Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: subrob1967 I understand this whole free will thing, and he sent Jesus to forgive us of our sins, but I just don't buy it. Okay, so what don't you buy? The free will thing? Or one of the various myriad claims made about, or purportedly by, Jesus? And, do you actually understand the free will thing? I mean, if your nature was preset, your choices would be severely limited, and your free will would be compromised. And if your choices were predetermined, your future would be known in minute detail (provided the choices of others are too, given a relatively deterministic universe), and there would be no free will at all. Hence, any argument about suffering goes back to the age-old dilemma that humans have been faced with too: where is the trade-off between the necessary control to cut back on suffering and the necessary freedom to live as you please? The Founding Fathers had a clear opinion on this, it seems. An often used quote is, in its original form, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". The Bible has pretty much stated the same thing. Free will is sacred. It is the foremost gift from the creator. S/he urges us to be kind to others, and to improve ourselves, but has ultimately left the choice to us. This is pretty powerful to me, as a Dom: My slave has free will, yet chooses to submit this most precious thing she has to me. Of course, from the sorry state of affairs that you pointed out, it would seem that we may have started out neutral, but either something inherent to the nature of suffering is viral, or maybe the delicate balance could have gone either way and just happened to go the "wrong" way. With free will as paramount, and the choices humanity has made, the Catholic position that humans are inherently "sinful" or "corrupt" makes more sense, although I don't subscribe to it. As far as accusations that the Bible condones violence etc. are concerned, remember the time at which these messages originated; we see shadows of this in countries like Afghanistan even today. If you were to start urging people in the direction of doing good, would you suggest they turn their lives on end? No, you'd be written off as a radical, or in more modern times a "hippie" or something. So, you write something that will improve things incrementally, yet lay the groundwork for future generations to read more into it, and hope they catch a glimpse of the Grand Design(tm). Not in the sense of a planned future, but in the sense of your hopes for what humanity could be. This is why the Bible doesn't say that you shouldn't have involuntary slavery: almost no-one would listen at the time, and the slaves would be no better off. Instead, it states that you should treat them better, and leaves it up to you and your descendents to eventually realize that you're not really supposed to do this to other people. This awareness started in the US in the late 19th century; we're slow to catch on, but we do, eventually. And then, some time later on, you send them Jesus. Or perhaps he just happened to come along and had glimpsed more of this Grand Design of which I spoke. At this point, I would adress DiurnalVampire, as what I am about to say is relevant to whether she wants to be a Jew or a Christian. Christians of all denominations have remembered Jesus' life, deeds and words, as they have been passed down. Ignoring the issue of integrity of transmission for the moment, there is still something really wrong here: they have largely forgotten his spirit. What Jesus preached to the Jews, of which he was one, was the same message that the Bible had held all along: be kinder to each other, be better than the Law (Jewish Bible) requires, and improve yourselves. And, depending on whether you believe the Gnostic gospels, he seems to have additionally preached that humanity had the potential to, at some point, transcend the physical plane. As a final point of potential interest, with only a limited relation to the rest of my post, I will mention my own view on this physical plane. It came to me when I was considering the idea of Purgatory, the idea that my loved ones would suffer for the purification of their souls, despite having been comparatively virtuous people, something that seems rather "wrong" to me. I came to the conclusion that this is Purgatory. Souls incarnate on this physical plane to atone, or to refine themselves, or gain insight, or some similar purpose, and the torments of this physical plane allow the contrast between "good" and "bad" to become visible, so that these souls can improve too. It would also make some sense if the physical plane were a sort of centerpoint, with both denominations (if you will) being valid, yet sorted to either side, depending on the preference between "good" and "evil", with a distance to the physical plane depending on the purity (or strength) of this preference, giving us something analogous to the concepts of Heaven and Hell. Okay, that's all from me. Hope this was interesting.
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