The Sum of Awe
Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
FreeWill. How can it be so?
If you are punished for doing certain actions, can it really be called freewill? You have the physical potential to choose God and to not choose God, but you are pressured into choosing God by the threat of hell. This supposed freewill amounts to nothing more than a person who has a gun to their head, who has the freewill to decide whether to give the robber the money or not.
A lot of folks under Abrahamic faiths see that any direct interactions of God with man will negate freewill. If God were to show himself to the people on earth by taking the form of a big smiley face in the sky, it'd somehow contradict freewill. But I see it as rather the opposite. The fact that God is not obvious is negating freewill. It's foolish to expect a person to believe in your existence when all they have is a book that went through decades of mistranslation, misinterpretation, historic distortions, etc.
I'm in a world where things can be explained without God, where there are many different ideas of God, where many people have died because of other peoples' God, where myths of these Gods have the same nature but different character.
In my life, I have never been seeked by a God, so I am convinced there is no god out there that seeks me. I have found God and he is very different than how other people describe him. Why am I to believe in a God when I have no reason to other than one book, out of many, claims to be the truth and claims that all the others are wrong?
If God truly wants man to follow him, using freewill, he would have made it clear, and directly asked each of us. There is no freewill, just open ended strings that fall loose of man's grip. There isn't a choice until there are reasons.
If you are punished for doing certain actions, can it really be called freewill? You have the physical potential to choose God and to not choose God, but you are pressured into choosing God by the threat of hell. This supposed freewill amounts to nothing more than a person who has a gun to their head, who has the freewill to decide whether to give the robber the money or not.
A lot of folks under Abrahamic faiths see that any direct interactions of God with man will negate freewill. If God were to show himself to the people on earth by taking the form of a big smiley face in the sky, it'd somehow contradict freewill. But I see it as rather the opposite. The fact that God is not obvious is negating freewill. It's foolish to expect a person to believe in your existence when all they have is a book that went through decades of mistranslation, misinterpretation, historic distortions, etc.
I'm in a world where things can be explained without God, where there are many different ideas of God, where many people have died because of other peoples' God, where myths of these Gods have the same nature but different character.
In my life, I have never been seeked by a God, so I am convinced there is no god out there that seeks me. I have found God and he is very different than how other people describe him. Why am I to believe in a God when I have no reason to other than one book, out of many, claims to be the truth and claims that all the others are wrong?
If God truly wants man to follow him, using freewill, he would have made it clear, and directly asked each of us. There is no freewill, just open ended strings that fall loose of man's grip. There isn't a choice until there are reasons.