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If God knows everything, how can there be free will?

Trigger me timbers Batman this guy follows me everywhere.

Your nickname is ?shadow? for now on

There isn't that much posting in this forum, so probably everyone who posts here is reading all of your posts here.

I think he meant the underage fiance thing, maybe he felt concerned you were talking about it on a public forum.
 
Do you have children?

Have you allowed them to make mistakes?

No?

Come back and talk when you have had them.

I don't have kids, and probably never will due to personal choices. Even if I had children, I can't effectively "allow" them to do anything, they are free of their own volition to a certain extent and can ignore what I tell them to do, but that doesn't translate to "Free will", which implies 100% ability to make decisions and actions as you see fit in life. Assuming the pretext that an all knowing, all seeing creator of the universe exists, no being on this earth has any choice or say in what happens.
 
LaVeyan Satanists don't even believe in a literal, anthropomorphic deity answering to the name of 'Satan', rather, its used as an abstraction, to denote the carnal, the force in man/womankind, the hedonistic and sensual, the right to wield power and be one's own god. Why take direction from an invisible entity reputed to exist, that could just as well be the product of primitive people's limited understanding of the world (not saying WE understand it fully, but certainly better than middle eastern tribesmen of a couple of thousand years past), hallucinations as a result of meditative ecstasy on the parts of monks, saints, nuns and other ascetics of varying religions.

ESPECIALLY if the orders from on high are 'don't be a bastard', when you don't intend on being one in the first place. I don't need someone else to tell me not to go out and punch a little old lady in the face, because its something I wouldn't do to begin with.
 
I don't need someone else to tell me not to go out and punch a little old lady in the face, because its something I wouldn't do to begin with.

I'm pretty sure in every religion there is a roundabout way of saying, "Thou shall not puncheth a little old lady in thy face". However the Abrahamic religions exalt the bastardized as something holy.
 
If there is a God that judges us and is above our understanding then the only thing that makes sense is universalism where we will all eventually find redemption no matter what sins we have committed in this life. He has left us with an incredibly confusing mess to follow for judgement. The books of every religion are a joke if a higher being influenced them especially those of the Abrahamic religions where God is portrayed as a tyrant.
 
Yeah, for a god of infinite compassion and mercy, the abrahamic god comes off as a total fucking psychotic cunt. Lets see....genocide (multiple counts of multiple tribes). Child-killing, and on a massive scale close enough to genocide itself to be a bit questionable whether to include that or not, sending one of his own angels to butcher the firstborn children of egypt. Child killer, who, even though omnipotent, allegedly, hasn't the fucking stones to go and do his dirty work himself, but has to go and get one of his angels to do the murdering for him.

Commanding murders (stoning this that and the other kind he doesn't like), whilst at the same time giving one of the ten commandments as 'thou shalt not kill', being known as 'your god, who is a jealous god', and at the same time, demanding 'thou shalt not covet'

Seems pretty willing to go by 'do as I fucking tell you, or I'll rip your arms and legs off and in my infinite love and mercy, beat you to death with them, then lovingly send you to burn in searing flames and torment for all eternity my child, if you dare do as I do, rather than obeying me and doing as I tell you''

Hypocrite, liar, infinitely proud, whilst condeming the proud as sinners, to lovingly burn screaming in hell because he is merciful like that. Genocidal, a babykiller, killing others who were judged righteous, (Lot's wife) just for turning and looking at the city he destroyed as they fled (turned into pillar of salt...sounds like magic to me. From the same fucker as said 'thou shalt suffer not a witch to live')

Sounds majorly insecure, about threats to his power-base, this so called god, is a fucking monster, no better than Moloch. Even demanded one of his own faithful offer his own son (Isaac) as a burnt sacrifice, only to can it at the last minute, just to see how devoted his father was. Jesus fucking christ (so to speak)....WORSHIP this mad bastard? as far as I can tell he has done nothing worthy of worship. I for one hope the reason for his jealousy and fear of other deities if this fucker exists, is because there are some and he is caught in a power struggle and has to defend his territory on a theological level against of his kind, who might not be such fucking bastards.
 
Within the Kabbalistic tradition at least, the "Old Testament God" is totally explained within the context of a God of infinite compassion. The psychotic cuntiness is representative of the harsher aspects of the infinite that is God. If God is everything, then of course a part of God is also a psychotic cunt. Interpreted as primarily metaphorical and only possibly historical, the stories contained within the Torah, Talmud, and Bible are allegorical to creation as the expression of the seven lights of God, or the lower seven of ten sefirat on the tree of life. Certain characters are direct expressions and metaphors for certain sefirat, stories are allegories for the processes experienced both within the self and without during evolution, growth, and change, etc. etc. The stories of God being a dick are seen, from an esoteric standpoint, as representative of the harsher aspects of God, and thus illustrative of the processes surrounding each.

I for one am glad the most treasured texts of the traditions are inclusive and integral enough to include the tyrant. Otherwise, what kind of holy book are they?
 
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I see your point. Makes me think of the lovecraftian Azathoth, the blind idiot god, and a decidedly less than pleasant entity. And certainly not something anyone (at least, nothing without tentacles for eyesockets, wriggling plant tendrils and a a screaming beak for an anus, covered in severed, bleeding human faces) would wish to worship.

Whats next...jesus as Nyarlathotep?=D
 
I've often wondered about the existence of free will, and it has been one of my most common existential questions. I think that there both is and isn't free will simultaneously. How so? From within our experience as individuals, there is free will. However, when looking at it from outside of our own experience, our decisions at the end of the day are caused by neurobiological processes. Thus, these neurobiological processes are really what is guiding our decisions as individuals. These processes are predetermined due to the way that the body of each individual functions and how each individual cooperates with other individuals (or doesn't), making humanity and the world as a whole including animal life some sort of mass organism where effectively each individual is like a cell in a greater organism. Therefore, we don't as individuals have any more free will than a single cell has free will within our own body. Though, within our experience we absolutely do have free will. Outside of it, we do not. Though, both realities are equally true simultaneously. This has been my resolve to this existential question, and I finally feel like it makes sense after coming to this conclusion. Although, the presence or absence of free will has been something that previous to this resolve, I spent a good bit of time going back and forth on.
 
Perhaps these same neurobiological processes and architecture is the hardware needed for that free will to be manifested?

The human brain operates, according to some reading I have done about consciousness, on a fine line between order and chaos, a quasi-chaotic state being necessary as I understand things for consciousness to exist. If the brain operated on a basis of purely ordered neuron firing, then it would be firing in synchrony, and essentially sending and processing the same data, nothing would get done, and there would be no emergent phenomenon of consciousness.

Just look at seizure activity for example, epileptic brain activity involves parts, or the whole of the brain firing synchronously, such as the typical spike-and-wave discharges during many types of seizure. Consciousness is either shut down entirely or seriously impaired, and no matter what it is impaired in some respect.

Consciousness requires that the circuits of the brain and their synaptic pathways fire in certain ways, so in this, there is order, but the neurotransmission must be dynamically variable and thus there essentially, needs to be a finely-tuned orderly chaos. If that makes sense.

And it appears, that there is a critical threshold for this to take place within. Too ordered, and consciousness shuts down, too chaotic and random and the organism would be unable to operate. Some papers I have read support this, speaking of this criticality of chaos, although I paraphrase. Makes me think of a nuclear reactor. There must be a sustained chain reaction, which requires that the reactor be maintained in a state of criticality, but at the same time, the moderator rods must be in place, to absorb excess neutron flux, because if the reactor is not both maintained at criticality AND the chain reaction controlled and moderated then you get a runaway and potentially even a core meltdown.
 
Doesn't the act of forcing humans to have freewill mean that we really don't?
 
An omniscient god and free will are totally contradictory.
 
An omniscient god and free will are totally contradictory.

Choose A or B.

I set up a reality that has two choices. That is to say I set up a reality we both accept in terms of a question rather than an answer. Whether you choose A or B doesn't matter and I have omniscient knowledge that claims there is no C in the reality of the question. Now that we both know the reality of the question and all its possibilities, it is left up to you to decide within the context of my defined reality.
 
^Demonstrating the plausability of free will and omniscience still doesn't go far towards explaining how it is possible that we could even have free will in the universe we exist in.
 
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Couldn't both exist? Maybe god just knows what you will choose of your own free will, and what you'll choose in the future. But it doesn't mean you didn't make those choices when those moments happened, and that you won't make the future choices, too. At any given point in your life, because of many factors, you will make a particular choice. But that doesn't mean you weren't making it.
 
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^Demonstrating the plausability of free will and omniscience still doesn't go far towards explaining how it is possible that we could even have free will in the universe we exist in.

If reality is a question rather than an answer that explains it. Just that we inhabit a universe, where, our brains have a finite number of words which we then use to reason out an action. We can only think and reason as far as we can in the description of any action. However it simply comes down to will I move this paperclip or not? In a universe of objects we are driven to make choices, which fruit do I plant, which grain do I sow, which animals do I eat, do I procreate, do I walk from A to B, these are questions within a context of reality that asks you to constantly be thinking about determinations. I chose to eat the durian fruit despite all the evidence saying that I should not, that my nose would determine whether or not the decision is worth it. In that the smell is courting reason and I have no ability in the way my brain registers smells I can still decide to take the time to crack it open and hold my nose and wait for the results from my tongue. Our brain is very executive function latent.
 
Couldn't both exist? Maybe god just knows what you will choose of your own free will, and what you'll choose in the future. But it doesn't mean you didn't make those choices when those moments happened, and that you won't make the future choices, too. At any given point in your life, because of many factors, you will make a particular choice. But that doesn't mean you weren't making it.

If it's predetermined, it's not free will, only an illusion bof free will imo. If it's truly free will, no one would be able to know 100 percent what someone will do.
 
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