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Does God have a plan or do we have free will?
Posted on: October 17, 2007 - 8:55pm
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Does God have a plan or do we have free will?
Christians.. Does God have a plan or do we have free will? I'm sure this has been addressed before but I'm new here so help me out. This contradiction has always confused me.
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Not a Christian, but I'll answer your question anyways:
Neither.
neither? how you do that? explain please. Ive heard the following many times, "we have free will to choose whether or not to follow God's will for us" and
"God knows what we will do, but the choice is ultimately up to us".
davidnay2007, can an atheist jump in here ?
Yeah there's free will for ya, of course we are bound by our limitations, but see my free will ? ... I have never ever understood this question ... ???
and GOD who ? fundy religious god OR science god ?
all that troubles you is the trouble of this world .... drowned in questions that will never be answered.
My point is why waste time on what we will never ever know, GOD ?
Just accept life and help our planet ...
Atheism Books.
Well, thats the problem. Humanity blindly accepts ancient myth as fact without putting it to scrutiny, They "Just accept" Allah, Jesus, Vishnu, just because their parents did and their parents did.
And this blind acceptance has diverted humanity's attention away from helping our planet, the only home our species has. Insted geo religious gangs use the planet as one giant game of "capture the flag".
Insted of focusing on polution and climate change, humanity is more worried about Sky Daddy Cheerleading clubs.
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Cheerleaders.....where? What church do you go to? If there were cheerleaders in church I might have become a theist.
Seriously though davidnay2007 you will be waiting a long time for a Christian to come on here and make a cohesive and sensical argument. So far humanity has been waiting 2007 years. You will find one Christian who will swear we have free will and another who says it is all God's plan.
My favorite was one of my co-workers told me that if I just believed something would happen it would. As if we could create God's plan. She kept believing she would make a ton of money. I transfered to a new office and started making money...last I heard she just was released from the looney tunes section of the hospital. I don't think believing got her very far.
Ok Christians, come out, come out wherever you are and prove me wrong. I promise I won't bite but my dog might.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
I think you may be right. I would like to see a Christian address this though.
I don't mean to be condescending with the question. I'm really just curious as to how the obvious contradiction will be dodged or if possible, explained away. It seems to me that it's all about convience. If a loved one is murdered the Christians will tell each other that God has a plan meanwhile condemning the murderer who (if the Christians are right) was just a patsy in God's plan.
I've only heard one serious answer to this question my whole life. Somebody mentioned it above.
"God knows what we are going to do, but he does not prevent us from making choices based only on what we want to do, so it is like a parent who knows that every four hours or so, her new baby will want milk. The parent doesn't force the child to want milk, but it's inevitable that it will, so the parent knows it ahead of time."
Maybe that's not the best analogy. Maybe it would be a parent who knows that her child will cry when it's time to go to the doctor. Whatever.
I've taken it apart too many times to have any interest in doing it again. Somebody else can.
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'Free will' is a simple-minded idea that doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny.
If our decisions are not based on the relative strengths of our emotional state, our basic urges and desires, our current sensory input, our memories, our rational evaluation of the current situation, etc , all of which can be, in principle, traced to brain states and our particular experiential history, just what would else is there, apart from something NOT based on any of these, which pretty much would be equivalent to a random flip-of-a-coin event. 'Free will' as pure randomness doesn't work for me, any more than a decision flying in the face of ALL I desire at every level.
We know why Xians and their like push the idea of free will, to justify punishment for disobeying God.
As for "God's plan", well that whole idea is just part of the delusionary fantasy world that is the religious world-view, and doesn't deserve further comment.
No matter how they mutilate logic, they cannot avoid the fundamental contradiction of mere mortals being able to go against the Will of an omnipotent being, without totally screwing up the meaning of the word 'will', as pointed out by Bertrand Russell last century. That misuse of the word is actually related to the misconception in the idea of 'free will' itself.
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