Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2017 23:09:22 GMT
Christian reliance on "free will" can be argued away rationally by "God" giving them all their traits, which they do believe. That doesn't take away their free will nor responsibility, as they are what they are, however good or bad they are, but it firmly implicates a creator god as reprehensible. It is both nonsensical to "override one's preferences, conditioning, biases and circumstances" and not what Christians hold, not the way you use. Whatever they do is by definition according to their "preferences, conditioning, biases and circumstances". Not the same thing as urges and dissonances in which they ultimately choose which matters to them more - still according to their traits and preferences. It 's trivially obvious that we all do that all day long.
If true, then it is cute, cuddly, fuzzy and multicultural because Muslims are (mostly) brown. That takes precedence over any moral concern.
Christians may not describe free will as "choosing what one thinks before thinking it", but that's a matter of cognitive dissonance whereby they refuse to give a concrete definition of the scope and mechanisms of free will in order to maintain the integrity of their emotional safety net. Much like you are doing.
Unless they subscribe to Calvinist doctrine, Christians simply cannot plump for anything less than absolute free will (the incoherent type), constrained by nothing, because anything less than that degree of freedom will impugn God's reputation as being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.
Ifs buts candies nuts. We can't stop those who aren't displaying mental illness from committing suicide, so your "don't allow" is just another of your canards. And regardless, this doesn't address your incompetent use of horrid treatment in third-world asylums as meaningful to anything save not torturing/neglecting patients but instead giving good care. Nothing at all to do with funneling the mentally compromised to permanently harm themselves.
Why should mental illness be a life sentence in cases where repeated courses of treatment are unsuccessful? Surely you would agree that a person with mental illness hasn't done anything wrong that warrants sometimes decades of interminable suffering? And someone with severe paranoid schizophrenia probably may as well be chained to a bed in a spartan chamber of an Indonesian mental asylum, as far as they are concerned. They are likely so consumed with their psychotic delusions that they don't register where they are and what's being done with them in reality. And given that 'original sin' does not exist in reality (i.e. people haven't done anything deserving of suffering just by dint of the fact that they were born into the world), that means that suicide should be freely available to absolutely everyone, in a form that is 100% risk free, as close as possible to 100% pain free and as fast acting as possible, and which allows them to say farewell to their friends and family and have those people present at the time of death without anyone calling the emergency services and raising a hue and cry.
This is of course nonsense. We as individuals see, choose, do. Unconstrained externally (what we think, want, attempt, not necessarily succeed at). Regardless of your meaningless framed babble about "come up with a list of the factors which act as constraints to freedom".
"Unconstrained eternally" (as in free from coercion) is the very same type of "free will" that Daniel Dennet and other 'compatibilists' subscribe to, and they believe that human behaviour is completely deterministic and mechanistic.
I'm not interested in what serves what zealot. Only in what is, as best we can know. Certainly not the self-contradicting derangements of the hopeful species-ender partisans.
In the context of this discussion, religion is cited to substantiate my assertion that the incoherent definition of free will must be the most commonly believed paradigm of free will. This is further substantiated by the draconian criminal justice systems which still obtain in most jurisdictions of the world, in which the individual convicted of a crime is punished as though they could have been something other than what they are. In a mechanistic universe, once a crime has been committed, we know that the perpetrator could have done nothing other than commit the crime, thus making a nonsense out of the concept that there must be retribution for the act, rather than just a measure of deterrence and protecting the rest of the population from the criminal. The idea of hating someone and wanting to inflict suffering on someone just because of what they are and couldn't help but be is shown to be utterly absurd.