty. Also why cant the two souls be switched? Either way that point is irrelevant, the actions of the individual wouldnt change the fundamental design, they still had the potential to fuck up, they just didn't or vice versa.
btw what was the contradiction?
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Your point only makes sense if free will doesn't exist. If free will does exist God is only responsible for giving humans free will, however humans are responsible for their actions.
There's a huge difference between making something that fucks up and making something with the potential to fuck up.
Consider a person who makes knives. Sometimes knives will hurt people, even if you never originally design them to do that. Does that mean you don't make knives? No, they're essential tools to getting stuff done. All you can do is instruct people as best you can and hope people makes smart decisions when using them.
In the same way free will is a tool and everyone has the ability to use it as they wish. Just because beyond all certainty it will be used to create pain doesn't explicitly make God responsible for that pain.
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This has always confused me. If its the "soul" of the person who makes them evil, didn't God create the soul, thus making an evil person. This means that they didn't have free will because they were stuck with an evil "soul". Oh religion, how you befuddle me 
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Well to make matters worse Christian theology teaches that whether your actions or beliefs are good or bad is actually irrelevant to how you will be judged by God when you die, all that actually matters is whether you 'believe' Jesus died for you.
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On September 28 2011 09:20 AndyJay wrote:
Your point only makes sense if free will doesn't exist. If free will does exist God is only responsible for giving humans free will, however humans are responsible for their actions.
There's a huge difference between making something that fucks up and making something with the potential to fuck up.
Consider a person who makes knives. Sometimes knives will hurt people, even if you never originally design them to do that. Does that mean you don't make knives? No, they're essential tools to getting stuff done. All you can do is instruct people as best you can and hope people makes smart decisions when using them.
In the same way free will is a tool and everyone has the ability to use it as they wish. Just because beyond all certainty it will be used to create pain doesn't explicitly make God responsible for that pain.
Strong point, Theres just on thing you haven't accounted for, free will is flawed, decisions are initially driven by instinct, from then on its a process of learning and trial and error until one achieves what could potentially be a strong personality forged from the ramifications of those decisions and the ramifications of other individuals decisions, if your the knife maker, and you sell a dull knife, thats your fault, you are expected to perfect your craft, if your blade is dull every time it doesn't cut bread or sail though butter thats not the bearers fault, its yours. If you equipped decision makers with the foresight to know the results of their actions or the ability to know definitively weather or not their decisions are right, then yes you would done everything you could for the decision makers, but you haven't, you've tied their arms and legs, dropped them into a deep dark cave and given them a handful of matches. That situation is some shoddy workmanship in my opinion.
Also free will is more like the essence of humanity as opposed to a tool of theirs, therefore any constraints on a free will is a direct constraint on humanity.
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Well it makes a sort of sense in Christianity because God's goal isn't for everyone to be happy and pain free on earth. His goal is to create beings that meaningfully serve him. Supposedly putting billions of them through huge amounts of pain to achieve that goal is something God saw coming and deemed ok.
I guess even completely un-religious people recognise the same fact and accept it when they decide to have children. Obviously not with the same end goal, but that existence with pain is better than no existence at all.
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EPT
