Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Why would any shortcomings in our spiritual capacity be God's fault?
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Does God Love Everyone Equally?
- Thread starter Glaurung
- Start date
Because God has the power to either prevent or correct our shortcomings, but instead allegedly creates us and allegedly places us in a certain environment.
The struggle is literally the point of this life. Virtue is a narrow path that is painful to tread. The Gospel never promises a happy or easy life.
Some crosses are heavier to bear than others, but no one is denied the grace necessary to please God. No environment excuses us from our obligation: Do good and avoid evil. Our failures will be our own, not God's. No matter how much we otherwise tell ourselves this side of eternity.
(This goes for me as well. I myself have not always been above blaming God for my own lack of virtue or from making excuses for my own lapses into sin).
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To the contrary a person cannot act against their nature in my view. If your God gave us our nature (which there is no evidence that it did and plenty of evidence that our nature evolved) then the buck stops at the top.
Unfettered
A striving disciple of Jesus Christ
I understand that God loves us all equally, as a good parent would. God is no respecter of persons. That is my understanding.
Although weakened humanity is predisposed towards sin we nonetheless retain our free will. (No matter how fashionable it is to deny human agency). We do not sin 'by nature' but because we consent to evil.
(If Christianity is true) God has provided us the means to overcome our sinful inclinations. It is not that we just cannot help it. (As you claim). It is that we do not want to help it. Because sin is pleasurable, at least in the short term.
I'm not convinced we choose our wants, it seems to me like we only realise them as they are generated by the brain;
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Man has two natures, a material nature and a spiritual nature, and free will to choose between those natures. The buck stops with us.
Because I am aware of this, I am constantly struggling against my material nature and asking God in prayer to help me.
“In man there are two natures; his spiritual or higher nature and his material or lower nature. In one he approaches God, in the other he lives for the world alone. Signs of both these natures are to be found in men. In his material aspect he expresses untruth, cruelty and injustice; all these are the outcome of his lower nature. The attributes of his Divine nature are shown forth in love, mercy, kindness, truth and justice, one and all being expressions of his higher nature. Every good habit, every noble quality belongs to man’s spiritual nature, whereas all his imperfections and sinful actions are born of his material nature. If a man’s Divine nature dominates his human nature, we have a saint.” Paris Talks, p. 60
THE TWO NATURES IN MAN
Question.—In verse 22 of chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians it is written: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” What is the meaning of these words?
Answer.—Know that there are two natures in man: the physical nature and the spiritual nature. The physical nature is inherited from Adam, and the spiritual nature is inherited from the Reality of the Word of God, which is the spirituality of Christ. The physical nature is born of Adam, but the spiritual nature is born from the bounty of the Holy Spirit. The first is the source of all imperfection; the second is the source of all perfection.
The Christ sacrificed Himself so that men might be freed from the imperfections of the physical nature and might become possessed of the virtues of the spiritual nature. This spiritual nature, which came into existence through the bounty of the Divine Reality, is the union of all perfections and appears through the breath of the Holy Spirit. It is the divine perfections; it is light, spirituality, guidance, exaltation, high aspiration, justice, love, grace, kindness to all, philanthropy, the essence of life. It is the reflection of the splendor of the Sun of Reality.
Some Answered Questions, p. 118
It seems unfair to saddle believers with such ideas. What we have is human nature which is more reptilian and mammalian than uniquely human. The uniquely human part is what can be used to cause the kind of dysphoria you describe. It's a type of self-loathing, because one can never transcend those lower brain centers and their desires.
The best we can due is subdue our subhuman urges and inclinations sufficiently to succeed in human society, but we deserve to congratulate ourselves for any success we have there rather than berate ourselves for having an older, pre-human nature with which we struggle. Instead, we have religions that denigrate man and leave people feeling guilty for being human which includes the legacy of our forebears.
Atheism (and polytheism, it seems) frees one from all of that. We don't have to disesteem man or nature. We don't have to adopt a host of bigotries. We can abandon magical thinking. We can ignore the stories of the angry and harshly judgmental ghost who lives outside of nature commanding and threatening man.
I wish that for you, too, but you likely understand that as wishing something undesirable for you, and maybe at this stage of life, it would be.
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Speaking of "I wish that for you" there's always a Grateful Dead song for any occasion:
Long distance runner, what you standin' there for?
Get up, get out, get out of the door
You're playin' cold music on the barroom floor
Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core
There's a dragon with matches that's loose on the town
Takes a whole pail of water just to cool him down
Fire! Fire on the mountain
Almost ablaze, still you don't feel the heat
It takes all you got just to stay on the beat
You say it's a livin', we all gotta eat
But you're here alone, there's no one to compete
If Mercy's a business, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true
Fire! Fire on the mountain
Long distance runner, what you holdin' out for?
Caught in slow motion in a dash to the door
The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor
You gave all you had, why you wanna give more?
The more that you give, the more it will take
To the thin line beyond, which you really can't fake
And if you don't mind a further, personal digression, in July 1990. my girlfriend and now wife and I flew up to San Francisco and visited an Italian bistro on Columbus with some kids playing music on stage. My standard joke was always, "Do you know any Grateful Dead," and these guys did, and asked me to join them on guitar. We played that song, Fire On The Mountain. I let them keep all of the tips.
We still talk about that night. She learned to play bass shortly after that, and we began performing for the next ten years. Here's our version of Fire On The Mountain. Thats me on vocals and lead guitar, and my wife on bass and singing harmony. I hope you like it:
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Note the supposition.
Another supposed claim
Wow........... Constant assumptions
Who writes up which so has a greater capacity?
Christianity is not the benchmark of what is true.
Funny little topic and the opening post is adorn in presupposed foundations. How can anyone honestly entertain constructive dialogue to grow with?
You are simply asserting free-will rather than supporting it. As to man's alleged spiritual nature, having a soul only defers the question of free will since the soul too either chooses in accordance with it's soul nature or makes a random choice, and neither of those are a free-choice.
As Sam Harris so eloquently puts it, you would have to be very unlucky to have recieved the soul of a psychopath for example;
That assumes that God did not give us our nature through the mechanism of evolution
I see it that way as well
Our evolved nature is physical (spirits don't have genes that natural selection acts upon as far as I'm aware), and if God gave us our nature through the mechanism of evolution then we are simply either making choices in accordance with the nature of our brain, making choices at random, or some mixture of the two - all of which exclude free-will as I see it.
As I pointed out in post #31 seing it that way only defers the problems of free-will to our spirit nature, it doesn't solve them in my view.
We all make choices according to our natures. From a strictly material perspective, our genetic heritage and our upbringing means that we don't have a truly free choice.
Why is it different from a spiritual perspective, do our souls not also have natures which they act in accordance with?
As I just posted, I agree with don't have a truly free will. I do think there are times when we have choices but those choices are not 100% free of various kinds of influences.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Nobody can prove that humans have free will or that we do not have it.
My definition of free will:
Free will is simply the will/ability to make choices based upon our desires and preferences. Our desires and preferences come from a combination of factors such as childhood upbringing, heredity, education, adult experiences, and present life circumstances. All of these can be considered causes or reasons why we choose one thing or another.
How free our choices are varies with the situation. Certainly what we refer to as “free will” has many constraints such as ability and opportunity but we have volition as otherwise we could not choose anything.
For example, people choose to get married, go to college, or have children, since nobody chooses for them. What people end up choosing is determined by their childhood upbringing, heredity, education, adult experiences, and present life circumstances, but it is still a choice.
That does not mean we can choose anything that we might want. Now that I am a widow I might want to get married again but if I do not have the opportunity I will remain single. There are other things I want to do but I cannot do them right now and may never be able to because I am constrained by my anxiety and fear. That is a psychological constraint.
Typical apologist tactic to raise the bar to proof when science only ever deals in evidence.
Read this and tell me how it changes anything;
My definition of will;
Will is simply the will/ability to make choices based upon our desires and preferences. Our desires and preferences come from a combination of factors such as childhood upbringing, heredity, education, adult experiences, and present life circumstances. All of these can be considered causes or reasons why we choose one thing or another.
Note how the removal of the word "free" clarifies things. Since you aren't free to choose your desires and preferences adding the word "free" only sends us into the (arguably deliberately) confusing world of undefined semantics.
Stop the press, to be "free" is to be *unconstrained*. If you have "constraints" you are not free.
definition of volition according to Oxford Languages: the faculty or power of using one's will.
Source: define volition - Google Search
Note the abscence of the word "free" preceding the word "will" in the definition. Of course you have a will, it is simply not free of internal and external constraints as per the evidence you post below;
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Science is irrelevant to this discussion since there is no scientific evidence that deals with free will.
That definition works for me.
I am not free to choose my desires and preferences and I am not always free to act on them, although I 'sometimes' can act on them.