Adam and Eve (page 5)

waiting

Sigh,,,,,,

Have the adherents of the theory of free will the right to punish? ......If he is punished, he is punished for having preferred the worse reasons to the better; which he must therefore have known.

And here one calls "free will" to one's aid; it is pure willfulness which is supposed to decide, an impulse is supposed to enter within which motive plays no part, in which the deed, arising out of nothing, occurs as a miracle.

It is this supposed wilfulness, in a case in which wilfulness ought not to reign, which is punished; the rational intelligence, which knows law, prohibition and comand, ought to have permitted no choice

Thus the offender is punished because he employs 'free will,' that is to say, because he acted without a reason where he ought to have acted in accordance with reasons.

The presupposition that for an offence to be punishable its perpetrator must have intentionally acted contrary to his intelligence - it is precisely this presupposition which is annulled by the assumption of 'free will.'

.......these are the primary thoughts after coffee. Good theory against theory of free will.

Thank you, Zep.

waiting

oops.

Edited by - waiting on 23 August 2000 21:54:31

Zep

No opinion???.....i dont have an opinion Waiting, it just let these issues lie, they dont bother me anymore.The quote is from 'a Neitzsche reader'...which took it from 'the wanderer and his Shadow'(i think thats what its called.)

Adam and eve...it reads like a fairy tale.It happened so long ago and there are so little details in the bible.You could just guess and guess and guess...what if this, what if that????.I use to ask these questions a lot(does God know the future/Why does he allow suffering), but now i just give up.I live, i make choices, and i'm to a degree responsible for most of what i've done...and i believe in some kind of God?,though, i'm not sure how i should take the bible!

You can drive yourself mad thinking about all this stuff, its not worth it!.Too much speculation is involved....looking for answers where there are none.

Pathofthorns

After all is said and done, probably the answer of the day: (IMO)

i dont have an opinion Waiting, it just let these issues lie, they dont bother me anymore...
You can drive yourself mad thinking about all this stuff, its not worth it!.Too much speculation is involved....looking for answers where there are none.

At some point when my mind is up to it, I'll look over the issues involved and all the sides to it. But when no one really knows anything for sure, when it seems just an exercise in speculation, what real difference does it make to how I live my life anyway?

Path

waiting

Hey guys,

I think one of the problems in life is that "no man is an island" is a concept which involves our emotions and mental makeup as well.

Everything hinges on something else;

If Adam and Eve did not exist, as the WTBTS has long argued - then there would be no need for a saviour, Jesus Christ. Then there would be no need for Christians.

Well, then there would be no need for a lot of things, like the Jewish law - which was supposed to teach the people a need for Jesus.

See? Everything hinges upon something else. That's the problem with life - it all hinges - making it very difficult, or impossible, to understand.

And then we are supposed to make logical, knowledgeabe decisions. Go figure.

waiting

Frenchy

Dear Waiting: I don't have much time this morning but I will try to make do. As always your responses really hit some deep chords. Your arguments are meritorious and my replies are by no means attempts to ‘explain them away' but I think you know that. In response to your comment:

But why give Free Choice if it's not an equal choice? I can accept candy (Paradise) or poison (Death). Some Free Choice.

God is aware of evil. Somewhere in a past perhaps so distant and dim that it is inconceivable for us to even imagine, He, being aware of all things gave due consideration to evil. He decided that he could not be evil. Now, he cannot. It's a choice that he has denied himself. He wants his creation to understand why evil cannot exist alongside true happiness and fulfillment. We have to learn this. Some, perhaps to his surprise, have chosen to embrace evil. The evil will not be tolerated beyond its usefulness. Once the lesson is learned it will be abolished. (This is difficult to put into words!) Death (not an eternity of torment in hell) is the end of evil. God is saying look, this is what evil is and pursuing it will result in death in the end. You may choose the evil but you will suffer its consequence. It's not a punishment but rather the result of wanting to practice what is hurtful to the whole creation.
Waiting, you say that this is no choice at all but please think real hard on this. There are doctors who smoke. They of all people should be aware of what they are doing. They choose the destructive course. Hookers wear crucifixes. Murderers go to church. Child molesters read the Bible. The practice of evil is not done out of ignorance because then it's not really evil, it's just wrong and as a result could be corrected. When evil is committed it is committed for its own sake.
Have you ever eaten a watermellon that you stole? Believe me it's much sweeter than the one you buy! Why? You know. Excitement in the risks being taken, like husbands and wives cheating on one another. In the end, however, it brings grief and pain to many people. When I was a child (I was a rascal!) I did things for which I knew for a certainty that I would be punished. I did them nonetheless. So, you see, I really had a choice. God will not tolerate evil forever. We need to learn that evil is counter-productive and we need to learn to hate it so that we will not want to practice it. It will no longer have the allure that is does now once we learn just how terrible it is. When this happens we will have grown up spiritually and God will shoo us out of the nest, fully confident on how we will fly. No one has complete freedom. Even God has restricted himself so that we are told that he cannot lie, for instance. We are going to have to learn to restrict ourselves as well. In order for joy and happiness and creativity to exist freedom must have its parameters.

-Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it-

waiting

Wow, Frenchy,

You are fast!

Just wanted to add to my minutes-ago post:

We have to believe in free will - we have no choice. Isaac Singer

waiting

Zep

He decided that he could not be evil.

I think it would have been impossible for God to be Evil, to even contemplate it.First of all 'evil' would/could not have existed before God created other creatures.Second....this thought:Its always the weak man who wants to dominate others, to inflict shame and harm on others just for the sake of it, like a bully does.If God had done evil(inflicted pain on creatures he had created just for the sake of it) it would have meant that he was unfulfilled in some way, that he had a weakness, that he was imperfect?.Imperfection and God dont mix in my mind!

waiting

ok, ok,

Now you can tell my brain cells are wearing down - I'm resorting to quotes:

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. Paul Anderson

Basically the word mankind is made up of two separate words, mank and ind. What do these words mean? Nobody knows and that is why mankind is a mystery. Jack Handey

I guess that old saying "Life is a Mystery" is true.

waiting

Tigger

Phew!! what a lot of reading and now my head is spinning, but its kind of freaky because Ive had this very train of thought going round my head for the last couple of days. Ive come to the conclusion that the bible could pass as another book by Tolkien, what with all the strange creatures, good conquoring evil and having tests to pass etc etc etc.
It all seems like a really sick joke to prove a point. If God is all seeing, all knowing then he knows the final outcome. Why not put us all out of our misery and get it over with. I just get sick to the stomach when i think of all the suffering that has occured in the past hundreds of years (granted it was all mankind against mankind) but when you think of all the people who've been murdered, tortured, starved to death, mutilated....you get the picture, when is the ref going to step on to the ball field and blow his whistle and hold up a yellow card?
It just seems like a bit too much overkill at the sake of proving a point, especially when he knows the outcome.
Even as a kid the story of Job never sat right with me. I mean the guy lost ( i forget) quite a few kids and what he was supposed to be overjoyed at getting them replaced with new kids. Im sorry but as a mother i can honestly say that if you lost a child, a million children would never make up for the one you lost. That story seemed to treat life as a commodity, easily expended to prove a point.
Ok Ive had my whinge for the day.
You can all get back to your D & M. Some thought provoking stuff though guys.
Where do you get all those quotes from Waiting?

Adam and Eve

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