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To: Mad Dawg
So, you didn't have a choice, not really; your faculty of choice was trashed..

Yes, in this case by the choice you made to get drunk.

I'm not saying we are totally free. We do each have capacities and we are also constricted by our conscience.

Neither are we completely determined.

Reality always lies in between completely determined and complete free. We are neither of these extremes. What I see as going off a wrong end is the on/off switch of free will/choice - believing that only saved Christians can choose to do good for example. And further that "saved" is always an instantaneous on/off, and even when some say on/off from birth.

At this extreme there is no true free will and therefor no responsibility for any of one's decisions.

8,139 posted on 01/31/2007 2:18:32 AM PST by D-fendr
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To: D-fendr
Yes, in this case by the choice you made to get drunk.

If that were all there was to the thinking, then we would make DUI or even just getting spiffed a felony, or at least a big old misdemeanor. But what we do is leave you alone if you get blotto at home, but if you, having gotten drunk of your own free will then go out and run somebody over we punish you for DUI AND some vehicular homicide charge.

I'm not trying to be smart here. (I try to give up losing battles early.) I'm saying it SEEMS to be a legal notion that sometimes without a mens rea or the possibility of one one can still be held responsible for one's actions as though they had been undertaken of one's own free will IF one is responsible for trashing one's own free will.

Say it again: I choose to get drunk. That is, I choose to trash my ability to choose well. Then I make a crappy choice. So I get punished for the choices I made after trashing my ability to choose. But if punishment were related to freedom (and its misuse) The punishment would have to be just for getting drunk, and the quiet drunk in the corner would be as guilty as the drunk careening down the residential street in his Camaro.

What's wrong with my alleged thinking?

And just to be clear, I'm trying to find a contact with the idea that choices made with a bound will still merit punishment. PART of that is that, in terms of the Divine order, the punishment is integral to the sin - what the sin in fact is -- and only temporally separated. But I'm still looking for the juridical-type argument one step beyond "You're the clay, He's the potter, shut up."

8,142 posted on 01/31/2007 5:08:34 AM PST by Mad Dawg ("It's our humility which makes us great." -- Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers)
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