Why Free Will is a scam

[Jester the Nightmare]

Oh boy, yeah here is something most people don't actually think about, God made everything, that means he made sin for man to fall into, man could not create temptation as we are but mortal beings, so God had to have made it for us to fall into, kind of like a general controlling both sides of a war and just watching them kill each other for S***s and giggles. All that free will crap is fake. If God wanted us to be good why make temptation in the first place? Answer, there is no god it was a half baked story made up by a bunch of writers who wanted to get money for their works, and put together by an empire who was dying out slowly. Yeah, there. Suck it Trebek.  

[[-Erik-]]

Money-hungry writers? I don't know. Maybe they were just doped or something.

But I agree with you on the rest. Why the hell create temptation if we were meant to be good? It's pointless.

 

[Jester the Nightmare]

Not money hungry writers more like, the best writers of the time in an era of time when writing biblical tales was popular, then each one got picked for their writing.  

[Doredia]

I might have seen the reason behind that if human temptations were completely mental, like a hobby or something. But a lot of them are not. People are tempted to wrong because of their hormones. If god did want us to be good, he wouldn't have made these hormones that made us want to do bad things.

Also, I keep getting annoyed at the fact that there are mentally ill people and this "free will" thing. Where is their free will? They are not fully responsible for anything they do, and they can control their actions a lot less than normal human beings.  

[Revolutionary Justice]

Quote:

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.
-Karl Marx

Some works about early Christianity if you're interested:
The Book of Revelations
Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity
The History of Early Chirstianity

Sources might be a little old but they're still awesome reads.  

[Jester the Nightmare]

i'm going to paraphrase here but in civilizationf our when you optain religion there is a quote "Nature's beauty in and of itself instills in mans mind the very thought of God." Which looked at carefully means that some pople have to have somebody out there who made something because the very idea that its just there on its own is to overwhelming.  

[PetreyDish]

Your opening argument is about the equivalent of saying "If my body didn't want me to do cocaine it wouldn't have a nose"; completely ridiculous and absurdly hard to take seriously.

The existence of sin is a sheer testament to the existence of "free will", or at least from a biblical point of view. If we had no free will, there would literally be no sin, but seeing as we're not avatars of God we have the ability to turn our backs on him/her and sin until our teeth fall out.
That's what free will is.  

[Jester the Nightmare]

Good point there, but the fact is that when one being controls both sides of a deal he made for people to choose from and made it look like we are to blame ourselves for the choices when he could have made it easier to choose him, then its a scam.  

[PetreyDish]

Jester the Nightmare

Good point there, but the fact is that when one being controls both sides of a deal he made for people to choose from and made it look like we are to blame ourselves for the choices when he could have made it easier to choose him, then its a scam.

It wouldn't be free will if there wasn't any choice.  

[Eccentric Detective]

DancesWithBats

Jester the Nightmare

Good point there, but the fact is that when one being controls both sides of a deal he made for people to choose from and made it look like we are to blame ourselves for the choices when he could have made it easier to choose him, then its a scam.

It wouldn't be free will if there wasn't any choice.

I agree. If there is a god, he only wants the people who are capable of making the right choice even when the wrong options are available.

The thing I don't get, though, is why he has to put us through this "test" in the first place. If he's omniscient, he knows everything that will happen, so why make us go through this life of suffering if he could simply take the good ones to his heaven?

Oh, wait, he loves all of us, so he wants to give us all a chance, even the potentially hell-bound ones, who he would be sad to see punished for eternity. An exercise in futility? (Unless god is not omniscient after all.)

And then... if you're going to punish someone, isn't the whole point to make them learn from their mistakes?? Hell offers no chance of that, not to my knowledge anyway.