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Post by chandlerklebs on Nov 15, 2014 12:22:40 GMT
Below is a definition of the word religion that I want to explain.
religion: "A strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny" - WordWeb
If you believe there is some type of power which controls your destiny, then you must admit that your future is not up to you and that there is no possibility of you changing it. This is sort of fatalism that makes many people feel hopeless and angry. Most of the time this causes them to leave the religion they grew up in.
Most of the time, the name of this power is called "God".
God: "The supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions" - WordWeb
Omnipotence and omniscience both create a problem for free will. If God is omnipotent(all powerful), then what God does is unstoppable. This means that God controls the exact time that each of us begins life and ends it. If God is omniscient(all knowing), then it can only mean that God knows everything in both the past and future. For your destiny to be known by God means that it is fixed and unchangeable.
But what happens if this God doesn't actually exist? Does that allow room for free will? Not at all! It only means that there is no being which actually "knows" the future. Whether the future is fixed, predetermined, or predestined is another matter entirely. There still must be a cause for every event to happen. It just means that the causes are what we would call natural rather than supernatural.
What this means is that events such as pregnancy happen because of sex rather than because of an acausal event or some magical force that we can't see. When people die, it is not that it was their fated time but most likely had something to do with them being hit by a car, or shot with a gun, or aborted, or some disease killed them. The point is that there is a cause for the start and end of our lives. Causality is the main difference between determinism and fatalism.
In my experience, I have seen that atheists are determinists while religious people are fatalists. The difference between the groups seems to be about their knowledge of the causes of events. This is partly why I think the debates between theists and atheists is actually about why things happen. However, neither side really believes in free will. They believe that they can convince the other side that they are right. Not one single person who debates about religion, abortion, or anything else can believe in free will.
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Post by George Ortega on Nov 16, 2014 9:04:26 GMT
Because religion is in various ways beneficial to individuals and societies, the answer may lie not in eliminating, but rather in reforming, today's religions away from free will belief. Also, pantheism, the earliest religion, that simply equates God with nature, or the universe, implicitly assume that we humans don't have a free will.
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trick
Junior Member
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Post by trick on Nov 16, 2014 14:48:15 GMT
Because religion is in various ways beneficial to individuals and societies, the answer may lie not in eliminating, but rather in reforming, today's religions away from free will belief. Also, pantheism, the earliest religion, that simply equates God with nature, or the universe, implicitly assume that we humans don't have a free will. I think the harms of religious thought outweigh the benefits (more rational understandings of our world are far more beneficial), and equating God with nature is similar to what the compatibilists are trying to do with free will. Such, in my opinion, just creates more confusion in the minds of people regarding what it means that we don't have the (current) common notions of free will or god. ;-) |
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Post by chandlerklebs on Nov 16, 2014 17:41:13 GMT
Because religion is in various ways beneficial to individuals and societies, the answer may lie not in eliminating, but rather in reforming, today's religions away from free will belief. Also, pantheism, the earliest religion, that simply equates God with nature, or the universe, implicitly assume that we humans don't have a free will. I think the harms of religious thought outweigh the benefits (more rational understandings of our world are far more beneficial), and equating God with nature is similar to what the compatibilists are trying to do with free will. Such, in my opinion, just creates more confusion in the minds of people regarding what it means that we don't have the (current) common notions of free will or god. ;-) I tend to agree with 'Trick here that it creates a lot of confusion to use God as a synonym for the universe. I have no problem with pantheism but I worry that it may cause confusion if you are speaking to someone of a different religion who believes in a God that is a "big invisible man in the sky who punishes and rewards people for their "choices"". |
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Post by chandlerklebs on Nov 16, 2014 17:44:11 GMT
Because religion is in various ways beneficial to individuals and societies, the answer may lie not in eliminating, but rather in reforming, today's religions away from free will belief. Also, pantheism, the earliest religion, that simply equates God with nature, or the universe, implicitly assume that we humans don't have a free will. I think that some religions will automatically be eliminated if free will is such a central teaching of their faith that they can't survive without it. However, if we can reform a religion rather than just eliminating it altogether, that might be the road that causes less pain for the believers. |
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Post by George Ortega on Nov 17, 2014 23:29:57 GMT
It would be great if humanity experienced a great enough leap of elevated spiritual consciousness that we all decided to scrap the existing prophesy-based religions, with their mistakes, contradictions, and inherent divisiveness, and set about the task of constructing a universally agreed upon reason-based world religion. But even all religions agreeing that free will is an illusion would be a monumental advancement over what we have.
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trick
Junior Member
Posts: 61
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Post by trick on Nov 18, 2014 14:59:37 GMT
The word "religion", to me, has too many connotations of requiring some sort of faith rather than being assessed via logical reasoning. I think we need to repair the very base level of people's epistemological foundations (standards of knowledge), even if that means people potentially dropping all religious ideology due to these new standards.
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Post by George Ortega on Nov 19, 2014 5:18:11 GMT
Although religion most technically began in response to our human tendency to want to know who we are, and how our world works, I agree that religion's practice and nomenclature has been corrupted in various ways over the last few millennia. Just as we need to protect the term "free will" from attempts to re-define it, and corrupt it's meaning, we may want to protect, and reclaim, the terminology and ideas around religion from those who co-opted them, especially by unjustifiably claiming "authority," and by moving it away from prophesy and toward logical constructs.
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Post by chandlerklebs on Nov 19, 2014 11:28:16 GMT
Although religion most technically began in response to our human tendency to want to know who we are, and how our world works, I agree that religion's practice and nomenclature has been corrupted in various ways over the last few millennia. Just as we need to protect the term "free will" from attempts to re-define it, and corrupt it's meaning, we may want to protect, and reclaim, the terminology and ideas around religion from those who co-opted them, especially by unjustifiably claiming "authority," and by moving it away from prophesy and toward logical constructs. The idea of one person having authority over others will be dropped as soon as we notice that none of us is choosing to be better, greater, or smarter than another. There is only one authority over all of us and I would say that it is determinism. |
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trick
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Post by trick on Nov 19, 2014 15:27:34 GMT
No person is more or less deserving over another, that doesn't mean some aren't causally more intelligent, logical, or rational. It's just that they aren't more deserving due to them happening to be more intelligent, etc. ;-)
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Post by chandlerklebs on Nov 20, 2014 12:32:38 GMT
No person is more or less deserving over another, that doesn't mean some aren't causally more intelligent, logical, or rational. It's just that they aren't more deserving due to them happening to be more intelligent, etc. ;-) The mistake people are making is thinking that their intelligence is up to them. If being logical was something we could choose, I can't imagine why we would not all be geniuses. |
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Post by Jamie Soden on Nov 22, 2014 11:43:57 GMT
Although religion most technically began in response to our human tendency to want to know who we are, and how our world works, I agree that religion's practice and nomenclature has been corrupted in various ways over the last few millennia. Just as we need to protect the term "free will" from attempts to re-define it, and corrupt it's meaning, we may want to protect, and reclaim, the terminology and ideas around religion from those who co-opted them, especially by unjustifiably claiming "authority," and by moving it away from prophesy and toward logical constructs. The only thing that truly makes sense to me about religion in regards to our existence is the possibility of reincarnation, I think it is possible just not in the same way Buddhists believe it, Our atoms will get reused elsewhere after we die, no different than the cycle of star birth and supernova. You might as well say consciousness is the 5th fundamental of a physical universe, in any universe that has the right conditions, live will form and evolve, We may very well be trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death, the question is, can we overcome it? |
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Post by George Ortega on Nov 23, 2014 7:06:24 GMT
The only thing that truly makes sense to me about religion in regards to our existence is the possibility of reincarnation, I think it is possible just not in the same way Buddhists believe it, Our atoms will get reused elsewhere after we die, no different than the cycle of star birth and supernova. You might as well say consciousness is the 5th fundamental of a physical universe, in any universe that has the right conditions, live will form and evolve, We may very well be trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death, the question is, can we overcome it? Religion is simply a term we use, along with philosophy, for our pre-scientific attempt to understand reality. While there are certain questions regarding the nature of reality that transcend reason, whether we have a free will is clearly not one of them. [Administrator's note; please remember the two-sentence rule] |
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Post by Jamie Soden on Nov 23, 2014 15:09:16 GMT
The only thing that truly makes sense to me about religion in regards to our existence is the possibility of reincarnation, I think it is possible just not in the same way Buddhists believe it, Our atoms will get reused elsewhere after we die, no different than the cycle of star birth and supernova. You might as well say consciousness is the 5th fundamental of a physical universe, in any universe that has the right conditions, live will form and evolve, We may very well be trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death, the question is, can we overcome it? Religion is simply a term we use, along with philosophy, for our pre-scientific attempt to understand reality. While there are certain questions regarding the nature of reality that transcend reason, whether we have a free will is clearly not one of them. [Administrator's note; please remember the two-sentence rule] True, but lots of things get oversimplified, religious people started the bull with thought police and condemning others for their sexuality, sex is part of evolution and people need to get it through their thick heads, the way I see it is sexuality isn't a problem unless it is being forced on another person. Sexuality isn't a choice however and due to the stigma of child abuse, which is very wrong, it will take a very long time before people wake up and learn the difference between molester and pedophile, TheBadcop69 on Youtube is right, there is a difference. |
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Post by George Ortega on Nov 24, 2014 23:38:23 GMT
the way I see it is sexuality isn't a problem unless it is being forced on another person. This is such a difficult issue because to the extent that people are being very sexual, especially outside of marriage, contraception accidents lead to more abortions. I think much of the problem is that for many thousands of years, humans were beginning to couple and have children at 16 or 17, whereas now child-raising is often delayed until the late twenties and thirties, and our hormones (another example of why we don't have a free will) are not able to wait as long as that to satisfy the basic pro-creative drive. |
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