(no subject)

[which_chick]

Yesterday's news: Yield curve inverts. CNN Money has the story here.

Also, I played The Bible Game last night. It contains distressingly tiny amounts of actual Bible knowledge and is mostly composed of non-Bible challenge activities. The challenges are video-game-ish and I suck at them (example challenge: Outline blocks on Tower of Babel to make them crumble, kind of a tetris effect.) compared to the computer generated characters. The game show format is remarkable for the sole singular feature I found amusing as (forgive me) hell: The Wrath of God. Think Whammy in Wheel of Fortune, only you get a rain of frogs, a swarm of locusts, masses of flies, and so forth. Playing the game show (called "Do Unto Others") is like being a pharoah, almost. You see a lot of The Wrath of God in this game, to the point where I just started to laugh at the rains of frogs. I mean, they're totally random and there's nothing you can do about them. You didn't deserve them. I can understand dying in DDR if I fuck up enough. I can understand dying in, say, Quake II if I fail to account for the snipers. I can understand getting eaten by the ghosts in Pacman. However, my mental concept of video games does not allow for random fucking rains of frogs. It doesn't make narrative sense. Anyway, given the frequency with which this game employs The Wrath of God, it was clearly designed by someone who'd read his Jonathan Edwards.

Comments

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

My issue with human free will and a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent deity is this:

God makes us the way we are. God makes every person, every rock, every tree, and the very firmament of the heavens.

God knows everything. Not a sparrow falls but that he knows about it. God knows the past, the present, and the future, for ever and ever.

Therefore, this most merciful, loving God has made people who are doomed to fail, doomed to burn for all eternity, doomed from the get-go -- and he knew that they were going to be like that and STILL he made them anyway, knowing what awaited them. That's some whack shit.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

They do have the choice not to be doomed, don't they? And I'm not necessarily convinced that all the people my M.I.L. and her fundamentalist friends expect to show up in hell are actually bound there. I certainly don't know, and they don't either.

Since I have a trouble just understanding the concept of Linear Time, God being outside of time is a bit beyond me. I don't believe in predestination.

But then again, it's a matter of belief. *I* don't believe in it, but certainly people like Charles Manson and Cotton Mather did. I have always figured that I'd wait and see, that I'll understand more of what is going on afterward.

It may sound like an excuse, but since I'm neither omnipotent nor omniscient, I don't expect to have all the pieces to fit into the jigsaw. It would be nice to have everything logically categorized and explainable, but I don't think anybody really can limit something like God to only what they believe. The only person I can limit or be responsible for is myself.

And I try not to make scary bad decisions.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they have a real choice to not-be-doomed. That's my problem... I think maybe, if God knows all the answers in advance, that's not real free will. Free will is where nobody knows what's going to happen next. If, on some level, someone knows what's going to happen, it's not free will and choice does not exist, no matter how much it LOOKS like choice exists. If the future can be known with certainty, then there is no choice and there is no free will.

*sigh* I'm probably not explaining this very well.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I'm not either.

Part of it is because I can't really subscribe to the "there can be no changes." That nobody can make changes to their lives, because it's already predestined. And if there are changes, there are other possibilities.

I can't explain how God would be able to see the possiblities...

I'm not smart enough, and really haven't got the background in theoretical theology to explain.

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

This is an argument that Abner makes a lot to people who argue that free will exists and God knows everything...particularly if you believe that God also created the universe--because then God made the universe, charted the course of the first photons, such that you would make the decision to have whatever it was you had for breakfast this morning, and not something else. And so on for every decision in everyone's life.

With that conception of God it is impossible to have free will--though you can *feel* like you do. And maybe, for at least some people, that's enough.

I don't really accept that God knows every decision we're going to make, but then I don't really think of God as the sort of person/personality that precisely knows things. It's like thinking of gravity and magnetism as being aware of the things they're moving around--doesn't quite work for me.

[brni.livejournal.com]

my father (who is a professor of theology and a methodist minister) believes strongly that belief in god needs to be rational, and that as a result, the concept of god needs to be rational.

think of it this way: a volcano erupts, a tsunami hits, an earthquake demolishes a town - hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or more people die, many of them instantly, without chance of redemption for themselves or others. an omnipotent god could have created a world with a physics that precludes tsunamis or other natural disasters. for an omnipotent god to fail to do that is evil. an omniscient god could have sent notice for people to evacuate. for an omniscient god to fail to do that is evil.

for god to be entirely, wholly good (and for people to have free will), it is necessary that god NOT be omnipotent or omniscient. so, that's the god he believes in.

then again, he doesn't believe in hell either. but he believes in heaven.

me? i think it's all crappe.

"What the #*^&$ happened to my free will?"

[teflon-tim.livejournal.com]

They do have the choice not to be doomed, don't they?

That's a whole other kettle of fish, as varying sects and varying interpretations of the Bible will have different standards as to what constitutes "doomed" vs. "saved" -- but that's a discussion for another day. We're talking about Fate v. Free Will* here.

Being an avid SF reader I've never liked the idea of Linear time; I prefer the quantum mechanical view of existence, i.e. life depicted as a series of infinitely branching "A" and "B" choices leading to a number of "C" futures. Using that as a model, I'd like to think that as the One who originally drew the Great Flow Chart, God has knowledge of all possible futures (all the "C" points), but leaves it up to us as to which "A" or "B" choices we make.

Ironically enough, in the end the only "C" point that matters is one that *is* pre-determined for us all: we all die. What happens after that, i.e. whether or not a "D" point exists, is yet another discussion. :)

It's not a perfect model, of course; nothing thought up by a mere mortal is. But I vastly prefer it to the idea of Predestination, which in my view eliminates free will and therefore eliminates real meaning and purpose from the life of the individual.

*[You will recall, of course, the landmark 1997 case in which the SCOTUS decided in favor of Free Will by a 5-4 vote. O'Connor was the swing vote; Scalia wrote the dissenting opinion.]

Re: "What the #*^&$ happened to my free will?"

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

The spouse absolutely will NOT read Time Travel novels exactly for these reasons. Paradox. aaieeeee!

Re: "What the #*^&$ happened to my free will?"

[teflon-tim.livejournal.com]

No, no, I wasn't thinking about that at all. There's no heading back to an earlier point "A" so you can choose "B" -- what's done is done.

Let me put it this way: in the Catholic tradition in which most of my family was raised, we are taught to pray not for specific things to happen to us ("Oh Lord, please let me get that job I interviewed for last week..."), but for the strength/wisdom/insight to do what is right.

To insert this into my (flawed) model, God looks at the choices before us (points "A" and "B") and then looks ahead on the Great Flow Chart at what the consequences of those choices (one or more points "C") will be. The wisdom that someone prays for would take the form of a insight into that possible point "C" -- not a vision of the future, but some extra brain power enabling one to deduce the results of one's actions more clearly and thus make more informed choices.

Hmmm. I am definitely putting this Flow Chart thing into my novel -- if I ever get around to writing it, that is...

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

Yes. God can basically *not* be simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. So bye-bye classical Christian conception (and to a lesser extent Jewish, though Jews generally aren't so hung up on the omnibenevolent thing) of God.

Which leaves people who can see the problem with the classical conception (not everyone) to find/invent/whatever their own vision of God. Or to decide that the whole God idea is bad ju-ju and live ethical lives without (which is an equally fine alternative, IMO).

Personally, I'm a panentheist--I believe that God is everything and is in everything, but there is more to God than the universe that we can percieve (now or ever). I think that, if God is Omni-anything, it's Omni-Outside-Our-Ability-To-Understand. Every attempt to write or speak about God is, on some level, blasphemy because there is no way humans can comprehend the mystery and vastness. Every word we say is a limitation on God. Even saying that God is vast and mysterious may keep people from seeing God in tiny things like neutrinos and in simple things like grains of sand.

Sorry. I have spent *years* studying theology, believe it or not, but I'm still not exceptionally articulate about what I believe.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's it exactly!

But being humans, we attempt to define our world. I don't know that it's blasphemous though. More like we are children working our way toward understanding. Some people never will reach it. Some people reach it, and then lose it. It's a satori of sorts.

As for omnibenevolent... I don't see always making sure someone is happy is necessarily always good for human beings. My children need to learn by their errors, and they need to accept the consequences of those actions to learn. Otherwise they won't learn. So what we might see as not being benevolent, or as being downright malevolent might not be so.

Again, it's hard for me to verbalize.

On the other hand (meaning able to verbalize, proseletyze, preach)... have either of you read Charles Manson's work? There is a man who is truly dangerous in that he can make insanity and death sound very, Very plausible. So just because we can't explain the way that some do, does not mean we're not working toward an understanding of what is right.

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of Charles Manson's work--we're talking the murderer here, yes??

There are some very scary people who can make all sorts of things sound reasonable and right. Like the dude who's name I'm blanking on in Jonestown--Jim Jones? And those Heaven's Gate people, their guru was like that.

But then I think some people really *want* to believe *something*, anything--something firm and definite and more solid than "We can't really say anything that's at all accurate about God except that God Is". (Which is why I'm never going to have followers, I suppose.) And those people who want to have *someone* give them definite things to believe can wind out in harmless places like ashrams and monasteries, in annoying places like Fundamentalist prayer groups, and in dangerous places like holding a gun on someone who disagrees with them.

I agree with you that making someone happy all the time isn't necessarily the best thing for them--but I think you can get pretty far away from benevolence in letting people learn from their mistakes.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

True. I won't let my kids do something that will kill them or maim them.

The thing is... just a thought... if this isn't the end all and be all life (though I live it like it is), then death is not the worst thing that can happen. Maybe. I don't know...

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

Even if this is the be-all end-all life, I don't think that death is the worst thing that can happen. I mean, "death before dishonour" is kind of trite sounding, but ... I think there's a point there.

Because life is about more than just living and staying alive--we're all going to die, there's no escaping that--so what you do with your life is what makes a difference. Whether you believe in heaven/hell, reincarnation, or oblivion, all you can control is how you live *now*. And living with honor and according to your principles is more important, maybe, than simply keeping alive.

Sorry, I'm being even less articulate than usual and I'm not sure I'm even *right*. But it feels right--I'd rather die with self-respect than live without it. But, of course, in the actual situation of choosing, who knows what I'd do.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I know there are more important things out there. I know there are things I would die for. The spouse and the kinder being three of them.

But those are just words until something like that happens to come up. How do I know how I will act until the crunch comes (hopefully it will never come).

So while I agree that there are things worth living for, and things worth dying for, I'm also one of those obsessively picky people who can't generalize enough to say, "I would die to protect the constitution" or anything like that.

As Missus Pongo said in 101 Dalmations, "How can I depend on a thing that depends?"

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree with you there--until the situation comes up (God forbid) then I can't say what I'd actually do.

I know what I wish I'd do. But *shrug*...

Honestly, I hope I never find out and I hope you never find out. :)