In the christian bible, i believe it says that god gave humans free will, to be able to control what actions they take. ..as a human, you know very well that you control the actions and decisions you make, ..right? ============================================================ If you were controlled by 'something else' (e.g. god) would you be aware that you were being controlled by something else? would you accept that there was 'something else' inside your mind/soul? Would you be aware at all? Is awareness and control the same or different thing?
Awareness and control are completely different things. I'm AWARE that I have to work for a living. I do not let it CONTROL me. I could make changes so that I didn't have to work so much or so hard. It's my choice as to weither I want to work and have a home, or not work and live on the streets. Free will allows us the choice to believe or disbelieve in a higher power. We can be aware that there is something out there that is greater than us. Weither you call it a god, nature, time, the universe, existance, etc. whatever you want to call it, we are aware that there is something out there that is greater than us. Free will allows us the choice to either acknowledge it or ignore it. We are aware that the day goes by in 24 hours. That doesn't mean we are controlled by it. We don't have to get up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready for the day. We can choose to sleep til 12:42 before we get up. What choices you make will have the consequences that are expected attached to it. As such, you have to deal with the consequences of those choices. But you get to choose how you deal with it. And it is a cycle that is on-going.
I don't know if the words "free will" are in the bible. What about the pre-existing factors relating to the decisions you make, such as: 1) prior experience (knowledge and wisdom) 2) the current situation a) the existence of the choice b) the options you believe to be viable (tied in with experience) c) the dynamics of the situation which affect your ability to choose (there could be other people involved, etc.) d) how you feel at the moment of the choice (what happened that day, a rough day at work will change the decisions someone makes after work...) Are people aware of the dynamics of a situation that influence the choices they make? They always exist. The words mean different things. You can be aware of something without being able to influence it.
There's no way of knowing whether or not we have free will. If god controls us, he could just want us to think we have free will, and if there is no outer influence, there's a lot of previous actions and circumstances that go into every choice we make.
Which means no free will (as per the definition: 2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention). However, the other definition is valid : 1 : voluntary choice or decision <I do this of my own free will> Although that definition tends to confuse some people. You know the type : "But I decided to do it! I have free will!" "Did you ever consider why you decided as you did?" "I did it because I wanted to!" "Do you know why you wanted to?" "Because I chose to want to!!!" "Are you sure there wasn't some influence that made you want to choose as you did?" "There wasn't any influence on my decision making process because I decided to do it of my own free will!" "So your prior experiences didn't influence your decision?" "They didn't because I have free will!" "Ok, so you haven't learned anything from your prior experiences that influences the decisions you make?" "No, because I have free will and that means that my will is not bound by the experiences I have had!"
Free will is a rediculous idea in the sense of Christian dogma. You can't have a predetermined 'destiny', which you do if God knows your fate long before you're born, and still make decisions on your own. Doesn't work like that.
Sounds like my mom's church. It's full with people who believe that if its your time to die you cant do anything about it.. well how in the hell can you have a "time to die" if people have free will? How can god know when you're going to die unless he controls everybody? Which, in turn, would make us quite unhuman and not alive, but whatever, its nothing to devote brain cells to.
As far as I can tell, I'm not beging controled by anything but myself and the nature thats makes myself. And From that I am free because I can rise above both. Not very easy, but doable.
I just don't buy this argument that because we have the ability to make a choice that we have "free will." There is no true free will, especially as mainstream christianity has defined it. There are plenty of things we have to deal with in life that were completely outside our control or choice, and are completely influential regarding our choices. Starting from the minute you're born the choices available to you are being restricted and influenced by many outside elements. Who your parents are, where you live, the education you will receive, other people's influence on your life, etc. If true free will existed the muslim woman in Africa would be able to have the same choices available to her as the rich white American businessman. The ability we have to "choose" things doesn't mean we have true free will, certainly not in any dogmatic sense. A good point by another poster, if God chooses one's "time to go" (a very common idea among christians) then free will is straight out the window then, is it not? The christian message has always been contradictory, IMO, and I don't see it much differently in this paticular case.
According to Sartre, we have the feeling that we are free, but in fact we are not. There is freedom of conscience, in this respect the individual is free and master of his own choices (there is free will). In fact, we are condemned to be free (“Les Mouches”), that is we must assume responsibility and make decisions on our own (whether we know what to decide, whether we decide right or wrong, whether we are confused or not). Conventions keep the individual away from his freedom. We are never free of the others’ judgement (“Huis-clos”), we live in a psychological hell with people around us passing judgements on us all the time. The Existentialists hold that the individual is controlled by social instances which escape his control. The social self (a surface self) is commanded by the others and by certain circumstances. From where does the absurd come? According to the Existentialists, from this clash between human consciousness (which is transparent) and the world (which is opaque, not revealing itself). I believe the problem is, if I am free, if I can do whatever I want, I will end up getting confused. Why? Because if God is dead (in the sense of values), if there are no more ‘standards’ for moral values, how am I going to know what’s right and what’s wrong? If there’s no more destiny, then the responsibility will weigh all the more on my shoulders, if I take a decision with bad consequences, then I will end up being held responsible instead of fate and am I strong enough to accept that?... I only exist function of the society in which I live and according to whose rules I must live. I must fashion and refashion myself according to its standards, I must play a variety of roles and act accordingly to be accepted, noticed, respected, etc. If there is a clash of values between me and the world, then I end up in loneliness, isolated from the world and its norms I do not want to respect. Is this freedom? I believe freedom is only in the mind, freedom of thought that is. More or less, as we are largely the products of different patterns of thought, ideologies circulating in a society at a given time...
There is a webpage I read a while ago that I can't find right now, but the basic jist of it was that if there is no spiritual force acting on us, and possibly even if there is, then all our actions and thoughts are the result of bouncing atoms and electrons and whatnot, whose courses were all set in motion and set in stone at the beginning of the universe, i.e. the big bang.
Seems to ignore emergent behavior. Water "is" a bunch of water molecules bouncing around according to some interpretations, but this ignores the behavior of the system as a whole when we focus upon small units of the system. Anyway, if you look at it in a different way, you might see physical "systems" as "scaffolding" to mold and interact with your consciousness. At the same time, this "scaffolding" reacts to your consciousness, so you can't really say that consciousness is determined only by physical systems- it is determined by it's own existence as well and the existence of other consciousnesses.....es....es....ess....
DR. HERSKOWITZ'S LECTURE IN GERMANY, DECEMBER 1993 INTRODUCTION DR. HERSKOWITZ: "Man is born free and everywhere, he is in chains. How did this change, come about? I do not know." These are the opening lines of Jean Jacques Rousseau's social contract. In the course of this lecture, I hope that you will find at least a partial answer to this question. The key is the process of armoring. It followed Reich's emphasis on character analysis, and he came to recognize that character is represented in the body as well as in behavior, that emotional repression is simultaneously a somatic as well as a psychological event. Great novelists have recognized this and have generally characterized character in the form of bodily terms: the individual who draws in his breath when events are overwhelming, the angry man who walks around with a tight jaw, and the stubborn person who has a stiff neck. These are all recognized by all of us, and all of us respond to them in our reactions to other individuals. Armoring converts free laughter into a cackle or a twitter; it may cause a woman to speak in a little girl's voice. It does not merely change a function by degree but also by time; it renders behavior more predictable, more stereotyped, armoring puts life in constraint. Armoring is most often revealed in muscular tension, but it is also revealed in eyes that are glazed, in excessive body contact, etc. It is a dynamic event, and it entails a consumption of energy. It constrains us physically, emotionally, and ideationally. It is a cocoon to which we gradually become accustomed. Reich viewed all living systems as pulsating. In the mammal, there are many individual pulsations encompassed within the overall pulse of charge with energy, and discharge with energy. There is the heart's pulse, the lung's pulse, the gastrointestinal pulse, the brain's pulse, and so forth. Armoring narrows the pulsation from aliveness to all aspects of existence to, in the worst case, living at a level of near existence. The heavily armored individual fears expansion and pleasure gives him anxiety. Armoring blocks the flow of natural impulses and bends them to new purposes, just as light is bent when it hits glass or water, so armoring bends impulses that come from our core and changes them into another direction. For example, the natural aggression of a child whose parents cannot tolerate that aggression and punish him for it turns, when he armors, that punishment into anger, hatred, sneakiness, or other manifestations which Reich called his secondary manifestations. And these are covered over, by what Reich called his superficial layer, that is, the layer that meets society. Therefore, his secondary layer might be covered over by compliance, politeness, by characterlogical rigidity, or other kinds of cover-ups. Thus the orgonomist uses the term personality not in terms of id, ego and super ego, but in terms of core impulses, secondary layer, and superficial layer. In our therapy, we treat patients going in the opposite direction - from how it was formed. We start with treating character as it's revealed in the superficial layer. When we reveal that and uncover that, we get to the manifestations of the secondary layer and, if we can manage to unburden the individual of the secondary layer impulses, we finally arrive at the natural core.
I came across this quote (don’t know to whom it belongs) in someone’s blogs: „Life is what happens while you are making other plans." ...and it made me wonder whether we have free will or whether we have desires. I mean, sometimes it doesn’t help if we have the free will to change our lives. Because if we don’t have the means to change our lives, if the external factors cannot help, then... actually we only have desires, dreams that cannot always be fulfilled. So against our free will we have an enemy – life. There are so many things in life we can’t control, even if we wished to... Even the fact that we were born is not a choice we ourselves made... But even the idea of having to make choices does not imply free will – that is, if we are given some alternatives and have to choose from them... maybe we’d want something else, an alternative which is not offered in the grid of choices... We can’t control when we are born and we can’t control when we die (of natural death, that is). We can’t control falling in love, sometimes we seem to lose all control over ourselves and our own lives... even if we had the will to do all these... If we have the free will and make the choice of writing a poem, but if nothing comes out of it no matter how hard we try – there’s always the issue of talent at stake – then... it seems our ‘free’ will clashes against reality (the way we were born, without the gift for poetry...). We may have the free will to obey or to break the rules, but afterwards there are always consequences we have to bear. And finally, if we break the rules, then we end up having no choice but to take punishment; if we don’t want to be punished, then we have to ignore our free will and obey the rules... and there’s not much space for freedom here... What is it that I understand by free will? Control, be it over events, one’s actions, one’s self. It also includes independence – from society, conventions, from external circumstances, from the unpredictable (which is sort of impossible). Free will is different from freedom in the sense that it involves more power and control. Free will can also meet obstacles from reality, while freedom excludes these right from the start, together with conventions, rules, norms, unpleasant consequences... But can we really ever be free and happy? Freedom sometimes brings confusion, together with responsibility and even difficulty of making decisions and establishing facts as truths... We may have free will, but it clashes against obstacles which are outside us, in the external world, or inside us, and then free will becomes weaker and changes into desire... I may want to change the world, to control time, but I will never be in control of these... so all I’m left with is a desire, a dream...
if there is no free will then knowledge would not be possible. we wouldn't be able to use reason. we couldn't choose to believe anything. if it's true we would never be able to know it.
in the christian bible there are many statements that are mutualy self contradictory if taking litteraly. this is intentional. to make the point that what it is trying to tell and teach is aligory rather then litteralism. why aligory? because the meaning of words drifts and that is the only way to perpetuate some semblance of meaning beyond the drift of the meaning of individual words. of course fanatics don't WANT to know this. because fanatacism doesn't really care about spiritual meaning. only the ability to miss interpret it as an excuse and an immagining of beeing told it is alright to cause wanton destructiveness and harm. thus fanatacism is the real anit-religeon of each and every religeion it is itself a fanatacism of. even christ tried to explain this. as did every other reavealer of organized belief. =^^= .../\...
words do change meaning. that's why it's important to read passages in the bible in context and not a verse here and a verse there.
