Why do Christians believe in fate, destiny, and "it was meant to happen" ideologies? Doesn't it contradict free will?

I think creating something you know is doomed to eternal suffering is worse than not giving it free will in the first place, or creating it at all.

>it's a "Veeky Forums is just another spiritual ideology debate board after all" episode
apparently we didn't learn from what befell Veeky Forums after all...

He can always not create someone he knows is doomed to go to hell

Allah knows your fate and you can change his decree by giving duaa. Submitting to Allah and only allah, praying, giving to the poor, etc.

Apparently that makes god ever so merciful. If god was ever so merciful then why would he create people destined for hell to begin with or even create hell? And why would somebody who wants everybody to worship him create non believers?

I can find no history on this or anything in the Qur'an or hadith and when I asked a scholar he looked at me like he was going to kill me then just said Allah knows what we don't know.

God is above good and evil. If He causes suffering, then it matters little, because all suffering is ultimately transient. God exists as the only truth, being the creator of all that was or will be, and so it is that we might be described as little more than His fleeting dreams. God transcends time and existence, and so He knows all futures and possibilities; in a sense, it is logical to consider that they must all occur simultaneously from His perspective. God is a perfect being, surpassing all human attempts at understanding, and any contradiction we may observe is due to our limitations and lower forms.

We cannot comprehend any hypothetical sufficiently higher-dimensional entity, or any alternate universe operating under entirely different physical laws, or even the fundamental phenomena that lie behind the absolute smallest components of existence and the reasons as to why the most basic relationships between these units occur. All of these things illustrate the limitations of our understanding, and the nature of God goes even further in its infinite and transcendent totality.

>God creates man, leaves him to his devices, but also knows what choices man will make beforehand.
If he knows what choices you make before hand, and chooses to create you in that way anyway as opposed to another way, then he is controlling your fate.

It's called cognitive dissonance, religion's best friend.

Because they are filthy Calvinists

Pretty sure humans use the whole "God/Elohim made it happen" because they cower from responsibility.
Though, when i think of good and evil it's more like the cartoon conscious thing.
If you don't believe in good or evil, you won't have one~~~~~!

i mean god/devil*

>God creates man, leaves him to his devices, but also knows what choices man will make beforehand

The end result of this hypothesis is that god, from the get-go, knew exactly where we as a society would end up, who would get to heaven and hell and that it was already set in stone. There can't be a free will under these circumstances because your path is already determined.

I'm not saying there is any free will, only that it's incompatible with an omniscient god.

>God does not control your fate, he only knows of it and allows you to fall into error if you so desire.

Since time began, god has known exactly which amongst us would end up in hell and heaven. Thus any illusion of sin or free will is pointless, since it will all just be according to his plan anyway. And furthermore, his EXACT plan since he is omniscient.

Where does the Bible mention free will?

>Where does the Bible mention free will?
Nowhere. It is a later christian concept that have to contradic others concepts otherwise the whole "God loves you" thing don't really work.

Dont argue with christians they are mentally retarded.

>you can change his decree

Nope. The Koran makes it very clear, Allah hardens the hearts of the unbelievers so that they reject Mohammed, he actively keeps people from accepting the truth in order to burn them.

>because all suffering is ultimately transient.

Except for that eternal torture he's set up to burn those of us he created without the capacity to believe in him. Because he LOVES us....

>>God does not control your fate, he only knows of it and allows you to fall into error if you so desire.
>Since time began, god has known exactly which amongst us would end up in hell and heaven.

It's actually even worse than that, because God created us and the Universe in such a way that some (most?) humans would end up burning in the fires. It's not like he "had" to create the Universe the way he did, he chose to do so, to create a mechanism that would condemn some (most?) of his creation to hellfire.

The eternal torture of lower entities is both meaningless and false next to the perfection of God, for in truth, there is nothing defined but for God. God is the only truth, and His love for His creations must be understood as the love we perceive through the cracked and distorted lens of human comprehension. That any form of suffering exists at all is the will of God, just as all other forms of seeming imperfection within Creation are. God is the only eternal entity, and your perception of the damnation is a view borne of ignorance fed to the masses; peasants and the small-minded perceive a bath in unending hellfire to be damnation, but the only true damnation is separation from God: Damnation is solely a state of deprivation, there is no Hell but the hell of not joining God's perfection and infinity.

"You" -- that is to say, your "soul", what may be considered the distillation of all that you are -- can only join God if it desires to join God, and if it does not, then it will both be and not be "you" that enters damnation, for you cannot truly exist in your unmaking without transcendence borne of God. Some might call this tyranny, but how can a false world be tyrannised, how can any simulation be respected next to the truth of its creator?

did my IQ suddenly jump the moment I stopped being a christian?

God exists outside logic, see Christians and their whole God is actually a third of God.

>The eternal torture of lower entities is both meaningless and false next to the perfection of God

That's nice for God but it hardly helps me, does it?

>peasants and the small-minded

By which you mean, "people who have read the Bible"?

>Damnation is solely a state of deprivation

God is omnipresent, so this is a nonsensical claim. There is no deprivation of God, not on Earth and not in Hell.

>he thinks free will exists
give it a year and you'll see the source

>That's nice for God but it hardly helps me, does it?

You are a creature in God's creation, a figment within His dream. What does and doesn't help you is irrelevant; you can only aspire to transcend this state of being and become joined to God's perfection. And as I said, there is no true eternal torture, for you cannot exist when you are unmade without God. Your damnation is the state of being deprived from God.

>By which you mean, "people who have read the Bible"?
It is stated canon by many Christian sects, including the Catholic church (and for that matter, most other monist religions besides Christianity that theologically and philosophically analyse the transcendent Being that is perfect and indivisible), that Hell is not a bath in fire and brimstone that manifests in some human-imagined temporal existence. Hell, damnation, is the state of being of deprivation from God and his transcendence.

>God is omnipresent, so this is a nonsensical claim. There is no deprivation of God, not on Earth and not in Hell.
God permeates all of His creation, yes. But what is meant by deprivation from God is any degree of separation between Him and yourself, with damnation being the most extreme state of deprivation. When you join God, you are literally transcending all degrees of separation from yourself and Him, and all the others that have also joined God. It is a state of completion. And again; Hell is not a place, Earth is a temporal figment of God's will, and paradise is transcending human suffering and pleasure, entering a state of perfect bliss and completion.

>But what is meant by deprivation from God is any degree of separation between Him and yourself, with damnation being the most extreme state of deprivation

If God is omnipresent there cannot be ANY degree of separation, period.

>It is stated canon by many Christian sects

So I should ignore what the Bible clearly says on the topic?

>You are a creature in God's creation, a figment within His dream.

Please cite the chapter and verse where this is spelled out. I think you may have mistaken Hinduism for Christianity, an easy mistake to make I'm sure.

>If God is omnipresent there cannot be ANY degree of separation, period.
The creator and controller of a simulation can be considered to be omnipresent, and his will essentially permeates the entirety of the simulation. That does not mean that there exists no degrees of separation between the actors within a simulation and the creator-controller itself.

>So I should ignore what the Bible clearly says on the topic?
Do you take everything in the Bible literally? Jesus stated that damnation was an "unquenchable fire", and he was right. To be deprived of God in its extreme is to be thrown into a state of perpetual, consuming want.

>Please cite the chapter and verse where this is spelled out. I think you may have mistaken Hinduism for Christianity, an easy mistake to make I'm sure.
I am not alluding to anything in the Bible when I state that. I am only attempting to understand and share my understanding of a small facet of God's nature and existence. If God is the only perfect being and creation is borne solely from His will and imagining, and if creation is wholly transient and conceived, then how is creation not effectively to Him what our dreams and imaginings are to us? Again, I cannot claim that any aspect of my understanding is perfect and unassailable. I can only make attempts at understanding in limited ways what God must truly be like and His relationship with the universe and existence.

>The creator and controller of a simulation

Okay. Irrelevant unless you claim the Bible describes reality as a simulation.

>That does not mean that there exists no degrees of separation between the actors within a simulation and the creator-controller itself.

It does if one of those actors has the property of being omnipresent!

>Do you take everything in the Bible literally?

I'm not a Christian so no. However, if you're arguing a Christian perspective and you DON'T take the Bible literally, then you have no argument because I can just say "well that bit about god, that's just a metaphor :^)"

>if creation is wholly transient and conceived,

There's nothing in the Bible to support such a claim, on the contrary the Bible is pretty clear about the realness of reality.

>Again, I cannot claim that any aspect of my understanding is perfect and unassailable.

My friend, your "understanding" is completely incoherent even from a Christian perspective.

I'm not a Christian, either. I'm an agnostic atheist acting as a devil's advocate. Almost everything in your arguments is essentially an argument against taking the Bible literally, though.

I adapted a lot of what I was saying from some discussions I've had with a couple of acquaintances that are theology students. They don't think that everything in the Bible should be taken literally -- for that matter, not even the Pope thinks that everything in the Bible should be taken literally. It's enjoyable to analyse, though.

Being outside of time, God knows whole history, that's true. It's also true that the particular events, although known beforehand by God, weren't true choices freely made by men. There is no contradiction here.

What's more, it's not even contradictory with God's omnibenevolence - God was still providing means for sinner's salvation when they were sinning, which they freely rejected - that's what divine love is (for more on its nature, see the difference between affective and effective love - God's is called effective).

>Omniscience contradicts free will
I want the modal fallacy meme to die

he creates you with no predisposition either way
the entire point is that YOU CHOOSE whether you want to burn in hell or not
it is an explicit choice on your part
you have only yourself to blame

There is no "free will"

You can make choices but what you choose will be based on circumstances that you have no control over. So your choice is already predetermined. There are verses in the Bible to support this (lots in both epistles to the Romans I think)

TLDR Calvinist predestination nigger.

Post proofs, Biblical or otherwise.

>HURR

That's nice, idiot.

Free will isn't biblical

This. The Bible supports strict determinism, as Calvin and Luther both realized.

>he creates you with no predisposition either way

Obviously not true, human nature exists and people have different predilections, interests and experiences.

>the entire point is that YOU CHOOSE whether you want to burn in hell or no

No, you don't. I don't believe in God. This isn't because I hate God, or because I want to suffer, it's just that I was raised by non religious parents and have never found any of the arguments for God to be remotely convincing. What would I have to do in order to avoid Hell? I can't believe in something if I don't believe in it! And God knew this, knew that I wouldn't believe, knew that as a result I would burn forever, and like the "loving" parent he is, he created me like this anyway! What could this mean, other than that he creates people simply for the pleasure of burning them?

>he creates you with no predisposition either way
Even if tabula rasa were true, which it demonstrably is not, then the environment everyone is born into would determine their inclinations through conditioning by life experience and interactions with others, which would themselves be determined by their own life experiences and interactions with others, etc. Before the first instant of creation, the omniscient mind would be aware of every possible set of inclinations that would eventually lead to heaven or hell that could possibly exist, and choosing to create the universe one way as opposed to another would be done with full knowledge of the inclinations that would occur as a direct result. And given the fact that people do not exist tabula rasa and have behaviour affected by genetics and so on, the effect is even more pronounced.

Who cares what Christians think.

so does science

Why don't atheists believe in Compatibalism? Are they unable to keep up with mainstream academia?

are you a catholic?

>god fails to create something correctly
>oops now you burn forever
why doesnt he just let us have no afterlife like the other imperfect animals?

>Hell, damnation, is the state of being of deprivation from God and his transcendence.

Gee, that's not what Jesus says. I wonder who's right, you or Jesus.

Revelation 19:20 Then the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who worked signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image. These two were cast alive into the lake of fire burning with brimstone.

Revelation 20:10 The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Revelation 21:8 But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

The bible.

Catholic kryptonite.

Clearly God is a dick.

Just like Calvinism

Determinism is in itself a fallacy that can be generalized to its own religion. It all comes down to how you draw the line. Some draw it at causality of major events such as decisions and outcome. But when it comes to galaxy-scale or microscopic events, they're prudent enough to say "Nah, the universe is chaotic on these levels!" So is there some order from chaos? Or does order come only once chaos has slowed down to an arbitrary degree?

The Book of Genesis, from "And God said let there be light" to God's making of man in "Our" image, conveys an order in which the Christian God is omnipresent. However, the fact that He made perfect man to be a laborer with Him, in the garden eschews a metaphorical companionship that goes beyond the scope of determinism. Later, during Jesus' life, it's brought up various times that He had to do this or that so that the prophecies would be fulfilled. This was surely not lost on the Jews who used every ounce of ammo they had to deny that He could be the Messiah come. Notice though, that Jesus never answers questions directly when asked who He is. As He asks an apostle at one point, 29“But who do you say I am?” He asked. Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” 30 "And Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about Him."

In short, it's always up to the individual to decide where he stands in relation to God. The fundamental tenet of Christianity is a personal relationship with Him; being virtuous is only a means to an end. Same thing can be said for determinism. You are as much enslaved to fate and the idea that the past controls you, as you believe you are. Neither of these ideals, a walk with God or a deterministic outlook, can be changed for someone outside of their control and still be within the design of free will. This is what Jesus' parabolic teachings mean.

If you can't decide small matters in life without a myopic preconception of right or wrong, then there is nothing you can be taught that will change your doubting heart.

And that last bit isn't by any means a condescending notion or quip. It's because we as humans are creatures of habit that we can't help it. We are the habits we keep.

No matter what amount of personal will we think we can muster on to overcome an obstacle in our path, we will only ever get over the hurdle if we approach it from a single digit view.

In this sense, there is some truth on a spiritual level to determinism. It's by climbing a mountain one foothold at a time that we can ever improve or evolve in any measure. And whilst in that journey of life, you are cosigned to a sense of causality. Like a painter you can only learn by your mistakes and learn to have the confidence to keep painting despite them if you are ever to get better.

I don't think Calvin's God actively causes people to doubt him for the pleasure of burning them, as he very clearly does in the Koran.

What nonsense. We don't have free will because we are deterministic creatures of a deterministic universe, if you "believe" you have free will then you're simply wrong. This isn't a matter of perspective, it's simple logic.

Tell me how you came to that conclusion. Tell me how my being a sentient pattern in the Universe's matrix correlates to the inertia of its sudden expanse, deceleration and rearrangement against all odds, for us to be having this conversation. Show me the supposed connection between this event and the unseen psychic tendrils you posit are governing my response to you right now, in the present day, at the present second.

It -is- a matter of perspective whether you want to ride the road of least resistance or not. Nobody is making you get on that boat. You're doing it because you've already accepted that you have, basically idolizing a solipsistic outlook of the world. A perception issue you don't want to remedy because it requires hard introspection as to how you came to that conclusion and the shaky fabric of ideals by deciding that's what you were. Which going off your laconic comment, is something you already know.

The Universe is deterministic. We are part of the Universe. Ergo, we are deterministic. This isn't hard to grasp.

If everything in the Universe was binary, yeah. It wouldn't be. Too bad it's not, and we're not automatons unless we believe are because we're governed by instinct/intuition. Which given any knowledge of the future, probabilistic or otherwise, contradicts you because there's no future for a choice not yet made.

You may think there is, because you've not tapped into your higher realms of consciousness but as much as we are able to sometimes make our own fabrications reality, you can't make that one true.

not all christians believe this, some christians believe in predestination and some believe in arminianism

the only thing that really binds christians are the stuff that's contained in the apostles and nicene, and somewhat the athanasian creed

>omnibenevolent

Yes, which is why that's known as an atheist strawman, and not something in the bible, or about God, at all.

Even that crippled little cunt Stephen Hawking said that if everything is determined, we don't know what that determination is, so we might as well act as though it doesn't exist.

Anyone who argues for determinism is a fool; you could literally not change anyone's mind if you're right.

No, it's just stupid and wrong and self-defeating.

>a deity who creates humans with the explicit intention of burning them forever, which runs contrary to the whole "omnibenevolent" thing.

i don't think god creates anyone for the purpose of burning them, but im also not sure omni-benevolence is an attribute of god.

"... & Humanities" was a mistake

>Anyone who argues for determinism is a fool; you could literally not change anyone's mind if you're right.

But that's stupid. Your arguments would just be deterministic factors applying to their causally determined reasoning.

That's funny you should tell all those theologians who have spent literally centuries trying to square the circle of theodicy that they're just atheists strawmaning :^)

>i don't think god creates anyone for the purpose of burning them

If he knows before he creates us that we will burn, and then creates us anyway, for what possible reason has he created us, but to burn us?

>If everything in the Universe was binary, yeah.

What? You think only binary systems can be deterministic?

>and we're not automatons

I didn't say we were, that's not what determinism even >implies.

>Which given any knowledge of the future, probabilistic or otherwise, contradicts you because there's no future for a choice not yet made.

This is only true for God. We don't have perfect knowledge of the future so it's perfectly sensible for us to make choices and those choices to sometimes be the wrong ones.

>higher realms of consciousness

Self delusion and wishful thinking.

You believe that the Universe is in a constant state of this-or-that. This is binary thinking, and like the user above me said is self-defeating. Your entire argument is predicated off this, and the notion that just because we are self-aware and "fallible" to some arbitrary degree dictated by no measure, that we must therefore be subject to this humanist construct of determinism. It's an elementary font for cogito ergo sum. "We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt … ."

Like I said before. Solipsism. Like attracts like in this Universe, and so the more you create idols out of delusions you can't see or feel, that you think support you, the more real they become, just because you live within your own convictions. It's a selfish, nihilistic religiosity.

In essence, determinism to you is a cop-out for those things you lack in a spiritual baseline as to why the world is, or your purpose.

Buuuuurnnnn.

>You believe that the Universe is in a constant state of this-or-that.

What?

That's a funny way to spell "incoherent gibberish"

>Big words hurt me

Oh you're a moron. Carry on then.

One thing I don't understand is how God loves us, but sentences people to eternal damnation if they disobey him. You don't see (sane) parents murdering their kids for not listening.

>I never read Watchmen.

Hit or miss. 1 or 2. Determined to happen or not to happen. This or that.

...

Okay, then my answer is simple.

"No, I don't"

>my answer to addressing the holes in my argument is "No u!"

Am I supposed to say touche, now? Cause that was equivalent of your response to all of

You see this is the problem when you base your argument on telepathy. You don't know what I think, and your guess was wrong. There's literally nothing else for me to say but "you're wrong".

...

>telepathy
Condescension. The last refuge of the weak-minded. The better man would have admitted he was at his limits and moved on.

You literally tried to tell me what I think.

>Like attracts like in this Universe
Alike charges repel, actually.
The rest of your post is such a mess nothing more can be taken from it to even refute.

Do you know why they repel? Because when they try to connect, their polarities change to face the same direction which causes them to repel each other. They don't repel, so much as push against each other because they can't connect.

>they don't repel so much as repel

>Because when they try to connect, their polarities change to face the same direction which causes them to repel each other.

Nonsense.

Additionally, electrons repel each other, which is outside the context of whatever your explanation was supposed to be.

It's all the same. They all have an axis. They all subscribe to some form of the electromagnetic force. Those axis in turn switch when they meet, so that they can become one. This results in the opposite poles facing, which in turn cause a push.

what part of science supports strict determinism?

Quantum science

ok
wait no

Yeah, no. Your grasp of physics is, if anything, even weaker than your grasp on logic.

Not that faggot but "all of it". Yes, quantum mechanics is deterministic, NOT stochastic as some claim.

go ahead and model it

If you could show this conclusively you would be the recipient of several Nobel Prizes.