(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]

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.