- Jan 24, 2008
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All good points except for So what?
Respectfully, this is what.
Respectfully, my thoughts exactly about what you said regarding the Roman’s verse. Your depraved mind=not acknowledging God is rather irrelevant as it pertains to the verses since the people were already not acknowledging God when they were turned over to a depraved mind. Which leads me to the next point of:
And your notion a depraved cannot/difficult to acknowledge God isn’t supported by the verses. To the contrary, a part of a depraved mind is acknowledging God.
The will is defined as either the desire, or the faculty of reasoning (two different meanings). If the term free in the moral/immoral purview denotes that the will is free from any external moral or immoral Spirit, this would not be true since the soul of man has always been predisposed according to a measure of Light and darkness that dwells in the soul.
We are defining a phrase. The phrase is free will. Isolating the individual word and determining its individual meaning is misplaced. Just as it would be misplaced to understand the phrase “stop light” by obsessing over the individual meaning of the word “stop” and/or “light” and think the phrase is accurately understood by doing so. It is also misplaced to obsess over the individual word “free” for the phrase “free speech” and think doing so tells us what the proper understanding of the entire phrase.
Free will is understood as the person, oneself, is the cause for the decision or action. This phrase and its understanding is contrasted with determinism and/or predestined. The latter two say the person isn’t the cause for their decisions, actions, but external factors caused the person to act, decide, like strings to a puppet pulled by a puppet master. Predetermined means, in this specific context, is God is causing, is making, a person specifically decide something or specifically act in some way.
Knowledge precedes us in existence and we reason upon what we believe to be true. We are not the cause of the existence of what is true even because we are subject to it, whether we believe that or not.
Edifying but irrelevant to the issue of free will, of man by his free will choosing to believe in God and his son Jesus, choose ambivalence, disbelief, etcetera, and by his free will choosing to act in a manner of adhering to the Bible.
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