[ivape]

I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time).

Faith was a gift to help.

In terms of Christ, let me put it this way. Imagine your high school, and one day the President of the US visits. You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. It’s a matter of faith, and it’s the little bit you need to help with the gift of free will.

The very first story (well second story) in the main monotheistic books was the Eden Story. That story is all about how vulnerable we are with the choice of free will. Empirically, we have seen the failure of it over and over throughout human history (systemically you can easily see it). So, yes, I fully believe in the fallen nature of man, not because we are evil, but because what a gift and responsibility free will actually is.

[Tijdreiziger]

> I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time).

I think this hypothesis is flawed.

I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society.

There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives).

Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.

[somenameforme]

I'd challenge your position with a simple thought experiment. You're given a device with a button. When you push that button a random person you don't know will be killed. In exchange you'll receive $1 million in completely clean money, and nobody will ever know you pushed the button or how many times you pushed it.

So how many times would you push it? Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. And asking how many times you'd push it also gets rid of the marginal utility argument, and just to the dirty self centered core of humanity.

People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards. There will undoubtedly be a guy who pushes it thousands of times, and then donates a fraction of it to charity, convincing himself that he's actually saved lives on net. That is humanity in a nutshell.

[Tijdreiziger]

Personally, I would take a strictly utilitarian approach. If I thought I could save >1 life for $1 million, I would press the button. The number of presses would depend solely on the number of lives I think I (or a humanitarian organization) could save with the money.

I think that most people with a moral compass would either take this approach, or would not press the button at all.

I think your second paragraph is misguided and reveals an overly pessimistic view of the nature of humanity. (Such is the nature of cynics: they always think everyone else is just as cynical as they are.)

> People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards.

Religious people aren’t immune from that, and conversely, it’s not necessary to be religious to have moral values.

edit: I thought about this some more. I think that the button problem is equivalent to the trolley problem (provided you can save >1 life with $1 million, as above).

[somenameforme]

No, it's the perfect example because we can't help but rationalize a way to justify pushing it. If you now gave every single person that button, humanity would be extinct within minutes - many of them rationalizing that they're saving humanity.

This is the heart of where the saying that power corrupts comes from. It's not that power corrupts but that these sort of decisions are ones that will never be available to anybody without power. Yet for those with power it's not that far away from many practical scenarios. In other words, we start corrupt, but our impotence mitigates the relevance of that. Power just reveals our character.

And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.

---

To respond to your edit, consider that you're basically doing a version of the trolley problem where you have the choice to redirect the track from killing one person, to killing two, but you get a million bucks for doing so. And you're now arguing that this is the utilitarian choice. It's plainly a false rationalization, but we can so easily convince ourselves that it's reasonable. Our extreme strength at rationalization is humanity's biggest moral and ethical failing. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY

[Tijdreiziger]

> To respond to your edit, consider that you're basically doing a version of the trolley problem where you have the choice to redirect the track from killing one person, to killing two, but you get a million bucks for doing so.

No, this is definitely not right.

Consider first the non-repeated case. There are two possibilities:

1. You do not press the button. Nothing changes about the world.

2. You press the button and donate $1 million to a humanitarian organization. A random person dies, but the humanitarian organization uses the money to save an average of 5 others.

Option 1 is like not pulling the lever, thereby letting the trolley run over 5 people. Option 2 is like pulling the lever, thereby saving 5 people, but letting the trolley run over another.

(From this, the repeated case trivially follows.)

However, as you allude to, the button problem has a third option: press the button and keep the $1 million. This is so cartoonishly diabolical that only a sociopath would do it. If this was how most people acted, nobody would ever help anybody else, we would all be looking for opportunities to stab each other in the back, and we would most likely not even have developed such a nebulous concept as ‘morality’.

This is what I alluded to with my remark about cynics: the cynic is negative, and therefore, thinks that everyone else is negative too. However, this reveals more about the cynic than it does about humanity (at least, I hope so; I am an optimist who likes to have faith in humanity).

> And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.

Many, many wars were and are fought for religious reasons. The Christian Church itself has famously fought multiple religious wars (IIUC, so has the Islamic prophet). Considering this, I really don’t think religion gets to take the high ground when it comes to ‘having fixed values’.

[somenameforme]

But can't you see what you're doing? You're simply rationalizing everything, repeatedly, until you find a reason to press the button. To the point that you're convincing yourself that in the scenario where you're literally killing people for money, that you're actually saving people.

And what you're doing is what humanity naturally does. The people we view as awful in history certainly acknowledged they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalized it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in. In their minds not only were they behaving ethically, but they were practically a martyr fit for Sainthood, as they are taking the burden, the stain, of such actions upon themselves, only to help an unimaginable number of people in the future. Really it was just charity at unimaginable cost to themselves.

Of course that utopia of the future never comes to pass, but the horrible things they do in the present always do. Such is the nature of humanity that we'll always find a reason to press the button. It's not about 'good' or 'evil' or anything of the sort. Rationalization enables a good person to do the most evil of things, and feel fine about it.

I think the only way to combat this issue is with static values. That can take many forms ranging from religion to a distinct and well defined personal philosophy. But I think anybody lacking such a structured system (from whatever source) will always succumb to rationalization.

[freedomben]

What if you were a Christian, and you knew that the random person being killed was a rock solid Christian who would die painlessly and without even knowing it, and would go immediately into the bosom of Christ?

In that scenario pushing the button seems like the right thing to do. If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault. What is the worth of a soul? My understanding is it's infinite. If not infinite, certainly it must be worth more than a measly cool million.

[baobun]

> If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault

Have you read the Bible? Jesus would disagree with this take very hard. Or do you have any support for this moral argument from any of the apostles?

[freedomben]

Yes I've read the Bible cover to cover multiple times (although admittedly on the second and third time through I did skim a bit of the last 1/3 of the OT rather than reading it for diligent comprehension), and have taken a number of different courses on it. I've read the New Testament at least a dozen times through, plus many years of Sunday School looking at different books/passages.

> Jesus would disagree with this take very hard.

Citation needed for that. This is something hotly debated among all sorts of Christians so I don't claim to have a solid answer, but perseonally I think the Bible is repeatedly pretty clear that you can lose it[1].

I used to be a strong believer, but no longer am. Out of curiosity, do you think I'm going to Hell or am I still all set for (eternal) life because of my past faith?

[1]: https://www.biblestudyguide.org/articles/salvation/salvation...

[baobun]

> Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it.

Is that a royal "Our"? I don't think you are speaking for anyone but yourself. People like Trump, MSB and Netanyahu aren't normal. They tend to abuse religion as a justification for their actions rather than spititual inspiration.

[teachrdan]

> You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes.

My question would be: If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? Easy ones include a global flood that killed every animal on Earth. (Except for the two of each animal on Noah's ark, which would have overheated with so many animals in it, if it hadn't collapsed under its own weight first.)

But there are also internal contradictions between the four gospels of the New Testament. Why would God make his own books inaccurate? To me, that indicates they are not the product of divine inspiration but the written accounts of oral histories.

Your response may be that God introduced these errors into his holy books to test our faith. But at that point, isn't the answer to every contradiction and inaccuracy just, "To test our faith"? Is there literally anything that would change your mind, or is your faith just being tested even harder?

[dragonwriter]

> If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it?

This would be a very good gotcha for a religion that believed the Bible was written by God (or at least dictated verbatim) and that it was intended to be a purely literal factual account, neither of which are majority positions within Christian theology (Fundamentalism, in which close approximations of both are important defining beliefs, being a relatively new movement within Protestantism and not the mainstream of Christianity.)

[teachrdan]

> This would be a very good gotcha for a religion that believed the Bible was written by God

Fair enough! But if God is all powerful and all knowing, he decided to make the bible incorrect. Why would he do that?

[jayGlow]

Christians don't belive the Bible was written by God they belive it's the word of God. the inconsistencies and contradictions are because its been written by many people over hundreds of years.

[achierius]

They don't even believe it's the word of God, strictly -- Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible merely contains (in parts) the word of God as reported by men. This is a key distinction between Christian and Islamic theology.

[dragonwriter]

I've heard it described as "Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible is words about God", but there is definitely diversity of belief within Christianity about that; there are certainly groups that have views of the Bible that other Christians view as near-idolatrous.

[em-bee]

free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.

[jemfinch]

This contradicts the most common view of Christians throughout history, especially since the simplest reading of Romans 1 expresses exactly the opposite view: "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse."

[em-bee]

i am not representing a christian viewpoint. but i also do not see the contradiction. the claim that they are without an excuse to reject god does not negate the fact that they have the freedom to reject him. if we didn't have that freedom we could not even have this argument because we would all unquestionably believe in the existence of god.

[r2_pilot]

>free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion.

Much like how religion posits a soul, you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we). You yourself suggest that the input of "revealed God" removes human free will to disbelieve. In other words, God can't(or didn't for whatever reason) create a human that can experience God without disbelief. Anyway long and short of it, just because you believe in free will doesn't mean it exists, either in your belief structure or in actuality, and Calvinists reject your hypothesis outright.

[em-bee]

i don't know how free will is supposed to affect the laws of physics or chemistry. free will is about the choices we can make. that doesn't imply there are no limits to our capacity. nor does having a choice to believe in god or not imply that humans can't experience god without disbelief. on the contrary. that's the whole point. i can believe that the universe is created by god, and that everything i experience is in some way experiencing god, just as i can believe that god doesn't exist, and then, if god does exist, i would experience god without believing that my experience is caused by god. experiencing something doesn't require that i recognize the cause of the experience.

as for calvinism, how is that relevant? the existence if some faction believing something that contradicts the belief of others has no bearing on that belief other than that it may raise some questions that are worth investigating. my brief look at that leads me to the conclusion that their view of free will makes no sense to me.

[r2_pilot]

Specifically, free will can't affect chemistry or physics, because what, to you, is free will, to me, is chemical reactions that lead to your body making movements. Since no known process is capable of altering these reactions, ergo you have no free will(defined as the ability to make choices outside of external interference, whatever that even means). Calvinism is relevant because they purport to believe in the same God you do, yet have wildly different and incompatible theories of mind that make no sense to you. As an outside observer all I can say is that either you or they are wrong, and it's likely you both are.

[freedomben]

Agreed, and to expand slightly, we do know that our brains are constructed on top of neurons, and neurons are way too big to be affected by quantum-level events. There's countless literature describing people who have had accidents or illnesses that damage parts of their brain and change personalities (typically without the patient being aware of any change and in most cases being in adamant denial about it), and we can now pinpoint quite precisely what many parts of the brain do. We even have AI that can now "read minds" to an extent based on measuring neural activity. The idea of "free will" is highly suspect given the deterministic nature of our brains. There are still some God of the Gaps arguments that try to save free will, but IMHO you have to really want to save it in order to accept many of those arguments. It's deeply uncomfortable to consider, but our brains are deterministic.

This is not my field at all so don't take my word for any of it, but I highly recommend people interested in this read or watch Robert Sapolsky's work. His books "Behave" and "Determined" are utterly fascinating and get very, very deep into this in a way that is challenging but understandable for a non-Neurologist.

[bawolff]

This is a bit of a bizarre argument.

> you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we)

Physics (quantum physics specificly) posits a non-deterministic universe.

However even with a deterministic universe, i don't see how it neccesatates removing free will. Perhaps you (your soul or whatever) can choose whatever you want to, you just always have to make the same choice given the same input. Maybe you dont literally have free will in what you immediately do, but you have free will in defining what type of person you are, which informs what you will do in response to some input.

[Im an atheist if that matters]

[freedomben]

What about Moses? Or Paul? Or the twelve apostles? Or all the Pharisees who witnessed miracles from Jesus himself?

[em-bee]

moses is a prophet or messenger of god just like jesus or mohammad. they are not subject to the same tests. some claim they aren't even human. according to my understanding paul also has been directly chosen by god for a specific mission. i haven't looked at the miracles jesus performed because, since them happening can't be verified and i can't witness them myself they are quite irrelevant for me. i also didn't get the impression that everyone witnessing a miracle was automatically convinced.

also the existence of exceptions doesn't negate that the rest of us have that choice.

[MisterBastahrd]

That's not a reason. That's an excuse for why the vigorous handwaving of the religious is insufficient. We have people who are catching measles because they don't believe in measles vaccines, like right freaking now even though we know that the vaccines are safe, effective, and work. Every dimwit who is against their children getting those vaccines was once a child whose parents were intelligent enough to get the vaccinations for them.

So no, try again, because that argument is silly.

[em-bee]

i don't understand how the freedom to believe or reject god has anything to do with vaccines. what are you trying to say here?

[MisterBastahrd]

Whether or not something exists has zero to do with whether someone accepts that it does. Your free will argument makes absolutely no sense to anyone who actually thinks it through.

[em-bee]

Whether or not something exists has zero to do with whether someone accepts that it does

i didn't make such a claim. the existence of god has nothing to do with free will. he either exists, or he doesn't. your or my belief in the existence of god however is governed by the freedom to either believe or reject his existence. if god exists then rejecting him does not make him go away, nor does believing in god make him appear if there is no god.

my argument was that free will is the reason why god did not reveal himself in a way that everyone would immediately recognize him without a doubt. it was not an argument about his existence.

[MisterBastahrd]

My freedom to believe or reject the existence of god has nothing to do with revelation. People deny what they plainly see and what can be proven to them all the time. You are making an argument that does not exist in any scripture, and is frankly an apologist's argument regarding the failure of Christendom to reach its prophesized conclusion.

[baobun]

So assumimg we have

1. Physical reality (e.g. how many years has earth existed)

2. Metaphysical reality (is there a creator? If so is your "soul" or life in any way relevant to them?)

3. Moral reality (Is killing other humans in cold blood justified by scripture? Are there such a thing as "Good" and "Evil"?)

4. Cultural reality (What do the people who raised you and otherwise influence you believe, local traditions and stories, scripture)

5. What feels intuitive for an individual to realize ("As above, so below", the unit of self, comparing Christ with POTUS, "the fall of man")

Assuming your local space-time intepretation gets it all right (and everyone with different understanding got and gets it wrong) and that all of these by necessity align is some next-level hubris...

[ivape]

1) We can start with the fact that Historians believe Christ existed.

2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person.

3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that.

4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism.

5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin.

6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things.

7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans.

8) I’d let the whole true date of physical reality go. We literally reinvented time after he died. I won’t hold the Old Testament to the test of carbon dating, and reconsider that those books told us all the nature of how things began (from a big explosion).

9) And then we find the miraculous Dead Sea Scrolls proving that those books were not altered through the course of time.

10) The books say your soul is quite important. Christ was also one of the first to suggest your morality is from within (the thing atheist often suggest).

11) I’d finally suggest the following about science:

Imagine I take a shit in a toilet. Imagine you are a brilliant scientist that sits around and figures out every measurement of how the shit moves around the toilet, down to the physics, down to the chemical composition of the shit. You would have figured out the physics of the universe of your toilet, but you will never ever know that I took the shit because I ate a lot of Taco Bell.

12) Hubris would be thinking our constant measuring (science) proves anything about our purpose.

13) Given the above hypothetical, it would be humble to accept the fear of god scripture puts into us, since we would have never even come close to figuring out our purpose via science (finding the true nature of God’s Taco Bell order) without these goofy books.

14) Last but not least:

If the Big Bang was the moment of creation, you can believe one of two things:

A) Something caused it

B) Space was a vacuum and something came from nothing.

If you believe A (You believe in God), our very existence is contingent on the sequence, A lead to B, then to C, and so on, so the entire chain of us talking here was deliberate (plus or minus all the free will decisions of humans, mostly a rounding error in the grand scheme).

15) And my personal favorite, everyone one of our births was a miracle given how sexual reproduction works (we all beat a million other possibilities). Faith is not hard when you truly see just how insane the odds are for so many things. Therefore, I’m quite open to the ridiculousness of the Galileans story. Another way to put it is, I am in awe of God.

[NickC25]

>2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person.

The same could be said for the "prophets" of any major religion. Muhammadﷻ (SWT) arguably went into a state of psychosis after the premature deaths of both of his sons. Joseph Smith, a local drunk in a small western NY town, said a magical rock in a hat that only he could see told him the garden of Eden was in St. Louis and that the native Americans weren't native Americans, but rather, the real original Israelites.

3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that.

Sure.

4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism.

Sure. However, some pretty fucked up stuff has been done in the names of God, Jesus, Allah, Muhammadﷻ (SWT), Israel, Buddha, and so on. Doesn't justify anything.

5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin.

So was MLK Jr. He got shot.

6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things.

Sure. Which is why his message is also a cornerstone of Islam.

7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans.

It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole. If God made man in his own image, and man treats his fellow man with disdain, hatred, violence, etc, what does that say about God? If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another? Paradoxical at best, a fallacy at worst.

[ivape]

If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another?

That is the ultimate intellectual question. But pay attention to the key word, intellectual. You cannot get spiritual answers from an intellectual question. That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation.

It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole.

Christ, allegedly, died due to the pride of religion. He was very much on a mission to call out the pride, power and arrogance of organized religion. Again, the answers are simply not available in the intellectual domain and must be sought in the spiritual domain.

I'm not even a member of a Church as I mostly do my reading on my own and do my own reflection. I think one of the main things God tries to hammer home is that we are to all have an eternal life in the after-life (which is mercy, because he could just erase us). If eternity is what is at stake, it is probably in our interest to cleanse our soul of whatever makes us shitty humans, lest we enter eternity tainted and unreformed, for a soul like that will be shitty for all eternity.

[NickC25]

>That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation.

Faith. Key word, faith. There is no reason for faith, because you're placing faith and (fleeting) hope that some dude in a desert a few thousand years ago found the ultimate way to interact with (his understanding of) humanity's creator, if we even have one. What makes you so 1000000% sure that this guy's understanding of the supernatural is correct? You're assuming that there actually is some omnipresent being that manifested existence, and that same being actually divinely created humanity on purpose, and not only that, gave humanity free will, and not only that, also simultaneously loves and hates you, and will condemn you to eternal hellfire if you don't worship him enough. Oh yeah, according to some, he's got a son too, born of humanity but with magical powers.

Faith. Come on.