Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Yes you do choose for yourselves but the choices are governed by circumstances outside of your control. Perhaps you are thinking in terms of not obeying traffic rules or say blowing your entire salary on a huge end of month party and being broke the rest of the month?
Traffic laws are the external influences you have no say in and yes you can choose to ignore them. You already know the potential outcome of say speeding or running a red light. You are either going to have an accident or at least get a fine from a camera. If you speed, you are at a higher risk of doing injury to yourself or others. In both these scenarios, traffic lights and speed limits are determined by other factors such as urban planning or roads that are not safe to travel at high speeds or where kids may be in the road. These are all external influences that force you to conform to said laws that you personally have no control over. Ignoring them and choosing to be reckless by ignoring them is stupid and we all know that.
If you blow your entire salary at the end of the month on a big party and will be broke till the end of the next month, that kinda already stands to reason. You could see this as having freewill but a decision like this already has known outcomes so the choice you make is irresponsible and thus is not indicative of freewill. Not paying your rent, utilities etc, and not having money for food are known factors outside of your control.
In both these examples, you really are forced to abide by the predetermined outcomes that present themselves so this would not be an example of freewill. And of course, how you got here to owning a vehicle, having a job, all circumstances you had no influence over.
This is why the Calvin doctrine of predestination is probably the closest to what we observe in reality. Postulating an elect, this negates the questions of what about them and them when asking what about hell and what about if they never heard etc. I am not saying that it is correct but is closer than Arminianism which espouses the freewill doctrine. Quite ironic that Arminius was a student of Calvin.
So basically, even in the most secular sense, freewill does not exist therefore it has no bearing on any type of eternal destiny.
When you strip away the veneers, the philosophy of life is
"Life's a female dog and then you die" or you can adopt this one.
Life's a journey, enjoy the ride.
"predetermined" as our lives are mapped out for us?
"predetermined" as our lives are mapped out for us?
Yes, it would appear that way but not mapped out as you suggest. This is where we enter the realm of supposition.
If you were able to travel back in time and retain knowledge of what transpired in your life, you would be able to make choices that would affect your continuum, come back to now and live in an alternate outcome. Would you be aware of the new outcome as opposed to the other one you left from initially? Gets goofy no?
It is only by retrospective examination that this concept of predetermination presents itself and opens a Pandora's box of what ifs.
An example here from my perspective is, in '82 I got involved with drugs (MJ mainly) and that finally led to me meeting my wife. The reason I started drugs, I was involved in a car accident, we rolled a car on a straight dirt road at 60km/h and I was in the back seat w/o a seat belt. At the time I was in a menial door to door salesman job and the decision for us to be where we were was outside of my control. I had no medical insurance and suffered severe back pain. MJ magically fixed all that but then I got lost in the drug culture. Eventually I was flat broke, unemployed and had to come home to another town where my parents lived, got a job thanks to my dad who was in recruitment and my late wife worked in the same department I ended up in. It is more detailed than that but this shows how the time line of this part of my life was predetermined.
I have done this retrospection back to my place of birth and realised had I made just one different choice, I would never had met my wife, my kids would never have been born. Even my wife's employment was chance as she came from a town 1000km south and I from a town >1000km north and we ended up in the same town, same employer and same department for mostly chance reasons. She never planned to stay here as this was her 1st job post college thanks to her cousin who organised the job for her and was only trying to get an employer on her resume. I was not the first guy to ask her to marry, she sad no to the other guy. We came from two very different cultures yet it happened.
Thus all your choices are determined by factors outside your control.
The reason you don't like reading the Bible and do not understand it is because you have yet to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
No religious person has said you need to be special or accept Christ to read the bible. The bible is for everyone to read. Why do you think you will find a bible in every hotel room across the country?
I was told the bible should not be read like one reads a novel. You can jump around and read passages that you understand. Take the easy ones first. It would help if you had a bible study group to join. Get a bible that has up to date language of today so it is more familiar to you. Study bibles are good since they explain things.
Yes, it would appear that way but not mapped out as you suggest. This is where we enter the realm of supposition.
If you were able to travel back in time and retain knowledge of what transpired in your life, you would be able to make choices that would affect your continuum, come back to now and live in an alternate outcome. Would you be aware of the new outcome as opposed to the other one you left from initially? Gets goofy no?
It is only by retrospective examination that this concept of predetermination presents itself and opens a Pandora's box of what ifs.
An example here from my perspective is, in '82 I got involved with drugs (MJ mainly) and that finally led to me meeting my wife. The reason I started drugs, I was involved in a car accident, we rolled a car on a straight dirt road at 60km/h and I was in the back seat w/o a seat belt. At the time I was in a menial door to door salesman job and the decision for us to be where we were was outside of my control. I had no medical insurance and suffered severe back pain. MJ magically fixed all that but then I got lost in the drug culture. Eventually I was flat broke, unemployed and had to come home to another town where my parents lived, got a job thanks to my dad who was in recruitment and my late wife worked in the same department I ended up in. It is more detailed than that but this shows how the time line of this part of my life was predetermined.
I have done this retrospection back to my place of birth and realised had I made just one different choice, I would never had met my wife, my kids would never have been born. Even my wife's employment was chance as she came from a town 1000km south and I from a town >1000km north and we ended up in the same town, same employer and same department for mostly chance reasons. She never planned to stay here as this was her 1st job post college thanks to her cousin who organised the job for her and was only trying to get an employer on her resume. I was not the first guy to ask her to marry, she sad no to the other guy. We came from two very different cultures yet it happened.
Thus all your choices are determined by factors outside your control.
Some things are outside our control, some things. But as with your wife, she could have chosen someone else, no one made her choose you. I'm sorry you feel the way you do about God but you don't have correct knowledge about him. I hope you gain it and are able to be there when your wife is resurrected.
Some things are outside our control, some things. But as with your wife, she could have chosen someone else, no one made her choose you. I'm sorry you feel the way you do about God but you don't have correct knowledge about him. I hope you gain it and are able to be there when your wife is resurrected.
All things are outside our control. It is just hard to accept this initially.
God is not real except in your head. There is no resurrection, this is vain hope based solely on the suppositions of man. I will never see my wife again as she is now dead, finito, game over. The only place she now exists are in photographs of her and our memories of her. That too will end as time passes.
All things are outside our control. It is just hard to accept this initially.
God is not real except in your head. There is no resurrection, this is vain hope based solely on the suppositions of man. I will never see my wife again as she is now dead, finito, game over. The only place she now exists are in photographs of her and our memories of her. That too will end as time passes.
As a fellow widower I can also suggest, gently (and you're free to disagree, of course, as I am six years on and my grief is not fresh) but ... that you will not see her again is inherently sad only if you decide that it is. Or at least it is no more sad than the totality of the human condition arguably is. I am well content that my late wife lives in my memories, even if those memories will die with me. And that she lives in the memories, however incidental and less attached, of friends and coworkers and fellow students and teachers and extended family and others that she influenced throughout her life, as evidenced by the number of them that took the trouble to come out of the woodwork and attend her funeral. All of this is evidence that she loved and was loved and had a positive impact on her world, even in the diminished state of illness with which much of her adult life was occupied. Is this somehow diminished by the fact that her influence ends at the grave of the last person to have known her? I think not. (And technically, her influence is "eternal"anyway in that the impact she had on the people she touched, then have different impacts on others including those of subsequent generations).
And the good thing about this is that her life counted ... not in some other mythical or hoped for existence but in the one life that she empirically HAD.
As for free will and causal chains and all that, I am far more interested in what each of us does with what life presents to us in each moment than in how much choice we did or didn't have to get to that point. We have just a tiny bit of free will, I believe, and that is the 2 or 3 choices that are available in each decision we make. If we are able to think outside the box, maybe we have an extra choice now and then to take also. We make these choices with imperfect knowledge, and varying degrees of wisdom and vision, and within the constraints of our culture and experience and the (mis)interpretations we put upon those, but we make them just the same. I suspect it's both all the free will we really need, and all the free will that we can actually handle.
Why is the book even called Holy Book if it contains filth and very disturbing graphic material? I would have to use white out and take out all of the bad parts in order for it to be a " holy book." I don't care much about most of the characters. A lot of them are just old, boring, but have sex with their daughters and other family members. Great book this is.
You are suffering from two psychological disorders, "critical thinking" and "intelligence." They generally don't go well with religious faith...
been to a christian church since age 6 but stopped early 20's, now I'm in late 20s, but I only went because I was taught to go, even after 18 I went because I was so used to it and I wanted to see my friends but I didn't really care much about what they preached about, sometimes I would leave the church with a friend and walk around the block to the corner store, but the main reasons why I didn't like reading the bible is because it's in a language I don't care for or understand even though it's the English version, "thou shall not, " etc... and I don't have time trying to figure out riddles, trying to interpret the bible, different words can be interpreted different ways, it should just be straight forward. It has a lot of disturbing stories ranging from incest, animal sacrifice, to violence like David and Goliath. Heard the story many times as a kid and pictures were shown on my bible school lesson for teens of the story but what they missed was the chopping of the head. Why is the book even called Holy Book if it contains filth and very disturbing graphic material? I would have to use white out and take out all of the bad parts in order for it to be a " holy book." I don't care much about most of the characters. A lot of them are just old, boring, but have sex with their daughters and other family members. Great book this is.
Somehow, my teachings omitted stories about these men who have sex with their daughters and other family members. Who did these acts? Please tell.
Somehow, my teachings omitted stories about these men who have sex with their daughters and other family members. Who did these acts? Please tell.
Lot supposedly had sex with his two daughters following their families escape from Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:32-35).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
