Zipperfish Zipperfish:
andyt andyt:
One minute you throw shit about my avatar, next you posit a reasonable question. Way to use that free will of yours.
1. Free will has nothing to do with old age, sickness and death.
Old age sickness and death are not evil, by any conventional definition I know of.
$1:
2. I repeat my question. What kind of God sets up a system where free will rapes and murders Tori Stafford. It's nice in theory, not so much in the application. If you are suffering under someone else's free will, are you going to say "thanks God for not making me an automaton." And I think you have sufficient knowledge of biology to know how much of a slave we are to it, don't have that much free will at all. Eden didn't sound all that bad to me. But God sure threw a shitfit when Adam and Eve exercised their free will. Going by the bible we're actually being punished for exercising free will. It's a bad thing.
Bad for you maybe. I'm having a good time. As for what kind of god does that--well, that would be the agnostic part of the agnostic deism: I don't really know. I doubt that the intelligence in which I believe sees good and evil in the same spectrum I do.
The question of free will is not wholly biological to me. I believe free will is an illusion. But I also believe the self is an illusion, for the same reasons. As are all my perceptions. As I make frequent use of my perceptions, my self and my free will, I find those illusions quite useful, so the fact that they are illusions doesn't really bother me. The notion that there is "really" no free will or no self is simply too exhausting to maintain. Heck, Zen Buddhists spend the better part of there lives trying to get there (Enlightenment), and most of them don't.
As a student of modern cosmology, there's a popular contemporary theory arising from Hawking radiation that the universe as we experience it is simply a projection, a shadow, of a greater-dimensional reality. In other words, an illusion.
The fact that I am an illusion doesn't bother me too much. I enjoy illusions. I used to pay good money to hallucinate.
Well, you're dancing all over the place here. In your argument previous, that without freewill we are all rocks, the presumption that free will exists, unequivocally. Otherwise the statement makes no sense.
I think the God you posited originally, the watchmaker, is insane. Just someone playing with his toys. Of course that may be true, but I doubt it.
If free will is an illusion, then by your earlier premise, so is good and evil - so why did you spend so much time defending free will/ good and evil?
That the universe as we experience it is an illusion is an ancient idea. I'll go with Buddhism's co-dependent origination and concepts of relative and absolute reality. While my teachers maintained both are equally real, when you call one of them absolute it sure sounds like the more "real" one.
Or, as the heart sutra has it:
$1:
"When the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara."
"Was Coursing in the Deep Prajna Paramita."
"He Perceived That All Five Skandhas Are Empty."
"Thus He Overcame All Ills and Suffering."
"Oh, Sariputra, Form Does not Differ From the Void,
And the Void Does Not Differ From Form.
Form is Void and Void is Form;
The Same is True For Feelings,
Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness."
"Sariputra, the Characteristics of the
Voidness of All Dharmas
Are Non-Arising, Non-Ceasing, Non-Defiled,
Non-Pure, Non-Increasing, Non-Decreasing."
"Therefore, in the Void There Are No Forms,
No Feelings, Perceptions, Volitions or Consciousness."
"No Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body or Mind;
No Form, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch or Mind Object;
No Realm of the Eye,
Until We Come to No realm of Consciousness."
"No ignorance and Also No Ending of Ignorance,
Until We Come to No Old Age and Death and
No Ending of Old Age and Death."
"Also, There is No Truth of Suffering,
Of the Cause of Suffering,
Of the Cessation of Suffering, Nor of the Path."
"There is No Wisdom, and There is No Attainment Whatsoever."
"Because There is Nothing to Be Attained,
The Bodhisattva Relying On Prajna Paramita Has
No Obstruction in His Mind."
"Because There is No Obstruction, He Has no Fear,"
"And He passes Far Beyond Confused Imagination."
"And Reaches Ultimate Nirvana."
"The Buddhas of the Past, Present and Future,
By Relying on Prajna Paramita
Have Attained Supreme Enlightenment."
"Therefore, the Prajna Paramita is the Great Magic Spell,
The Spell of Illumination, the Supreme Spell,
Which Can Truly Protect One From All Suffering Without Fail."
"Therefore He Uttered the Spell of Prajnaparmita,
Saying Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha."
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