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Either God in the OT was still seeing things from the perspective of choice, or some people were lying about what He actually thought and said.
I don't think the law is going to be a good example for showing a free will. If God told you to do these laws or die wouldn't that qualify as an outside or divine influence?
I've time to address this at last. I'm not a fan of posts with multiple points and I try to keep my responses to 2 or 3 points at most. I may break my self imposed rule here. If you respond, I'll try to keep my reply to your main points.
It's my position that you truly can't be personally held to blame, or that you can be held culpable for an action because the type of person you are. Your desires, your characteristics, your choices are determined by events out of your control. And that if someone breaks into my house and steals my goods, if I had the exact dna, the exact upbringing, the exact education, the exact peer pressure etc etc then I wouldn't be me - I'd be him. And I'd make the same choices as he does. There's no 'I' outside of everything that is me that can say 'Hang on, I shouldn't be doing this'. That's dualism and it's a position that has long been discounted. One that I discounted a long time before I rejected free will, but is a position that ultimately leads to that rejection.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'm not ignoring blame. I'm saying that it isn't applicable.
Everyone, unless they have a serious psychological condition, knows the difference between right and wrong. People don't rob banks or assault people or cheat on their wives without doing their best to get away with it. Because...they know it's wrong. But they do it anyway. The guy that broke into my house knew very well it was wrong. But he decided to do it anyway. The potential benefits outweighed the possible negatives.
You are either the type of person who can be persuaded by reasoned argument. Or you are not. If you are one, then you can't decide to be the other. If we caught the guy who broke into my home then we could ask him if he could change. It would be explained to him the impact the crime had. Could he be persuaded? It depends on him. If he can't then we lock him up as a deterrent. 'Do this again and you will lose your freedom. If anyone else does this then they will lose their freedom'.
Yeah, we want to blame people. It's a natural reaction. I don't think it's valid for the reasons given.
What part of the explanation is self contradictory? It certainly was obfuscating. I was quite specific.
As I said...not culpable.
Be held responsible for your own actions…. In my opinion, is the actual point, here. This undermines rational reality. If you create a delusion that you aren't responsible for how you choose to respond to this rational universe, you have denied the validity of every word you speak, in my opinion.
DNA, Nature and Nurture. However, this is really just smoke and mirrors to the actual point. You are suggesting that the way environment shapes a person empowers the peoples free will choices that contribute to the individuals "being" in such a way as to "shape" said person. This merely denotes culpability to environment, circumstance and other people. If you continue to go backwards with this logic of throwing culpability off of each person for existing, it ultimately points to the existence of a "Watch Maker", Who set the entire watch in motion.
We can only hope that God made us to be decent people in the end, etc, and chose us to be saved in or by the end, etc.
My Brother in Jesus Christ, Neogaia772! Long time no direct speak! I know we see this differently.
You probably have to keep surrendering though, and I'm just hoping you won't have to continually always be doing that one day continually, but can maybe one day be truly free, etc.
False Humility? I'm the most humble person, only bested by Moses and Jesus in Humility. How could that be false humility? What is false humility?
God Bless You Grip.False Humility? I'm the most humble person, only bested by Moses and Jesus in Humility. How could that be false humility? What is false humility?
Tongue in cheek
Mark 10:18
I felt I should point out this could be seen as a mistake--> Grip Docility said: I will simply say this. Because I know I'm culpable for every mistake that I make, I am in perpetual surrender to Jesus Christ, because He alone is Good.
If our choices were not pre-determined in some way, there would be no causal reason for them, so they'd be truly random. Would they still count as choices? Not IMO, but it doesn't really matter.
Yes, I agree. Blame follows from culpability which follows from free will. They are mistaken concepts that arise out of our ignorance of the determinants of our behaviour. They've stuck around because they're part of an intuitively and emotionally satisfying, and somewhat effective framework of societal control. We can be held responsible as physical agents, but whether we are morally responsible agents is determined by influences we ultimately have no control over.
Yes, although there's no simple way to tell who can be changed and who cannot (it's a behavioural analogy to the Halting Problem!). I would suggest that only a small percentage of people cannot be humanely changed to an acceptable level of conformity with basic moral norms, given sufficient resources and time. The difficulty is in assessing the necessary resources & time and judging when success has been achieved.
Rejecting a concept only requires that you have reasoned that it is false, or that you dislike it (feel or intuit that it is false), or some mixture of the two. Neither reason nor feeling requires free will, culpable or otherwise.
