Guest JeffCR07 Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 [quote name='Melchisedec' date='Apr 10 2005, 10:21 PM'] Im left wondering if free will is coercive in nature? I point a gun to your head and I tell you to take your clothes off. I have free will. I decide against it and I get shot in the head. I decide to undress and Im spared momentarily. Believe, goto heaven. Dont believe, get tortured in hell forever. Your thoughts? [/quote] Well the evil problem is even more unintuitive than that. Its like God is saying "you can go through this door, which leads to the fulfillment of all of your dreams, or that door, which leads to a swarm of angry killer bees. I really want you to fulfill your dreams, but if you really want, you can pick to the bees." And for some reason, Lucifer picked the bees. So it seems to me, there really isn't any compulsion. He must have been free if he picked the choice that doesn't make any sense, and the one that God doesnt want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
infinitelord1 Posted April 11, 2005 Author Share Posted April 11, 2005 Since God is All knowing and he exists outside of time.......He must already know our outcome before we are allready born. Since he is outside of time......time is not a limit of his knowledge......therefore he can see the future just as he sees the past. I dont believe he bases our future on what current choices we make. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Melchisedec Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 [quote name='God Conquers' date='Apr 10 2005, 10:32 PM'] You've pretty much just described Pascal's Wager. And it's true. You could live a depraved life without God. If you're right... well you're dead at the end. If you're wrong. Well... it REALLY smells of elderberries. If you live as a Catholic and you're wrong then... well, at teh end of life you're dead. Same deal. If you're right.... sweet.... life forever in the best place possible. [/quote] Yeah I'm quite familiar with pascals wager. But I never stopped to think of it as a form of coercion. Can the torture of hell be likened to a gun pointed at your head? Amounting to coercion. You are indeed technically free to make your own decision. Your views? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paphnutius Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 [quote name='Melchisedec' date='Apr 11 2005, 11:06 AM'] Yeah I'm quite familiar with pascals wager. But I never stopped to think of it as a form of coercion. Can the torture of hell be likened to a gun pointed at your head? Amounting to coercion. You are indeed technically free to make your own decision. Your views? [/quote] In the context of the sacrament of Reconcilliation there are two types of contrition: Pefect Contrition=being sorry for your sins for you have offended God whome who love above all things. Notice the focus is on God, not on the person or eternal reward/punishment. Imperfect Contrintion=being sorry for your sins for you are afraid of eternal hell and what not. The focus is on you and what will become of you. I believe that this would be the gun in your mind. We believe that perfect contrition is indeed a far greater thing than imperfect contritition, but imperfect contrition may be the first stage of moving towards a perfect contrition. As far as coercion goes, we believe that there are certain things that diminish a person's free will and therefore responsibility (CCC 1734) :ignorance, inadvertance, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psyhological or social factors. If a person has an unnatural fear of spiders or something a kin, their free will may be diminished in instances where spiders are present. Free will is the exercise of of reason and will of the human. It must be deliberate (CCC 1731). One must be careful though, not to slip into soft-determinism here. It is easy to do... Free will is a deliberate and voluntary action of the exercise of the human reason and will. Performing good acts and orienting oneself towards the service of God makes on more free, for we believe that it is within human nature to seek out God. Therefore seeking out God makes one more human, and therefore more able to exercise human reason and will in a more fulfilling way. Choosing evil and turning away from God is an abuse of freedom for it diminishes the human characteristics in the human. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JeffCR07 Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 Melchisedec, I have responded to your argument of coersion above. It is not like God is "putting a gun to your head," but rather, like he is pleading with you not to pull the trigger on yourself. Your Brother In Christ, Jeff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
infinitelord1 Posted April 11, 2005 Author Share Posted April 11, 2005 God Conquers, You said earlier that god damns the created........ well why does he create them then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brother Adam Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 infinite love. And his 'damning' is not a negative, but an affirmative. To those who choose to reject him, he simply affirms their rejection by allowing them to live apart from Him. It is their free choice. God does not create a person for sin or death, that is the consequence of our freedom. If God created anyone without free will, that person would live without love by default. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
infinitelord1 Posted April 11, 2005 Author Share Posted April 11, 2005 Adam, If we didnt have free will......dont you think that those who would live in love or those who live in hate would be determined by how they were created? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aloysius Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 Yes, if we didn't have free will.. because then we'd really have a crazy God up there in the heavens forming some creatures to be tortured forever and other creatures to be in heaven forever.. and all these creatures would just be extensions of what He wanted. fortunately this is not the case, for he created a power and gave it to human beings promising never to interfere with it (except, if you're a Catholic, when He is preventing the pope who freely gave up some control of his free will from teaching error) He created time, and thus is outside of time. He created time to test us, TIME and the POWER OF FREE WILL are the two factors He created intertwined to change his creation beyond the control He has chosen to use. In fact, I may even go so far as to say that time necessitates free will, and that free will necesitates time. in essence, the passage of time and the power of free will are both the same creation God made. from here we shall refer to that as the temporal will. God created the temporal will and gave it to his creatures, making his creatures subject to the passage of time in which they can change by their choices. Adam and Eve were created to have a perfect human nature (and actually lifted up to a level of supernature by God to give them an even better chance), placed into time and given a gift of the temporal will. by this temporal will they did something CONTRARY to true perfect human nature, and since then we have had a fallen nature in which we are inclined towards those things which hurt our soul. so basically the choice the human temporal will has is "do this thing which is contrary to your human nature which will damage your soul" or "do this thing which is in line with your human nature." Our nature is to know, love, and serve God. If we fail to do this, we damage our soul. If we fail to do this so much, we can kill our souls cutting them off from God's grace. What happens when a soul such as this, damaged and/or dead from sin, enters eternity is IT cannot stand to be in the presence of the perfect God, and GOD cannot stand to be in the presence of its evil nature. because when you enter eternity, all those things which are a part of you upon entrance to eternity BECOME PART OF YOUR NATURE. God doesn't arbitrarily set things as forbidden to humans and some things as good for humans. He created humans so that their nature is to know love and serve Him, because He loves them so much. bad things damage the soul, good things help the soul. God works with a soul that is open with faith, God cannot work with a soul that has killed it faith because it rejects him. The following statement I've seen everyone from calvinists to Catholics to protestants agree as a theological possibility: Essentially, the damaged soul upon entering eternity is EVIL, it was created good, but becomes evil through his temporal will, and thus upon death it rejects God and God rejects it. God cannot stand the presence of evil, an evil soul cannot stand the presence of God. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
infinitelord1 Posted April 11, 2005 Author Share Posted April 11, 2005 do you think the amount of free will varies from person to person? For a poor person to become successful he has to deal with how he was raised first. Then he has to make more choices to become succesful than a rich born person. The rich born person gets to go to college and his parents pay for it. The poor person has to first make the decision that he wants to go to college. Then he has to work hard and make a lot of money. Then when he has enough money he has to work and go to school. It must be pretty hard for him to study doing this huh. Where i came from this story would be rare. Most people went without. A high school diploma was even rare. Yes, they had the choice to go to college. Of course, they would have to make more choices to get to that goal. nfortunately, according to the way they were raised, they may not realize they had the choice. So can we say they did have the choice? Dont we have to realize that we have a choice before we make one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Q the Ninja Posted April 11, 2005 Share Posted April 11, 2005 Free will is equally given to each person...everyone has the same [i]capacity[/i] to exercise free will. However, not everyone gets the same opportunity. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jkat Posted November 4, 2018 Share Posted November 4, 2018 The Bible states that God created mankind for pleasure. God created the damned because he loves the saved according to the Bible. He created losers for his pleasure because he hates them and loves for them to suffer because he's cruel and jealous. If you read up on what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote you would know that a pleasure of the saints and God is to see the damned suffer in hell forever. God and the saints love to hate the damned and watch them suffer for pleasure and entertainment; it makes them feel good and brings them joy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 4, 2018 Share Posted November 4, 2018 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linate Posted November 4, 2018 Share Posted November 4, 2018 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 7, 2018 Share Posted November 7, 2018 We should not anthropomorphize God i.e. giving God human qualities. God is the Totally Other, Total Mystery and outside of time. Humanly speaking, why create a person knowing they will go to Hell? If God did not create a person He knows with Foreknowledge will be damned, He would be pronouncing judgement as 'unworthy of existence' i.e. a person would be damning themselves and judged 'unworthy of existence' before they even existed and died in mortal sin and an impossibility. But again, God is not as we are and all statements in response, therefore, cannot be spot on statements, but only quite remote approximations in order for us to think about the OP question in the first place. Nevertheless, it is a jolly good question ... a real curly one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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