Is it 'boring' being God?

How about frustrating? If you are omniscient you know what is going to happen, BUT you are also omnipotent so you can change it, BUT you already know you are going to change it (or not), so you change it but you already knew you were going to change it.So if you know what you are going to do are you ultimately powerless to change what will happen cause if you could change what would happen then you aren't omniscient unless of course you knew you were going to change it but then you aren't really omnipotent because you can't change what you already know to be what will happen anyway cause if you could then you wouldn't be omniscient.It's as likely to be frustrating or confusing as it is to be boring.I just don't know. Omnipotence and omniscience as commonly understood of course makes no sense to me. Can't help you, Brian, sorry.lfen

Ray,Oh, you aren't a trinitarian! I hadn't realized that. Haven't heard much lately from those who don't think Jesus was God. I'm a bit surprised you haven't kept one of those threads going.lfen

Ray,Omniscience is like pregnancy. Either you are omniscient or you arent'. There are degrees of knowledge, like knowing nothing, a little, a lot, almost everything, but if you don't know one little tiny thing then you don't know EVERY thing. You know almost everything but that is not knowing EVERYTHING.I think omnipotence is probably preferable to omniscience but most Christians on this forum, well, maybe just some would claim God is omniscients and that can only means knowing everything.lfen

Robin,Crucifixion would have have been nails through the wrists. It was a cruel suffering.Orthodox Christian believe that Jesus and God are the same. The Father and Son are sort of like multiple personalities in the same body. So it's hard to understand what was given up. And they were reunited in a matter of days. Pick a war, any war. Parents see there child go off to fight for longer periods than that and they may suffer and die deaths as bad or worse than cruxifiction. Think what the Nazi's put Jews through in the holocaust, or well, there is all kinds of suffering.The story does impress people. My response is to get pissed off by the obvious guilt tripping. It's God suffering and for a short time and then back to heaven. Why am I too feel guilty? Humans suffer far worse than that for far longer. Does God feel guilty about that?If Jesus was a human the suffering is poignant. But how much better off the west would have been had God decided to teach for decades and really give people a chance to understand the teachings. Instead there is this brief contradictory sketchy set of teachings that has led to lots of conflicts down to the present day.God is supposed to have all eternity, so giving up a few days, even a few years how meaningful is that?lfen

Organisms, die, at least the ones that don't reproduce by fission.I'd like to contrast your western view with that of Ramana Maharshi. Ramana was, if not the most realized, one of the most realized of modern sages. He was dying of cancer and his devotees were grief stricken and begged him not to go. He asked them with sincere puzzlement, "Where could I go?"The body died. That is in the natural order of things. But Ramana did not identify himself with a body, or anything else concrete, specific, or limited.What is death? Transformation, change. Change regarded as a beginning is birth, as an ending death. If you have a coin you have two sides. A stick has two ends. If you select a process in time in the manifest universe that process has a beginning and an end, a birth and death. Death is just the name of one of many many types of transformations that occur in the universe. Everything that is born dies. Thus in Buddhism one looks to that which was never born.lfen

Well, if Adam was a human being like you and I living in the same universe we live in then his body was a physical body like all others, microscopic, stellar, or galactic.Does perfectly sinless mean it's not carbon based organic life form? Then this is dream time, myth space. A universe of ideal mental forms. The universe that this internet and our bodies exist in is a universe made of up forces and fundamental particles organizing themselves into atoms, molecules and complex structures. These structures are subject to what we observe as physical laws. I suppose we could say these laws mean this universe is sin. But that is just how it's observed to function.I hold with Buddhism that you can't find the deathless in that which was born. Only that which was never born never dies. To seek the deathless in the manifest universe is to cling to samsara hoping to find eternal satisfaction in that which is coming into being.lfen

"at will"? What is mind and who is it that changes it? How is it this change happens?I think free will is an illusion created because the brain, complex as it is, nonetheless can't keep track of the complexity of itself and all the influences acting on it.lfen

Are you claiming that as a result of your beliefs you right now know the level of thryoid, testosterone, adrenlin, etc. etc. circulating in your body and the state of neuro transmitters in the brain plus all the neuro connections resulting from the complex interactions that conditioned your taste in foods, clothes, entertainment, etc.etc.?I was describing what is known about brain function. Maybe the Bible said something about that but my impression was that the writers of the Bible had no idea what the brain's function was or at least had no interest in the brain, endocrinology, and neuro transmitters.lfen

And myself and a handful of others disagree that there is free will.The unit of society is the human organism. That is where the focus of control is. Free will is a concept that developed as part of the social control of society through religion and jurisprudence. Free will is a legal fiction used as part of the process of controlling individuals. It works but it's fictional. I'm hoping a good analogy might be how gravity works as a fictional explanation for the way objects behave in inertial systems or in curved space.lfen

"true only by a fluke"? is this an obscure reference to something like quantum indeterminancy in brain state decision making?The conclusion of no free will can arise from a long series of causes, things like language arises, logic being developed, where you are born, educated, the way your brain is conditioned to think and view things and one day all these processes result in a philosophical perception and linguist statement "there is no free will". Someone else having been exposed say to Christian conditioning would counter with their learned response that "there is free will is says so in the Bible".Believing in free will is not a matter of free will but of conditioning.lfen

Skinner, Ramesh, and I don't recall any other names this morning, well, me, I conceive of our not having free will. So your conditioning hasn't thus far resulted in you conceiving of free will and mine has.lfen

I'm not denying that choices (possibilities) exist or that choices are made. The question is HOW choices are made, or how we explain or describe the processes of the behaviour called choosing. Some parameters of this problem are explored in behaviourism, some in philosophy and religion, and recently it's being studied in neuro science.Do plants make choices? Do amoebas? Jumping way up the evolutionary ladder (it's clear which campsite I pitch my tent at) does a parrot make a choice? A chimpanzee? Of those you say they make a choice do all choose with free will? Is free will a property of all living things? Humans only? At what level of neuro organization does free will emerge?lfen

The answer that Ramesh Balsekar gives is to watch the unfolding process of your self. That means the decision making process whether it is to laboriously list variables or go with a hunch.Predestination is interested in a linear end point. Advaita is interested in the present moment. The notion of freedom is moved from the actor to the observer. The universe unfolds from the galactic to sub atomic scales. We can translate the common use of "free will" to mean those actions that are not physically coerced by violence or threats, a kind of legal definition. But I'm interested in how actions arise in the organism. Actions initiated by an organism can be described as FREE but are they?How long would people continue going to work and working if they didn't get a pay check? Do people go to work of their own free will then?What if God appeared in an irrefutable way to everyone in the world and said something like "I've reconsidered. I'm destroying Heaven to build a golf course for the angels. There will be no life after death. I'll continue to let the earth exist as it always has. This decision is final and irrevocable." Would believers still go to church to worship? This is not a good example as I think believers get a lot of social benefits and reinforcement from going to church but I am suggesting that their love of God is motivated not by free will but by promise of benefits.Anyway, I agree with you that we experience decision conflict as the complex brain processes information and we await the outcome of that processing.I think the really vague term in all this is "will". We need to clarify what we are referring to when we speak of will.lfen

Robin,Before we can go much further we are going to have to clarify and agree on the terms "free" and "will". If you mean an action takes place by "free will" in the legal sense that there was no physical coercion that still leaves the conditioning of thought processes to be explained.Are you saying that by definition thinking is free? In that case saying 2+2=57 is an example of free will because I thought of it, and 2+2=4 is not because it's constrained by the development of mathematics and the real world.So I will ask you what are you refering to as "will", what do you mean by "free" and how do explain "free will".People were converted to Islam under threat of death. Chritians cite the martyrs who died rather than renounce their religion. So would you say those who converted to Islam with a sword on their necks did so out of free will or no?I am using the term "free will" not in the legal sense but in the sense of conditioning or prior causes. An organism, even you, and I are complex conditionings and our behaviours arise from our conditioning. I'm asserting that free will doesn't make sense in the context that Christians use it to make people responsible. If Christian conditioning doesn't work because it doesn't result in a brain that believes (takes as real) the doctrine attempting to be instilled should we blame those attempting to instill the doctrine or those who failed to develope it?As an educator let us say you are attempting to teach a child to read. If that child doesn't learn is that failure the result of their "fallen" "free will"? Or is it the result of problems with their brains and/or techniques of teaching or perhaps medications to help with attention?Where in all that would "free will" play a role? The doctrine of "free will" in Christianity is an excuse for the church to lay blame and convict people who disagree with it. It's an old explanatory fiction used rhetorically to absolve the Church and it's God of blame.lfen

BINGO!That is it exactly.Well, destined to believe in free will for some period of time that we can't know.lfen