Free Will

The best puppeteers make it look as if no strings are attached at all. And if we were puppets to some greater entity wouldn't we just be that greater entity projected into a puppet, the puppet being us? The puppet is the puppeteer. They are one in the same. Therefore fate and morals are just what the greater entity wants. The greater entity must be us.

"I try my best to be just like I am but everybody wants you to be just like them."
[  Edited by ChrisD at   ]

How? I man gets shot from a stray bullet in a downtown gun fight between the cops and the robbers. He dies. His family suffers and his son gets hateful and commits crimes of his own. The indirect casulties are the people the son is hurting. And they are casulties of his fathers death, indirectly ofcourse.

"Wht cry for those that often cry? Instead, help them smile, and smile for those that smile."

Either one thing causes another or it doesn't. You're being too general in your thinking. One event might set a state of affairs in motion, but we do not say that it "indirectly" caused this state of affairs - we say that it was an earlier point in the causal chain. It may be the case that this state of affairs doesn't come into existence at all, but that it is merely down to our miscalculation.
Of course, you're quite right in poitning out that some points in the chain are more important than others - a fact for which causality cannot account, and the antinomy which reveals its limits.

That said, I think "causation" is the word that best applies to this thread.

lol

Okay lets take things to their logical extremes.

As Schopenhauer said 'A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.'

In people, I note that concious actions are to the most part caused by unconcious thought, caused itself by preceding actions. It seems to me, that if we do take things to their absolute origin then we do have a cause and an effect and the effect is in direct relation to the cause. Hawking recently said that God was the dude who pushed a snowball and let it tumblr down the hill. I don't, however, agree that God is the past, but rather the past, present and future. Necessarily we are divine beings, but less total.

I think that God is one. And in order for God to be one, there cannot be another or anything else, seperate or connected as big. God is all, everything, a play. We are free in sofar that we have to understand what it is that needs to be understood. I dont see God as a being, but rather all.

In the Christian Bible, Lucifer was given free will and became evil. But who was it that gave him the free will? It was God. And if God is the all start and is perfect, which it must be since if there is a challenge there can be no real order of things. If there were no order, this life would be meaningless; what is the point in having no goal? It would be like playing a football match for seemingly no point at all. And, in order for there to be order, there has to be complete determinism. By this I mean that if person a had exactly the same genes as person b and if both were subjected to the same environmental conditions, person a would be (identical to) person b.

And as I said earlier, where is the hope if we have no free will? Yeah I was being dumb. All of us are one, and by understanding ourselves and others and by trying to solve problems through this method, we do actually become closer to God, or one, or nature. It is ego, purely and simply, that makes make wish for himself to have control over his actions and become selfish. However, this is not a bad thing. Its just a necessary step of evolution.

""No words""