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Cheers!

*PING* to late-night apologetics birdcage liner.

Cheers!

Interesting as I was just thinking along these lines today.

The only being in existence with absolute free will is God Himself.

Every other being ever created has varying degrees of free will... from animals to human beings.

The degree of free will we possess is based upon the factors of intelligence and self awareness.

The choices we make in life further restrict or expand the degree of free will we will possess in the future.

The most important choice of all being what we do with God.

Thanks for the ping; post/thoughts.

If God sees ALL possibilities equally, then he knows in advance everything that is to happen: yet without that foreknowledge impinging upon our freedom in the least.

If election is predicated on God's observation of future events rather than on his active interference in those events, then God is reduced to a mere passive observer who is basically irrelevant in our ultimate destiny.

The FACT of the matter is that without God impinging on our freedom "in the least", we are all eternally lost.

Your theory reduces God to a mere observer of his creation. Taking away the veneer from your premise here, it would appear that what you are preaching is some kind of Pelagian Deism where Man is in control and God is ultimately irrelevant.

My FRiend, unimpinged free will is not a blessing, it is a curse. IF you are a Christian it is because God interfered in your free will. God is not merely an observer of his creation, God is in control of it.

I have always thought that we play games like chess because the rules are known, whereas in life, although we may think we know the rules, we can never be sure.

I used to play a game in which you use a chessboard with 3 players. Two opponents sit opposite each other, with black and white pieces.A third person decides the rules, but does not tell the other two. The other two take turns trying to make moves, which the 3rd person can accept, reject, or alter. One example is that rooks cannot move backwards. This is the kind of thing that happens in life. A business makes money for years and years, and then “the paradigm” changes.

The reason kids (and adults too) like to play games is that after they replay them a few times, they are very predictable. Unlike real life.

All things whatever arise from, and depend on, the divine appointment; whereby it was foreordained who should receive the word of life, and who should disbelieve it; who should be delivered from their sins, and who should be hardened in them; and who should be justified and who should be condemned.
-- Martin Luther

This and other similar sentiments by Calvin have got to be examples of some of the most outrageous heresies in the history of Christianity. They aren't piddling little matters like unitarianism versus trinitarianism or Paul versus the "you must obey the Jewish law to be a good Christian" crowd because they aren't merely disagreements about certain interpretations within a common context but, rather, a wholesale redefinition of the entire enterprise resulting in the necessity to give entirely novel definitions to commonly understood terms as well as, basically, to cause certain things to be understood in a way that completely contradicts what their meaning has to be for them to continue to have any meaning whatsoever.

Again, it must be stressed that there is no way around the problem that Calvin and Luther pose to free will and, thus, to the essence of both the scriptures and everyday life except to engage in irrationality. And I will posit right here that the source of Western materialistic determinism is Calvinism. Calvin posited God making a clockwork universe. The materialistic determinists simply eliminated the cause. And why? Because since the effect is the same, why bother to retain the theological cause? It makes as much sense to say that a materialistic universe has existence in and of itself and that appearances of meaning and choice are illusions as it does to say that a knowing, thinking, planning, loving God created a universe that is as entirely inexorable in the unfolding of events as the strict atheist materialist proposes and as ludicrous in its treatment of human purpose, love, and free will as the materialist universe.

Theological determinism, that is, predestination, posits a cause (God) that determines the nature of all things, the effect. That is, everything that happens in creation does so, not because of preceding natural events (that is, contingency, mocked by Luther, or the human will, claimed by Luther and others to have no effective capacity, ie., to be an illusion) but because God had, before the beginning of creation, decreed that it should all be just this way and no other. God: the cause. The creation and everything about it: the effect. Given the cause, the effect could not have turned out any other way. And since it is claimed that God is unchangeable, there could not even be any change in initial conditions to cause a different, though still determined, effect.

In such a system there is no room for free will. But there is also no room for the concept of free will because the only one willing, God, would be causing the belief that there exists a capacity for something that simply does not exist. In other words, God is causing something much worse than a lie and the belief of a lie. He is somehow causing humans, who, under the scheme, are not and can never be agents, to believe (if that were even possible epistomologically) that they are other than what they are or that they could be other than they are, whatever that is, because, in such a system, there is no possibility of ever being able to determine the truth from a lie because the means by which that can be done simply does not exist. That is, in this system, the great deceiver is God himself.

Actually, the materialist version is an improvement on the Calvinist model because although the concepts of love, self-sacrifice, free will, sin, and suffering are equally as meaningless and absurd in both, in the materialist universe they are simply without ultimate meaning, but in the Calvinist universe, they are caused by a "holy" God doing it all for his greater glory. But before whom? Ha ha ha. An audience of one?

Again, from a long time ago, the World According to Calvin:

Once upon a time, before anything was created, when God in three persons dwelt happily in and of themselves, God the Father said, "Hey, I've got a great idea. We're going to create a universe by and through you, God the Son, and I am, before you create anything at all, going to determine how every single bit of it, from start to finish, from the beginning to the end, from the least quark to the biggest bang, is going to go. We will create an entire human race from an original male and female that I will cause to be tempted and sin and, because of that, subject the rest of the human race to untold millennia of misery and suffering and death and tell them it's their own fault, all for my greater glory because it seemed good to me, all the while promising them a means of salvation from that misery I've imposed on them as a result of their sin against me that I will have preordained.

And a really neat thing is that we will tell them that if they listen to what they are told and follow it faithfully, we will hear them and answer them and heal their land, but they won't know that in actuality they won't be able even to try unless we make a few of them do it and the vast majority we will keep in the bondage of sin and degradation and then hold them responsible for not doing what we created them to be unable to do.

And the best thing of all, God the Son, is that because the sin (that I will ordain and set into motion to the very degree and extent that is my good pleasure according to the unfathomable counsel of my will) cannot be forgiven without a sacrifice and since none of them is able or capable or even willing because I will have made them unable, incapable, and unwilling, YOU are going to have to enter the human race and grow up among those who, but for the few I will have made to act to the contrary, won't listen because I will have made them unable to hear, who won't see because I will have blinded them to the truth, and who won't ask for forgiveness for something they were hopeless to avoid doing because I will have made them incapable of doing so and then have the ever loving crap beaten out of you, scourged to within an inch of your life, before being made to carry the instrument of your torture before crowds jeering at you, because I will have made them do so, to the place where others, because of my decree before the foundations of the earth according to my own good counsel, will drive spikes through your wrists and hoist you up to hang between criminals--and the best part of all, at that moment, just as you are about to die, I'll turn my back on you!

But that's cool, because in three days, I'll raise you from the dead so that we can say that this proves you are who we already know you are without ever the necessity of our even creating a universe or a human race and then use faith in that as the ostensible means by which we confer saving grace on the humans without telling them, until John Calvin comes along, that what they think is turning to us in faith to freely receive the gift of forgiveness and salvation is, in actuality, every bit as programmed and inevitable as the majority of the human race on their way to burn and suffer eternally in the lake of fire for refusing to believe that which I will have made them unable to believe since before the foundations of the earth and all for my praise and glory. How does that sound?"

And does God the Son say, "Wait a second, you're going to create a universe with a world of conscious beings made in our image, screw them over in the most horrendous ways imaginable, hold them responsible for what you're going to compel them to do, and then, near the end of the whole shebang, make ME suffer for every sin they ever committed without their ever having had the capacity to decide otherwise, and die so that those who don't even have the capacity to make anything but a faux choice will be "saved"? And that will make the relationship that you and I and the Holy Spirit share right now better how?" or does he say, "Hey, that sounds great and we'll call that the GOOD NEWS!"