Metal Reviews

I don't know which post you mean, I thought you meant that one, my latest.

What do you refer to with "you" in that sentence?

Anybody. You, me, anybody. "One".

"The idea that God gives ONE the choice to do either good things or bad things, instead of forcing ONE to do good."

Do you see?

I'm talking about free will in general, what part of you is free will? Or what is free will at all?

You're losing me. Why not all of a person, if we're talking about god?

That 10 Commandments analogy is interesting because it showcases the idea a lot of Christians have about a "Greedy God." The thing is that the first commandment prohibits the worship of Gods other than the one true God. It doesn't necessarily prohibit worshiping no God whatsoever (if that's how you want to interpret it). They're very open to interpretation, as is the Bible itself (in fact, a lot of Biblical accounts like the Creation are just interpretation).

I think Free Will is also more or less where the Devil comes into play. When you die, you have your final Judgement. And that final Judgement determines whether you've lived a moral enough like that you can go to Heaven or have lived an immoral enough life that you must go to Hell. There are actually wildly varying views about how God views issues like disbelief, homosexuality, etc. But I personally feel that if these are natural feelings/beliefs, then God is understanding.

My belief too is that he's a forgiving God and can forgive those who may have done wrong to somebody. After all, we're not constantly obsessing over what God or Jesus think of our actions. And I don't think God expects that from us (although some do).

I personally don't think God wants us to necessarily obsessively worship and bow down to him. I think he more wants us to at least have respect for him and his creation of the world (again, I mean us as in those who believe). In fact, this whole idea of obsessive worship as a lot to do with why some people have been turning away from organized religion as of late.

But your beliefs go against christianity's. So, are you one or not? If yes, you follow the rules, because god says so. If not, why pretend?

Edit: And if god is so forgiving, why do bad things happen?

What defines a person then?

A person's deeds is how I meant it. You can either go to church or stay at home and listen to black metal. What do you do? If church, good boy, reward. If BM, naughty, get punished.

A person's deeds = free will? What then, is triggers their deeds? Their free will? Then what exactly is their free will?

God's allowing them to do evil is free will. They trigger their own deeds. Honestly, is this leading somewhere or are you just being annoying?

To have free will is to make use of one's ability to choose within the limited parameters of life. There's no part of you that IS free will.

Aaron tried to answer the question to what free will is, but how are you sure there even is an ability to choose?

The main definition of Christianity is a belief that Jesus is the true son of God. That's the one belief we all share. We all fear God to one degree or another and try to follow Jesus's teachings. But the extent to which we do this varies wildly. The fact of the matter is that there's a common misconception that all Christians are monks and goody-two-shoes who listen only to non-secular music, partake only in Christian activities, etc. Dispelling that myth, most Christians are regular people like you except that they believe in God and Jesus.

Christianity is a faith/belief in God. You try to live out God's will through daily life, but you don't necessarily have to be a monk to be a Christian, nor do you necessarily have to shut yourself off from non-secular activities. The idea that religion doesn't promote free-thinking really depends on the person you're dealing with. There are some Christians who strictly believe you should be as I just described, and others (like me) that believe there's nothing wrong with living a normal life while still adhering to basic moral decency (do not kill, do not commit adultery, etc). I personally find nothing immoral about listening to Slayer. But, of course, some Christians will disagree with me there. The thing is that, as a Christian, you do draw the line somewhere. But the threshold varies depending on the individual.

I'm not, and as such it doesn't really matter. I think there is, but it could just be the result of environment and biological processes. I could be a little clockwork robot that people turn the handle of and watch it do the same thing every time.

That sort of thing doesn't bother me.

Yeah, well it was more ment to devaluate Zad's hammering on free will, but he didn't get the questions or something. Since there is a proved law called action is reaction, something purely random and a concept like free will are both expelled from the regularities of the universe.

I'd say it basically comes down to biology. A person constructed in a certain way will react in a certain way to a given situation. Of course there are situational variations such as mood and emotional state, but I suppose a pessimist could look on that as there being no freewill at all.

The big problem I have with organized religion in general and Christianity in particular is the fact that by the church's lights, everyone who doesn't share that belief in Jesus isn't "saved" and is automatically going to Hell, burning for all eternity, demons poking them with pointy sticks, etc. After all, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the world, even today, who don't know about Jesus/Christianity. So they're going to Hell for having the audacity to be born in a non-Christian part of the world? I find this to be a fundamental flaw in the church, and, given that pretty much everything else is window dressing by their own admission, I don't find it unreasonable to state that the Christian church is factually (as per the previous discussion about the existence of their conception of God), morally and ethically wrong.

I totally agree with you about the Church's opinion about people who don't share their belief in Jesus. It's a gaping hole in the Christian religion that's probably been around since its first inception. I think it's probably because of how unheard of Atheism really was back in the middle ages, so religious wars were restricted to which specific God you believed in. If you believed in God, but not the same God your fellow church believed in, you were burned at stake. Actually believing in a God was more or less taken for granted at the time. You could say Atheism is that untouched topic that Christianity still hasn't really developed an opinion of yet.

Well, the bible says that the final judgement will come after all the people in the world have heard the gospel.