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by informatimago 1318 days ago
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger.

This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.
3 comments
paulryanrogers 1318 days ago
Was just thinking that religion was the one thing that caused me decades of unnecessary anxiety over my natural wants and interests. Would not recommend.
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leethargo 1318 days ago
I believe this to be similar to Epicurus' excuse [1]: He couldn't publicly say that there are no gods as creators, because that would have been blasphemy. But he wanted to take away the fear that everybody had of punishment by gods. So he argued that our (human) lives aren't important enough for the gods to mess with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Theology

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bheadmaster 1318 days ago
> He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming

I don't quite understand - you're using our "programming" as an argument that we have free will? Wouldn't our "programming" imply that our will is already deterministic?

In other words, is there any difference between our will being driven by our programming, and driven by God's debugger? We're following orders either way...

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