Perhaps it would be better to think of God as not subject to time, rather than have him “predict” what you’re going to in. Because in actual fact, you’ve already made all the decisions you’re ever going to make, you just don’t know it yet.
Your thoughts and actions certainly have an effect on the future, but we’re bound by time, and cause and effect here, and God is not. If you were outside time, you’d be able to see all of eternity, would you not? And you would be able to find out the result of a truly random function, such as quantum fluctuations (or something).
Does you knowing the result presuppose that the function was not truly random in the first place? Certainly, in time, up to that point, you have no way of finding out the result of that random function.
In that sense, we have free will, and we are making the decisions that we want to. It’s just that we have to make them in time, and God isn’t bound by time, so he obviously knows what’s going to happen as a result of our decision, and in fact what the decision was. Notice I didn’t say “before we made that decision”, because that implies a time element. To God, we’ve already made all our decisions.
I didn’t say it was core in Buddhism, I said it worked for Buddhism and it is, in fact, taught as a meditative strategy, especially when it comes to overcoming negative emotions like anger or jealousy.
Just to clarify for anyone interested, I wasn’t talking about love as an emotion, but love as a mechanism — more akin to charity than to affection. I defined love as the means by which goodness is facilitated. It doesn’t come from the brain; it comes from God.
With respect to the Buddha, when I made the point that Christ is not an electromagnetic field but rather Spirit, part of what I was saying was that His physical manifestations can and do take many forms. God is not individuated by flesh, but by the necessity of His existence. You cannot point to a particular man and say that he is God and there is no other because you would make Christ a liar, and Christ is truth. Truth is the lens through which goodness is seen. All who love are one with Him. If the Buddha loves, then he too is God. God is the agent of love.
By creating people with the freedom to choose whether to accept and believe in Him or not. Don’t know if risk is the right word, it’s all I could think of. If you were God, you’d have a choice: create people automatically programmed to believe and love you or give people free will. I know…that opens a whole new can of worms and I’ve heard the questions concerning that. Deep subject.
Well since a risk pretty much indicates an uncertain or possible bad outcome, it doesn’t fit for an all knowing or all poswerful G-d. I always felt like giving us free will was a huge act of love and one that G-d knew would ultimately cause him to feel sorrow. But he did it anyway, for us.
Like I said I just wanted to distinguish between concepts. Buddhism seems to be getting a heavy Christian wash lately and Love is nowhere near the central Buddhist doctrine that it is in Christianity.
By creating people with the freedom to choose whether to accept and believe in Him or not. Don’t know if risk is the right word, it’s all I could think of. If you were God, you’d have a choice: create people automatically programmed to believe and love you or give people free will. I know…that opens a whole new can of worms and I’ve heard the questions concerning that. Deep subject.