Free Republic

The inventor of the Sarco suicide pod is building a 'kill switch' implant which could allow dementia sufferers to seal the time of their death years in advance. Dr Philip Nitschke, whose controversial capsule ended an American woman's life in Switzerland last September, has told MailOnline that his newest device is nearing the testing phase. His plans have been labelled 'disturbing' by critics, who argue that enabling people to trigger their deaths with a simple switch could have serious consequences for individuals with various mental and physical health conditions. The mechanism would be sewn into a person's body - most...

Do you believe in free will? Some scholars do not—and they rely on evidence from the brain sciences to make their case. Some people find the dismissal of the idea that we are in control of our decisions and actions to be deeply disturbing. We, as professionals active in the field, know they do because we regularly receive their e-mails asking—often in desperation—about neuroscientific studies that seem to threaten the possibility of free will. Most of these assertions rest on scientists claiming to anticipate or predict choices based on brain activity observed before a person in an experiment is even...

First off, I offer this as a great argument against the teachings of original sin and unconditional Election as taught by many churches today. That being said, I do not necessarily agree with all his teachings. I offer this, because it was well written, and on the subject matter I am 100% in agreement with his points of view. So if you go research his website and find other topics you want to argue about, I will not take the bait. Debate me on the subject of this thesis not on anything else he teaches. This is long, and the...

Freedom to choose between good and evil. Everyone has it and makes a choice.

Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation. Today we know epilepsy is a disease. It’s accepted that a person who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be charged with murder. That’s good, says Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. That’s progress. But there's still a long way to go. After more...

@RealJohnDennis I was threatened tonight to be put “in the hospital a long time” by a prominent San Francisco real estate developer because I’m a Republican. It’s in a text exchange. Have screenshots. Called me a “MAGA bitch.” Should I name him? As I just said in a private thread, I’m sick of being threatened in this town because I’m a Republican. I’m furious at the moment. Want to sleep on it. I pushed back against his insults but did not threaten violence against this person. He brought that up all on his own.

After more than 40 years of studying humans and other primates, Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the division of cells or the beating of our hearts. (Of course, he had to.) Therefore, we mustn’t harshly judge such heretofore disdained folks as drunk drivers, serial criminals, Hamas terrorists, and those who bring 29 items to the “8 items or less” checkout lane. Sapolsky said: “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish...

Calvinists like to use Paul's reference in Romans 9:13, which refers to the story of Jacob and Esau, to support their Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Yet when we read Genesis 25:27-34, we know that Esau willingly, on his own, forfeited his birthright by selling it to Jacob. Thus it should be obvious that it was not by God’s election, but rather by Esau’s own free will choice. It's a misinterpretation of the Scriptures to claim this text teaches predestination? To properly understand the text in question, one must understand the main reason Paul wrote his letter to the Jewish and...

I originally shared this back in March of 2010, but have since learned more about the situation. So I decided to update the information and repost it. This is a home video of an incident that took place in December of 2009 in Astrakhan, which is in Southern Russia. It starts with a 38-year-old Chechen man who decided to pull a trick at a wedding where he was a guest. He claimed he had an unloaded gun and was going to act like he was playing Russian Roulette. So he puts a gun to his head, when another man with...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) defended The Women's Health Protection Act from San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone's assertion that "the bill is nothing short of child sacrifice," by claiming that "God has given us all free will. I am using my free will to make sure that no state can implement any restrictions on any woman's free will to terminate the life of her own unborn child." "Just because I am a Catholic doesn't mean that I must blindly follow the dictates of a meddlesome priest," the Speaker explained. "In this country we have freedom of religion. I can practice...

The difficulty in explaining the enigma of free will to those unfamiliar with the subject isn’t that it’s complex or obscure. It’s that the experience of possessing free will – the feeling that we are the authors of our choices – is so utterly basic to everyone’s existence that it can be hard to get enough mental distance to see what’s going on. Suppose you find yourself feeling moderately hungry one afternoon, so you walk to the fruit bowl in your kitchen, where you see one apple and one banana. As it happens, you choose the banana. But it seems...

JAG Writes: How does God simultaneously , , , {A} maintain and respect our Human Free Will , , , while at the same time , , , {B} often working in our lives where we do His Sovereign Will? One way is that He presents the "outside inducements" and controls the external circumstances in such a way where both {A} and {B} occurs and is the sustained reality. Let me give you one example where you could do that same thing with your son {assume you have an 8 year old son} A Father & Son & A Strawberry...

HENRY and THE JUDGE. The takeaway point in this post is human Free Will choices are responsible for the evil in this world. _______ Many Anti-Christians and Atheists daily look for ways to demonstrate that humans are not actually responsible for their Free Will choices to do evil. Atheists do not believe that God exists, but they postulate that God exists for the sake of argument. Here is ANDY ATHEIST trying to blame God for the evil choices that humans make, and at the same time take the blame off of human beings for their Free Will choices to do...

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” Malcolm Muggeridge

Like many Americans during the past three weeks, I've been bombarded by news about the destructive power of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. The stories are of misery, death, and destruction. The misery, death, and destruction are acutely difficult to accept because they have been visited upon innocents. I say that knowledgeable of the ancient argument that our personal and collective sinfulness has merited our pain. Yet that raises this question: Does anyone really deserve personal ruination because of personal sin, particularly from a God whose Son said He came to call sinners and not the...

High Tech Truth and Life! So are you ever Amazed and Astounded with the modern technology and the way high tech works? Do you wonder how it is that your technology works so well yet with little effort and as long as it has not been damage it does what it does without error, well as long as you the operator does not error and do the wrong things, why is that? There is a Reason and it is a Reason we should truly Reflect on our lives and how we do things to better understand how we too could...

"So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy."—Romans 9:16 "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."—Revelation 22:17 The great controversy which for many ages has divided the Christian Church has hinged upon the difficult question of "the will." I need not say of that conflict that it has done much mischief to the Christian Church, undoubtedly it has; but I will rather say, that it has been fraught with incalculable usefulness; for it has thrust forward before the minds of Christians, precious truths, which but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDkLUBdvOkwIn the external, or physical, world, we're all aware of standard cause and effect. You know, "Object A acts upon Object B with Force X." We all get that, because it applies to just about everything -- from electrons to athletes. But now consider events in your internal, or mental, world. What causes your thoughts? Some of our thoughts have external causes, like when we touch something and suddenly realize it's hot. We don't deliberate whether or not to pull our hand away. Our brain has already fired the instruction to do so -- involuntarily. In some strange sense, "we"...

Shortly after the Reformation began, in the first few years after Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, he issued some short booklets on a variety of subjects. One of the most provocative was titled The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In this book Luther was looking back to that period of Old Testament history when Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading armies of Babylon and the elite of the people were carried off into captivity. Luther in the sixteenth century took the image of the historic Babylonian captivity and reapplied it to his era...

Greetings, I have been listening to and reading a lot of your material over the last year, and have been learning a lot - not least from the Defenders podcast. I've been searching in your material for the answer to a specific question, but haven't found it - and therefore I write you now. I'm trying to sort out the matter of free will and God's foreknowledge, and I've come to understand that there is no contradiction between God's foreknowing a free choice, and that choice being truly free. Foreknowing doesn't equal determining. But - here is my question: How?...