I'm telling you what the Orthodox Christian teaching is on all this. This is my worldview. According to the Christian faith (which is based on divine revelation and not empirical observation or purely rational reasoning which are secondary to it), death is unnatural and is not part of the creation which is perfect. Death is the privation of life, just like evil is the privation of the good, chaos is the privation of order, darkness is the privation of light, etc. God didn't change the creation after the fall - the fall of man caused the fall of the whole creation (hence cosmic in scope). The closest I can explain it is shifting of one realm to another which was a supernatural event beyond our understanding (like creation and miracles are).
But even arguing in this framework is presupposing your beliefs, to which I'd still ask for an actual breakdown of how animal physiology supports a world without death (and how that effects plant death, why animals have to experience death if humans were the ones who made the mistake, etc). Still I'm interested in your answers to these questions.
We're not told that. Some Church fathers meditated on the way Eden was before the fall, but the affirm patristic teaching is that we can't have positive knowledge of what things were like there, just like we can't know how the afterlife functions (beside what we've been told about it). The approach is apophatic, meaning negative - "the human body and nature was unlike what we know today". Basically it's not possible to give a naturalistic rational breakdown of how nature operated because of our limitations. Obviously the Bible doesn't get into detail about many natural phenomena and the explanation for that is that such knowledge is not profitable/benefitial to us and that's why it wasn't revealed. Everything we need for our salvation and virtuous life has been revealed by God. It's much like how a father wouldn't get into details about how the engine works when asked by his 7 year old about cars. The obsession people have to know everything and peer through all mysteries is very much childlike and we're as impotent as children in this endeavor even though we believe we know so much.
The irony is we concentrate on minute details and phenomena millions of miles away from us, or invest great effort in looking at how microscopic things work, or how the Earth supposedly was millions of years ago and take great pride in this knowledge. But disregard the most important aspects of our life - the spiritual realm, the fate of our soul and that of our neighbour. But that's man's nature - we miss the foret for the trees just like Adam and Eve missed the Garden for that one tree that was forbidden. We're always searching and never content.
So, let's talk a different way. I have free will but that doesn't mean I can do anything I want. I cannot fly. No matter how much I will it, I am limited by physical reality, a set of systems God put in place. So, how is it not possible to still have free will and have constraints on evil? Perhaps a man could only become physically aroused in the presence of a woman he made a sacred marriage pact with, surely God could make that happen.
This was the natural state of being in Eden as Adam and Eve didn't have sex as we know it. They fell because they were deceived and they disobeyed and that's when all sin, evil and death entered the creation. But even after the fall, and especially after Christ, there are constraints on evil - we are given explicit moral laws and conscience and most importantly the Church which is guided by the Holy Spirit. A person who lives a Christian life participating in the divine grace through the sacraments has nothing to fear. If he makes his soul a house for the Spirit, if he becomes sanctified, no evil has power over him.
If God were to intervene and modify man to not be capable of sinning, that would not only make him a tyrant, but would negate the possibility of man to reach true virtue which is only achieved through struggle with the passions and transcending the worldly. For Christians, this life is a preparation for the eternal life - it's not self-sufficient and self-contained. We have to make ourselves worthy of God and restore our likeness which was lost due to the effects of the fall and sin.
God eventually healed our nature by assuming it in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the fall was reversed and our path to salvation and eternal life in God was cleared. The purpose of man is to become one with God, to become like-god (theosis). What good is for God a being that can't freely choose to love Him and be with Him? Such a being is no better than a dumb beast that's only loyal because of instinct or a machine that's been programmed to emulate love. No, that's how Satan operates - he's the one who enslaves people and tries to subvert their free will through deception.
There's much more to be said on that and the Church fathers have written tons on those problems. I can assure you every aspect of the Christian faith has been addressed in detail and put to scrutiny in the past 2000 years.
Citation needed. Philosophers don't agree on where morality comes from and likewise they won't be able to agree on where moral accountability comes from.
How can someone be accountable if he never had any choice in the matter? Again, in determinism nothing is morally good or bad - it just is. For example, Jeffrey Epstein was determined to be a pdf assassin for the Rothschilds. Why is that bad under determinism and how is he guilty of being himself? Is a lion guilty of eating his cubs?
Quite clearly here in Romans 9:19-23 he responds to your objection: How could God hold people morally accountable whose choices have been pre-determined by God? His answer is that God can do what he wants with his creation just like a potter can create a pot for the purpose of destroying it.
None of the Church fathers understood that passage to mean that some people were created for damnation. As St. John Chrysostom says about this passage: "God supplies grace for salvation, but damnation comes from the sinner’s own choices.". The metaphor used is about God's justice, not fatalism. Only many centuries later protestants started reading the interpretation you have into the text, resurrecting old heresies. Sadly western-minded people are used to the calvinistic interpretation you have.
You still didn't point out which premise of my argument was wrong.
I presupped your argument - determinism destroys the possibility not only of knowledge (evaluating truth propositions) but also of ethics:
PS: Come to think of it, the whole notion of evil makes no sense under determinism. There are zero objective moral values possible if strict determinism is true. Morality presupposes the ability to choose the good over not-good (evil). This ties in to culpability and moral responsibility. So your entire argument is self-refuting.
And since you asked it's based on how things are.
Saying truth is how things are is circular. How do you know how things are and how do you know your perception of "things" aligns with what's true?
But I don't see why knowledge of truth would require free will. For example if knowledge is defined along the lines of justified true belief then none of those elements seem to require free will. You can believe something because your mind was deterministically put into that state of belief.
Here's why. We have two propositions: A is true and A is false. If determinism is the case, you can't really know what is the true proposition because you're determined to choose one or the other and at no point do you make an evaluation and choose the true one over the false one.
Here's another example: Imagine two calculators: one is programmed to output 2+2=4 and the other 2+2=BOOBS. You have no way of evaluating which one is true because your output is determined also - you're basically a calculator yourself. You have no access to objective truth because whatever you or anyone else is outputting has been determined. At no point do you have a real evaluator who can look at the outputs and say "hmm seems like this one is true", because that would also be a determined output and stand on equal grounds as any other output. This means that all propositions are equally valid => knowledge is impossible.
JTB assumes free will - not only truth does, but also belief and justification are real choices. In fact in determinism there's no justification at all because your reasoning is determined and not the result of evaluating propositions and sifting the truth over the false.
Not true because humans have minds and dominos do not.
A mind without free will is a determined input-output mechanism though. At no point does it act on its own.
Sure, in another comment I said the analogy is not 1 to 1 because we're secondary agents.
The person having a son did not create the world where murder is possible
God didn't create that world either. There was no death before the fall. As I said, you're describing the world after the fall. Your contention ultimately boils down to this: "Why did God made us in His image having free will and being capable of not loving Him and disobeying His command? Why didn't He create us as automatons so that no ill could come out of the creation?"
The answer as I already said is because there's no love without freedom of choice. Maybe people who think marrying their AI gf (golems) is an option may disagree, but frankly they are degenerates and they're too far gone in their metaverse minds. God allowed evil to enter the world via our own choices because He ultimately knows He can make a greater good this way. This is why I made the analogy with the child - you know the child will suffer and die eventually, but you still have the child because life is a greater good even considering all that.
BTC is already climbing back up. Once more, it didn't crash as much as some people wished it would. But every drop is a great opportunity to buy at a discount and not be a peasant in the coming NWO.
Dude, do you think I, an Orthodox Christian, coming from that region don't know about the Byzantine Empire? I laughed at you calling it the Byzantines and the bizarre claim that early Christians were unitarian (there were such heretical sects, but why do you assume they are the "true Christians" and not the majority ones who held to the teachings of the apostolic Church?)
The Church was headed by the Patriarch or bishop of Constantinople, who was appointed or removed by the emperor.
No, the Orthodox Church was always synodal and decentralized. The Empire was ruled according to the dual-headed eagle principle of symphonia - joint governance of Church and state working in harmony in their respective roles. The Church took care of spiritual matters and the state - of civil matters. The Emperor was crowned and anointed by the Church and he held a minor clerical order (diakonos). Yes, some emperors overstepped their boundaries and meddled into Church matters but that's not how the system was set up. Namely, this system is distinct from the Western Catholic system which came to be defined by a geopolitical struggle between the secularized Papacy greedy for political supremacy (owning a bank, a standing army and militarized orders etc.) and the God-Emperor kings who sought to rule all by themselves, getting rid of the RC Church (culminating in Henry VIII who made his own church where he's the head and later Napoleon who notoriously crowned himself in a self-worshipping ceremony).
The doctrine of the Trinity was not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, but it was implicit in John, and the New Testament possessed a triadic understanding of God and contained a number of Trinitarian formulas.
The Trinity is present both in the New and the Old Testament and that has been the traditional teaching of the Church as evident from the early Church fathers. The Rublev icon that shows up at the link you posted depicts the Trinity as seen by Abraham in Genesis 18.
You shouldn't be debating history and especially early Church history if you haven't red a lot on the topic. Reading some wacko's book or watching zeitgeist and tiktok reels about it won't do the job.
That's the world as we know it after the fall which is cosmic in scope. Before that there was no death or evil. The Earth was paradise, Eden.
Equivocating someone born into this system reproducing to a Being that ostensibly constructed the system this way is not honest
Exactly. I'm not the one equivocating though - I specifically said God's uncreated will is the primary cause and our created wills are secondary causes. There's a very clear distinction between God's nature and our human nature.
Nobody can create BTC too.
But why do you assume creation is the only way to control currency? Wouldn't holding a large portion of it have the same implications?
Also to remind you, the official religion of the Byzantines was the Holy Trinity. But most Christians didn't believe in the Trinity, and they were persecuted for the refusal to believe in the Holy Trinity.
"the Byzantines"? Are those supposed to be some of the Epstein islands? Sure, buddy. Did the clockwork elves tell you that? I was about to explain how the Trinity is conceived of in Christian theology but I see now it's a waste of time and you obviously are very knowledgeable about it all. Call me when you're back from lala land.
Where did Bill Cooper talk about a crypto currency like BTC? Do you have the page or quote?
The point of crypto was to make a 1 world gov and 1 monetary system that rothschild controls directly while claiming its decentralized. In reality rothschild would know all your purchases and stop your buying or selling ability if you made him mad. This would lead to mind control at extreme levels.
It's late to the party then, because that system was created 100 years ago with the privately owned central banks which is literal centralized system controlled by the Rothschilds and the other major banking families.
Precious metals, barter for goods and services are the future of trade. Later it will evolve to even higher forms.
And who controls the precious metal market? I bet it's totally not the Rothschilds. Oh, but later it will evolve guys. I love the magical language you use.
Yes, well said. All their arguments are based on word-concept fallacies.
The Hebrew word used here is raw. It means adversity, calamity, disaster, evil.
There you go. Does God create calamity and disasters, which are perceived evils for men? Yes. Is this evil by itself? No, because God is the standard for the good and not man. If God wills to flood the entire effin planet and purge it from the abominations, then He's justified in doing so and it's good. If He wills that the jews wander in the desert for 40 years so that the entire generation dies out before getting to the Promised land - He's justified. If He allows His Son to be tortured and crucified by the roman and the jews, He's still justified (keep in mind the Trinity has one will so the will of the Father is the same as the Son's).
Quote mining won't help you proving much. The Bible is a liturgical text that is understood holistically and not piece by piece standing alone. I mean, I can find quotes to prove any thesis you can think of but the Scriptures are to be understood within context. And the correct context is only understood when you have the correct presuppositions which are the result of having the correct doctrines which are found within the living tradition of the Church, created by God.
If you're doing internal critique of the Christian position, you must be consistent with that position and not strawman it. Seems like your critique applies to the freemasonic/talmudic manichean Architect and not to the Christian Trinitarian God.
Sounds like "able not to sin". If Augustine were interpreted that one is only "able not to sin" by one's own choice and God's choice flowing together as one, that might be the path of resolution. "Able" is another horridly ambiguous word.
I don't think so. God's will and a person's will are separate. God always wills the good so His will is fixed. A person can align himself with God's will or he can choose to go against it. I don't see the problem with the word able. We can use "possibility" and still arrive at the same point.
Nah, that's the predestination heresy which is not upheld by the early fathers aside from St. Augustine. God creates everyone with the possibility to freely choose Him and be saved. As for the fallen sinful nature, this is not God's creation but the result of the fall. God can't create "marred" or imperfect things because that's contrary to His perfect nature (claiming otherwise is like claiming God can lie, at which point you're talking about Allah/Satan or some other deity).
My defeater is purely logical and doesn't delve in theology where lots of objections are possible. I kept the argument with him in the philosophical realm for a reason.
I think I presented the defeater already:
PS: Come to think of it, the whole notion of evil makes no sense under determinism. There are zero objective moral values possible if strict determinism is true. Morality presupposes the ability to choose the good over not-good (evil). This ties in to culpability and moral responsibility. So your entire argument is self-refuting.
You conflate free will with moral accountability. Arguing for/against one is not arguing for/against another. You also conflate determinism with materialism.
I don't think so. No free will necessarily leads to no moral accountability and that should be evident. Determinism usually assumes materialism. If you have another worldview then let's hear it. What other causes are there beside material causes and how are they justified?
My terms were clearly defined and primary and secondary causation were not terms I used.
You're arguing on a subject where those terms apply. Just because you didn't use them because you didn't know them and can't make the proper distinction, that doesn't mean they are not relevant. That's exactly why I brought it up, because this this will help you understand how God being the primary cause of everything doesn't make him the secondary cause that led to evil coming into the world.
No, truth is true regardless of whether any agent is capable of making choices.
Knowledge of truth requires choice and evaluation. This is in the sphere of epistemology. Truth's ontological existence is another matter. But since you affirm the realist position, in what way does objective truth exist and what is it grounded in?
Love could be defined as an emotion one feels or as a disposition one has towards a thing or as actions one does in service of a thing. None of those definitions would require free will.
What is an emotion and what causes it? If it's simply a causally determined reaction to outside stimuli, then it's an instinct no different than any other instinct or mechanism in the body (or in nature as a whole, because there's no meaningful distinction between what you call a human and the other causally determined instances of matter - dominos - in the universe).
PS: Come to think of it, the whole notion of evil makes no sense under determinism. There are zero objective moral values possible if strict determinism is true. Morality presupposes the ability to choose the good over not-good (evil). This ties in to culpability and moral responsibility. So your entire argument is self-refuting.
Here's the main argument refuting determinism in under a minute which I went over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA2mYO0CwQM
You just agreed with my position (that God causing all the evil in the world doesn't make him evil) while claiming to be arguing against me.
That's a strawman. I explicitly said God doesn't cause ANY evil in any way shape or form because it's contrary to His nature. Everything God does is good, true and just.
Therefore if God wasn't pre-determined to create a universe that certainly (as proved by his foreknowledge) led to evil (action A leading to X) and could have chose not to create (action B leading to not-X), but yet he did, it follows that God creating the universe was the ultimate cause of evil in the universe. Additionally God was aware this action would lead to evil in the universe while the alternative would have avoided it, so therefore God deliberately caused evil in the universe.
Which part of this argument is wrong? Notice I said nothing about causing evil being evil, God being morally accountable for causing evil or humans lacking accountability for their role in bringing the evil about.
The part that's wrong is that you equivocate between primary and secondary causation. But the argument is not even valid when talking about secondary causation (created causes). Here's a very clear example:
If I have a son and I do a great job being a good father, but still my son, who's now an adult, falls into bad habits and eventually commits murder, am I responsible for the evil caused by him?
I'd say the whole argument as you put it begs the question because it assumes determinism and takes away the ability of real choice from the equation. Just like I said in the comment above - you presuppose physicalist domino-effect causality (A-> B-> C) where each each cause is the predetermined effect of a previous cause and acts a certain with no free will - basically it behaves like an inanimate physical object (so naturally, you arrive to determinism and the circle is complete).
Aristotle is cool and all, but like all ancient philosophers, he took a lot of things for granted because at that point no one was questioning the foundational ideas about metaphysics and epistemology. Many centuries passed before Descartes and later Hume, Kant and the existentialists had the ball rolling questioning foundational beliefs.
You need to define what a secondary causal agent is.
Secondary causation refers to the created causes we normally talk about (fire causes heat, choices cause actions, medicine causes healing, etc.) These causes are real and effective, operating according to their own natures.
In a row of dominoes ending with a button you can call the second domino a "secondary causal agent" but it doesn't change the fact that if laws of physics are deterministic then the fall of the first domino causes the button to get pressed.
No, you can't because a domino is an inanimate object and not an agent. Agent refers to a rational being capable making choices which influences other objects and agents in the universe.
Same thing if a general orders a soldier to kill someone - we say the general caused the death, regardless of the fact that there was a soldier who also caused the death and could have opted to disobey orders.
That's because in that context, the soldier is supposed to defer his personal assessment and act as a tool, an extension of the higher-up's will. Also, in the many cases soldiers are also held responsible for not disobeying orders on some occasions like the nazi executions. This a deontological and ethical question about when "I was just following orders" is appropriate and when it's not (and who gets to decide where the line is drawn).
But if determinism is true, the general isn't responsible too, because he's simply a domino down the causal chain. Responsibility, justice or any moral judgement is nonsensical in that system.
Citation needed. We all know people can love and make choices yet it is conceivable that these things happen via deterministic mental processes. If you say that a deterministic love cannot be love then you are simply defining love to be something that humans may not be capable of.
First of all, if determinism is true it's not simply about people not having free will and choice - that's just the surface of the problem as normies see it. Philosophically, it also leads to the impossibility of knowledge and truth. Why? Because truth necessitates a choice between the true and the false. But if every mind in existence is predetermined, no real evaluation of a given proposition ever takes place (I'm predetermined to say A is true, and you - B is true and at no tie-breaker is possible because C is also predetermined to output either A or B).
If determinism is the case, all that there is is matter governed by predetermined chemical reactions, that are effects of previous reactions and so on going back to the First cause. Where is love in that equation? Do you mean more predetermined chemical reactions? I highly doubt many people will agree on that definition (not an appeal to majority, just saying). Is the water boiling at 100 degrees any different than love? What's the meaningful distinction between me loving something vs the opposite?
God created all things good. His foreknowledge doesn't make Him an accomplice. What you're saying is basically this: you having children makes you evil, because you have them while knowing they will inevitably suffer and experience evil. But having children is still a net good and you go ahead. What appears bad to us, God uses to make good. Christ was betrayed and crucified but out of this a much greater good came to the world. This is how God operates and us having limited knowledge means we can't foresee and judge how thing ultimately end up. God can do only good because that's His nature.
The idea that God merely permits evil doesn't make sense given that God set everything up knowing how it would turn out, meaning he actively caused everything we witness, not merely permitting it.
No, that's a common mistake when critiquing theodicy (problem of evil). Knowing something in advance doesn't make you the cause of it. You conceive of only one type of causality (the domino effect one) - this is the result of materialism being the ruling paradigm in our modern world. But there are other types of causality that were widely accepted before metaphysics was done away with. Humans are secondary causal agents, meaning our will is separate from God's will and what we cause in the world is separate from God's causes.
There's no love without free will but free will inevitably leads to the possibility of evil (not choosing the good). God made us in His image having free will and being capable of love, even at the cost of evil and suffering entering His creation. Therefore love is greater than evil and triumphs in the end when all evil will be destroyed at the final judgement.
That's the correct Christian doctrine on free will and evil, yes. Evil doesn't have a positive existence but it's the negation of the good and the result of our own free will failing to choose the good.
It does. Denying it reduces to absurdity because it makes knowledge and truth claims impossible. This is basic philosophy shit and yet I see so many pondering this when people in the past have figured it out easily through divine revelation. People are so much dumber now, it's scary.
Don't forget the clockwork elves. They're the ones divulging all the secrets of the universe, those little bastards.
Deep state CEO are basically the Rothschild family and the Board behind him are the 13 families in Rome along with the Vatican, Italian Mafia, and Jesuits. Black Pope is the General of the Jesuits and often referred to as the leader of the deep state. Grey Pope is the leader of the 13 families. White Pope is just for show. These groups work for the underground Reptilians who mostly work for the demon world whose HQ is in Saturn but they are in this World too. The Zionists worship Saturn which is why they put that black cube on their head.
Source: I saw it on a DMT trip.
No, it's about to shoot up. Bull run incoming. Buy now or get shipped to Epstein island to get diddled for eternity.
It's coming as predicted. Smart people who paid attention the last couple of years are going to be rich and the rest are going to be serfs enslaved to UBI and CBDC.
Sure. Btw there are great saints of the Church who happen to be black so it's obvious that race can't be a defining factor in Christianity, just like any other division based on biology, intelligence or ethnicity. Literally everyone can become sanctified and participate in divine grace if he or she wills it in their heart and strives towards Christ.
You don't need binance or any other exchange to transfer bitcoin. I can send you BTC right now and all I need is a wallet hash.