RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 17, 2025 at 12:55 am
(This post was last modified: May 17, 2025 at 12:59 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(May 16, 2025 at 9:23 pm)Alan V Wrote:(May 16, 2025 at 8:03 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Free will of a limited kind is a profound contradiction in terms. Limits are exactly what people skeptical of free will are talking about. Limit being a damned good antonym for freedom in the first place.
Not really. We have free will even if we only have two bad choices. Freedom only extends our possible uses for our abilities to assess and choose.
Every restaurant menu, with its limits, would negate our ability to choose by your argument.
Actually, yeah, that's a good boundary to set. If all of our choices are actually more like a menu..where the options are constrained...and then within each of those possible choices we're strongly predisposed towards one or against another...the freedom of our will quickly becomes a term of art. Consider a menu made almost entirely of things you hate, with one item you enjoy. Did you freely choose that one thing, or were you compelled?
In the context of the opq, the idea of being compelled to christ or compelled to christendom or compelled to christian evangelism are all pretty well explored. I have no reason to doubt that the afflicted are exactly that and have little to no choice in the matter. Christian propagandists, however, will tell a person that their beliefs are a matter of choice both to suggest that the believer has done something worthy of reward, and that the non believer has done something worthy of admonition or worse.
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