Most of us have things we can’t do - for instance, most of us are unable to kill a baby in cold blood. So free will is not absolute, even now. There are many ways of exercising choice without sinning, so the lack of ability to sin would not turn us into robots.
It is also not clear why turning away from God is a sin. One would think that if this was so important, God would make himself a little more obvious. As it stands, many or most of the evidentiary claims of his holy word have been falsified, so if God is responsible for the Bible he seems to be encouraging us to turn away from him.
If god is everywhere, then there cannot be the total absence of god anywhere, even in hell. In any case, god is totally absent from my life and I’m pretty happy. If hell is like this, I’m not going to complain.
Since god made our souls, the responsibility for their imperfection is his. If I built a sentient robot who kept bumping into walls, by design, I’d be a monster to punish it for bumping into walls. In any case, when I was a kid I went to temple on Yom Kippur and asked God directly for forgiveness of my sins. Along with the ability to make mistakes comes the ability to recognize that one makes mistakes, and the ability to atone for them. That’s personal responsibility, not contracting it out.
God created beings with a particular nature. He then gave them something called “Free Will” (this isn’t in the Bible, but it MUST be true!) which inexplicably allows them to act not according to their own nature, which I assume means it causes them to do things completely randomly without having any control over their actions. This meant that they knowingly chose to do things that had consequences that no person, not even the most selfish and evil one imaginable, would EVER knowingly choose to incurr.
This, then made God very angry. Luckily, God is full of great ideas. So he squeezed himself down into a human body, born out of a virgin’s womb, called himself his son, and arranged to have himself killed. Afterwards, he felt lots better, and decided to start teling folks that they could avoid a punishment that everyone would knowingly avoid if they could if only they agreed to pretend to believe that any of the story I just told makes any sense whatsoever.
This has nothing to do with the concept of original sin which is the topic under discussion. The doctrine of Original Sin is that humans are born inherently sinful (somehow) because of the actions of (the mythical) Adam and Eve.
2, Free will is a logically incoherent concept both for God and for humans. An omniscient being cannot have free will because he will have foreknowledge of all his choices and not be able to make a contrary choice. For both God and humans the concept is incoherent because it relies on an a priori inherent moral nature or antecedent determinant for choices. Something has to motivate the choices. One cannot freely choose the wrong without already being wrong. True free will cannot logically exist. Choices are either random or caused. If they’re random, they’re morally meaningless. If they’re caused then they’re not free.
What does it mean to “turn away from God” and how is it possible to turn away from a God who refuses to provide any reason to believe he even exists?
I hear this all the time from Christians and I still don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean. What is “separation from God?” Separation in what sense? Draw me a picture. Why is separation from God a bad thing? Why should I care?
If it really IS such a bad thing then why doesn’t God stop it from hapeening. He can save anybody he wants so ultimately any suffering souls only suffer at his own volition. If nothing else, he can simply eradicate them. What purpose does it serve to have all those souls mooning about in the outer darkness (that’s how I always picture it) if he can either bring them into Heaven (why CAN’T he?) or snuff them out of existence.
Oh, yes he is. Read the New Testament. The Paschal-surrogate imagery is especially strong in the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation.
A lot of Christian theologians have tried to make it so, but in the Bible it’s really not so complicated.
This idea of substitutionary atonement is also rooted in ancient Jewish practice – specifically the ritualistic placing of sins on a “scape goat” (a literal goat) at Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) who was then driven off a cliff. The idea is just as silly with a human victim as it is with a goat.
An even more serious problem with this arguement is that if people have “imperfect souls” then God is the one who made them so. People are not morally responsible for inherent imperfections over which they had no choice or control.
I’m not normally a big fan of Ayn Rand but in her book, For the New Intellectual, I think she nailed this “imperfection” thing pretty well:
"If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free."
–Ayn Rand (For the New Intellectua, 1961)
I’ve heard them all. I’ve read them all. None of them hold up in my opinion.
To be precise about it, I was only criticizing Christian SOTERIOLOGY (salvation theology) I’m not critical of everything about Christianity and I’m not speaking from a lack of knowledge about it.
None of whom have ever been able to satisfactorily solve it’s thorniest logical problems.
I read Pelikan in college. I still have one or two of his books around here somewhere. Nice writer. Very intelligent. Also very traditionist and not especially challenging. He’s not really an apologist, though, he’s more of a historian. I actually used him a lot as a resource for Christian theological history. There wasn’t anything I didn’t understand about it. I just didn’t buy it.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this irks me. Every single human being has the capacity to murder a baby in cold blood. To say you are literally incapable of doing so is proposterous. To say you flat out WOULDN’T is true. There aren’t restrictions on free will.
As an aside, god was a real asshole to the Egyptians, screwing up their crops and murdering their babies and everything. Who would want to worship that bastard?
Expano, he’s asking this question OF CHRISTIANS. Forget reading the OP; did you ever bother to read the THREAD TITLE?
You’re perfectly entitled to disbelieve. I disbelieve many tenets of mainstream Xtianity myself (though I still call myself a Christian). But you seem to be being deliberately obtuse. Why not let the Christians answer the question, rather than mocking them?
This sounds circular to me. If I am unwilling to do something then I have a de facto limitation on my will, do I not? What else is free will but what I am willing or unwilling to do?
I’m not a member of the “anything is possible” club, but it actually being physically impossible to murder a baby in cold blood is just silly to me. How would it be impossible? Would you just not drive the knife into it’s tiny heart?
Say a madman put a baby in front of you, gave you a knife (and stood back, so you couldn’t kill him and escape, assuming you have a poor throw), and told you to kill the baby, or your whole family will die. Would you just think to yourself “well, shit, there goes my family”, and cuddle the child as you realize your position. Or would you go in for the kill and have an invisible wall stop the knife?
Just because something is physically possible doesn’t mean that a person can’t be incapable of having the will to do it.
These kinds of implausible hypothetical moral crises are never very useful but I’d dtill try to kill the madman instead. If I fail, I fail. I couldn’t bring myself to kill the baby, though, no. And I wouldn’t see myself as bearing any moral responsibility for any harm that came to my family. My moral responsibility – my WILL – would be to try to prevent harm to ANY innocents or die trying.
No, I think many - most - people just couldn’t do it - not freely, anyhow. Certainly some can. Some people are phobic, and can’t perform certain actions without conditioning - which perhaps violated their free will, like brainwashing.
A lot of us would also say “I won’t eat people. Eating people is wrong” after Swann.
To get back to the OP, many Christians say that God does not reveal himself because that would reduce our free will in choosing to worship. If God both revealed himself and gave each person a 3d tour of hell (with Smell-o-vision!) that would really reduce free will in this view. So, however your scenario would play out, it has little to do with free will, and in fact often someone is excused from being punished from what would usually be a crime if they were under extreme coercion.
Yup. I believe that marketing teaches you that one way of selling a product is to create a need. What better way of selling Christianity than creating the need of not being roasted. No matter if it is no more true than the diseases modern advertisers come up with to sell you their drugs.
Oh, so you’re a Christian with an angle on the interesting theological question? I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell from your post and I mistook it for a spot of antireligious horning-in that served no purpose other than to inform the world in general that you consider the whole topic a load of hooey. My bad.
Not robots but what? In the Book of Mormon it talks about the fall of Adam {not nessecarily literally} in a sense that without something to choose {even if it’s just a perception} how could we choose. If ,man had never percieved the possibility of chooseing something that was not in harmony with God then what would we be?
Is it not clear because it isn’t obvious or because we refuse on some unconscious level to see. The “sin” which is a word I resist is merely acting out of harmony with the essence of God, love and truth. Obedience is a word we use in the begining but hopefully we grow to see it as choosing to be in harmony with the source. Out of harmony has it’s own consequences.
Well, at least you perceive it that way for now. If God is then he is not totally absent from anyone’s life.
I don’t think we are spiritually imperfect. Our perception is and we are in the process of learning to correct that perception. As you know, I don’t think God punishes us. IMHO the whole process is perceiving our mistakes {what is not in harmony with truth and love} and correcting it. As you said, personal responsibility as spiritual peers not servants.
Why are people always so willing to trust the promise of the “Madman” who says he won’t kill someone if I kill someone?
If I was willing to kill someone, he is way up on the list of folks I am going to try to kill. If I kill the baby, the madman just laughs, and says " I already killed your family, asshole!"
Christian checking in here. I’m no theologian, but you might possbily be thinking of Original Sin. If I understand it correctly, it’s a doctrine within the Catholic Church that says that sex is, if not sinful, rather dirty and thus babies are born with some level of “uncleanliness.” I understand that this is one of the reasons for Catholic christenings that occur soon after birth. Others could explain it far better than me, though. (I’m not, nor have I ever been, Catholic.)
If you are referring to Original Sin, then not all Christians believe that. I, for one, don’t. I take being “born into sin” to mean being brought into the world, which is full of sin, and being destined to live a life of sin yourself. “Jesus dying for our sins” is a different concept. It means that the death of Jesus served as a sacrifice (in the Old Testament way) for the sin of those who believe in and follow Him. Not everyone reads it that way, but the majority of Chrisians would basically agree with that interpretation.
Are sins things not in harmony with God? Or can you be not in harmony and still not sin - like not going to church, maybe. And I’m talking standard Christian theology here, not your far more interesting variety.
As for choices, if I kept Kosher, there would be a bunch of stuff I’m blocked from eating, but I would not be restricted to one menu choice for each meal. Even if we couldn’t sin, especially the biggies, we’d still have a near infinite number of choices that we can make.
I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body, so best I can tell hes absent from mine - in fact it feels identical to the case where he just doesn’t exist. I’ve seen enough reports of people who claim god is within them to know what it should be like - nothing I feel. The hell question still stands.
Shaw’s hell, in Man and Superman, seems far more probable. Why would the devil make his home a horrid place? If a person did not believe from lack of evidence (and my opinion of religion is shaped by the same logical processes I use to evaluate astrology and UFOs) and he gets more evidence, why keep him? In Shaw’s hell, people are free to walk out and head for heaven, and vice versa.
That’s why your philosophy on the whole is less objectionable than standard Christianity, where we are spiritually imperfect from the start.