Thoughts on Organized Religion

a reply to: Ignatian

od didnt create Adam and Eve to specifically disobey Him. It was their choice, their free will.

You mean, He didn't know how it would turn out?

Because if he did, and he still created them that way, how does that differ from creating them 'to specifically disobey Him'?

I say again, we're not puppets on strings.

I didn't say we were. Puppets imply a Puppeteer. That's not my way of looking at things.

You think we are... not ultimately responsible or our actions?

Why should we not be? They are our actions. The fact that we are essentially automatons does not dissociate us from our causal relationship to them.

Automaton=puppet on a string.

So, any action you take is essentially not of your doing? Because you have no free will? lol

Tell that to a judge, see how far that gets ya.

a reply to: Astyanax

a reply to: Ignatian

We are automatons in the sense that all our actions are responses to external stimuli, but there's no evidence that anybody is deciding what stimulus to apply. They are the result of matter obeying the laws of physics, and a good deal of randomness is involved at a fundamental level. How we 'choose' to respond is always a result of the three factors I mentioned earlier.

There is plenty of evidence to show that we act before we consciously think. Our conscious 'decisions' appear more like post hoc rationalizations when this evidence is considered.

It is true that legal systems around the world are predicated upon the concept of free will. As science makes it ever more clear that free will is an illusion, this will become an area of great difficulty; we will have to adjust our concept of responsibility. Some legal experts, such as this guy, are already thinking hard about this. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall, but here is the abstract:

While the law acknowledges special circumstances that may reduce an individual's criminal responsibility, the various defenses of excuse, including coercion and compulsion, often elicit a range of societal responses. The compulsion defense, affirmed by individuals in extreme circumstances or states of mind, is a vague legal concept because it is not a uniformly accepted legal term. The terms duress and necessity are more commonly used to indicate the affirmative compulsion defenses but are not synonymous and distinguished with respect to the source of the external threat of harm (e.g., environment vs man-made.) The issues of freewill, assumed to be fundamental principals in the adjudication of criminal responsibility, are challenged by the advances in neuroscientific research. Specifically, the work of Dr. Benjamin Libet is discussed, among others, as an example of neuroscientific research intended to empirically measure the sequence of an intentional thought and its relationship to consciousness. Such neurobiological explorations underscore the increasing efforts at unlocking the complexities that interface between the human brain and correlating behaviour.

You are really stretching.


I'll go with the 99.999% of the population who believe we have free will. Its obvious, moral, logical and reasonable. Have a good one.

a reply to: Astyanax

a reply to: Ignatian

You are really stretching.

Well, if so, I'm in good company. People who agree with me include Democritus, Hobbes, Hume, Bertrand Russell and the majority of modern philosophers. The science of physics has presented us with a sternly deterministic universe ever since Newton published his principia, and even quantum mechanicians today are determinists,who well understand that the random behavriour they observe among very small things 'decoheres' into causal determinism on a macroscopic scale. Psychiatry today is based largely on the deployment of drugs that variously affect the mental functioning of the patient, and most certainly do influence his decisions. My kid brother stopped getting into fights when he stopped drinking.

I think your population estimate is a bit on the high side. Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims don't go in for free will much, either.

Oh, and neither do Calvinists.

a reply to: Not Authorized


Your OP is absolutely the most condescending and distorted bunch of madness I have seen in a while. Very self absorbed and laced with bigotry.

a reply to: Logarock

self absorbed and laced with bigotry

Bigotry? How so?

a reply to: Not Authorized

"you cannot change people, you can only love them"

I do try and avoid organized religion since its adherents insist on trying to convert me. I try to be polite and tell them I am not interested in this discussion, although it is not so much a discussion as a scripted sales pitch. I really have no obligation to explain my beliefs or to justify them.