AJ Philips:>> Secondly, the tenth commandment put wives in the same category as oxen and ass as though they were a possession; yet another reason to believe it was written my mere (primitive) humans.<<

AJ, you intimate that we are better than primitive, that a haircut suit and lap top somehow alters what we are at our base. I disagree, I know we are well capable of living only to satiate ourselves at whatever cost. Society is a veneer and some think they actually are the veneer but the reality is circumstance dictates the veneer.

The anti commandments that I listed were not plucked from assumption. I simply remembered back to the first twenty five years of my life that I spent living just behind Kings Cross. I was born at Paddington Women’s Hospital and was an inner city kid from day one.

I knew families and their many acquaintances that lived by the anti commandments. I grew up with their kids till my mid teens at which point I started to study and they started to go to jail.

They would steal from each other, they would lie to each other, the guys would screw around with their cousins and sometimes brothers wives, you could not rely on them or anything they told you, and they lived their whole lives like this, they still do I expect, but no longer at Paddo, probably Campbelltown. They were poor and had that "immediacy" that the comfortable do not have, if they see an opportunity they grab it, without a moral component to the thought process.

AJ, I am not an old man so the human character exhibited and the society it existed in is still current. People need rules, or they need lots of cash to keep them happy. A moral compass may come as standard equipment with you but believe me it is an optional extra with some.

OK AJ,

Re-reading my post has revealed how inadequate and vague it was. The part of your argument I was tackling specifically was your statement that "if a god exists, then we do not have free will and this is an insurmountable problem for Christians." It is followed in the next post with "If a god existed then, being all-powerful and all-knowing, they would have full knowledge of what was going to happen in the future. This means that everything we have done, and will do, is already ’set in stone’. If we were able to deviate from what this god foresaw, then this god would no longer be a god."

I have read through these and the surrounding passages several times, and to be honest I cannot find an interpretation other than the one I addressed - that an all-knowing and all-powerful deity controls what we do. How else could the existence of God stand at odds with the existence of free will?

In your counter-rebuttal, it is pretty clear that you and I are on the same page. I just don't understand how this renders God impossible or puts us at odds with free will.

Anyway, if I came off as "preaching", I apologise. That is certainly far from my intent.

Oto.. very good point.

"I just don't understand how this renders God impossible or puts us at odds with free will."

Philosophically, AJ has touched on the old faithful 'unanswerable question'.

We can say as an affirmation "God exists, and is completely sovereign over all things"

At the same time, we observe and experience "free will"....

Though it might be argued that we don't really have it and that our choices were made by God for us.

I really hope you and AJ will examine closely Pauls statements in Romans 9 where he tackles this very issue.

14 What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

16 It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. 17 For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”18 Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.

19 One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” 20 But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

COMMENT. Understanding that rather 'ruthless' passage, we need to remember that Paul was LIVING it... yet he acted and preached entirely as it if depended on peoples individual free responses.

I don't believe he BELIEVED that.. as a careful reading of the whole chapter will show. But there's the dilemna and the intersection of eternity with time.

Well, SoG, we’ve now done a full circle here and you seem absolutely determined to not understand.

Firstly, I just want to clarify that while I see some worth in the rules that some of the Ten Commandments represent, the Ten Commandments themselves are redundant and yes, worthless.

The Ten Commandments are redundant because we already have a real-world set of rules in the law with our law enforcement there to up hold it. Our laws are superior to the Ten Commandments since they are reality-based and we have law enforcement to uphold them.

Without Christian theology to insert them into, the Ten Commandments are just words with no authority. So your argument for the Ten Commandments relies on the concept of a god and the threat of eternal consequences.

But I’ve already explained to you why the system set up by Christianity means that no believer necessarily needs to suffer consequences for their actions due to the loophole created for the irrational, unrealistic and immoral criteria by which its followers are expected to live (and this is how Christianity keeps it followers coming back). Let’s not even get into how immoral the concept of infinite punishment for finite crimes is.

I fail to see how you think you encourage moral behaviour and conformity from a system that is so inherently immoral, unjust and irrational to begin with.

You may be able to fool some, but there are many who will see through it.

Otokonoko,

I’ve been giving this some more thought and it’s possible that I’m being a little too rigid with the concept of ‘free will’.

According to your understanding of Catholic Theology (which was also my understanding of Christian theology in general) we certainly do have something that at least mimics ‘free will’.

For the sake of argument, I’ll agree with you and say that despite everything having been ‘set in stone’ due to the omniscience of a god, we do still have free will in the sense that the decisions we make at least coincide with our conscious desire at the time.

That being said, free will - a core aspect to Christian theology - doesn’t actually matter in the end. It would only have any real value if the future was not set. So the question then becomes: Why bother waffling on about free will if it doesn’t even matter? It becomes as pointless as praying for god to ‘fix’ a situation when his omniscience had already determined how things would play out anyway.

So your point about free will and omniscience doesn’t really solve much.

Another bigger problem though, is moral dilemma of a god, who despite foreseeing the bad decisions that people would make (ultimately leading some to eternal punishment), decided to go ahead with it all anyway.

Why bring something into existence when they’re only going to suffer eternally anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just not bring them into existence? The contradiction here with omnibenevolence is yet another problem for Christianity, as is perfect justice and mercy, since mercy is a suspension of justice.

I realise that many Christians nowadays believe that non-believers will simply disappear into nothingness when they die - as we are all going to - but this isn’t much of an improvement since they still believe that they will get something that others will miss out on.

Continued...

...Continued

<<I cannot find an interpretation other than the one I addressed - that an all-knowing and all-powerful deity controls what we do. How else could the existence of God stand at odds with the existence of free will?>>

I guess, in a sense, the god would be controlling what we do, but I didn’t mean to imply that he would be deliberately or consciously doing it.

<<In your counter-rebuttal, it is pretty clear that you and I are on the same page. I just don't understand how this renders God impossible or puts us at odds with free will.>>

Well, I didn’t say it renders god impossible; that’s not usually the approach I take on this topic since I don’t think it’s necessary. Simply pointing out that a naturalistic worldview is more rational - due to religion’s violation of Occam’s razor - is plenty. The inherent contradictions in concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent god, who is apparently both perfectly just and merciful at the same time, are more than enough to render god’s existence beyond any reasonable doubt given what we currently know.

<<...if I came off as "preaching", I apologise. That is certainly far from my intent.>>

No need to apologise; I see (more so now) that you were simply trying to explain Catholic theology as you understand it. I suppose when theists start makeing all these claims about what god is and is not, without being able to demonstrate it in any way, it comes off as preaching regardless unfortunately.

Besides which, I would actually expect that you DO preach. According to Christian theology, as I understand/understood it, Christians are obliged to be “fishers of men” since this is what Jesus supposedly commanded his disciples to do.

If you are in possession of some facts that have eternal consequences, I could imagine nothing more gravely negligent than withholding it.

People may find Boaz’s preaching annoying, but to his credit, he is at least doing as Christian theology demands. Tirelessly too.