- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Ok Calvin
For those downvoting the above, @captainlezbian@lemmy.world is making a reference to John Calvin, who is considered to be an OG determinist.
(Determinism: The view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world.)
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.
Removed by mod
This is what happened when you don’t seed your RNG.
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.
This actually makes my point though.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.
On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.
If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?
The childs.
Because she’s omniscient. That’s the problem with making up an all-powerful, all-knowing god. It comes with some inconvenient logical consequences. When she set up the initial state of the universe she already knew exactly how it would play out (because omniscient), she also could have chosen any other outcome (because omnipotent). It had to be a deliberate decision because as an omniscient being it’s simply not possible to claim ignorance of the outcome, and as an omnipotent being she could have chosen any outcome she desired.
Do you really believe this or are you being disingenuous because it doesn’t fit your argument?
Truly believe it. The child’s neurons in the brain fired off, having them explore/examine the saw. You could say the same thing for any object in the room. A child will look at some of them, but not others.
This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.
Free will is the ability to be belligerent until death.
Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.
That’s… just like your opinion man.
Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.
All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt
Spirituality is all opinion man.
But no, it not lacking anything.
Except all morality and empathy
How would an explanation of a religious concept have morality or empathy? Words don’t generally have Human emotions in my experience.
The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.
Removed by mod
If there exists a being that experiences time the same way we experience space, do we have any less free will just because the being can continue knowing about it before it happened? The person is making the choice, not the being that knows about the choice.