I Really Hate The Concept Of Free Will

[Nope]

Yeah, and if I have to choose between that or marinara and a naked woman it's a pretty easy decision. Something tells me, though, that this idea of hell isn't what our apologist has in mind.

As long as the believer doesn't allow him or herself to see the 'sinners' as human, hell is probably a very satisfying concept. The believer is one of the special people and everyone who doesn't agree with their religion is obviously bad and deserves some type of punishment. When people try to point out how horribly twisted their beliefs are, the believer can fall back on the excuse that everything will make sense once they die. They never question how a good person could believe that a large portion of humanity deserves to be tortured or turned into a caricature of themselves.

[Chad32]

Yeah, it' s pretty much "Me and all my friends get everything we want, and all the people we don't like get to suffer and scream, and we get to watch". It's less about justice, and more about vindication and the hope that everyone who kept you down will get it in the ass eventually.

[The Grand Nudger]

Ignoring, of course, that no one really kept them down in the first place.

[robvalue]

This is my take on it. It is always assumed that if you have free will, that allows both good and evil.

But I disagree. We don't have total free will, we are restricted by the laws of the universe and also the limits of our minds and bodies. So we effectively have a range of choices. Some of those choices are clearly harmful.

But if God made stuff, he set up all these rules. He decided what kinds of actions we can take, whether or not we can harm other people, and whether we could even conceive of the idea of doing something evil. He could have made things so that we have free will with many different choices, but all those choices were good. Or at least, not harmful in any way. Like a wonderful dream land.

If God couldn't do that, he is not omnipotent. If he chose not to do that, he is responsible for allowing evil choices.

Of course this is all drivel anyway, even if some sort of being created the universe, we have no reason to think they are omnipotent, care about us, are even aware of us, or still exist themself. And it's a big if.

In the real world, science seems to be pointing towards free will being an illusion anyhow. We're only consciously aware of very little going on in our brain, and we don't make decisions at the time we think we are making them. Most likely it's either entirely predictable or involves quantum randomness. To me, adding any kind of real choice on top of that would require evidence which is currently lacking.

I hate the minority report (film). It has such a stupid flawed premise. It is saying that people will do certain things, unless the police stop them. But that's saying the only people who have free will are the police.

[The Grand Nudger]

Wha.....? Minority Report...it's not...obs: no, no, no. That's what the reader/viewer is supposed to accept, that's what every character accepts, that's what sets up the drama. The rest of the narrative concerns precisely how that isn't true, how such a system could be gamed, and why it would be a bad idea to charge someone with pre-crime even if it was statistically successful. What is first put forward as a utopian future quickly devolves into a dystopian nightmare...and that's -precisely- what Philip K Dick was good at. Making the future seem just around the corner, not so much different than today...but much, much worse.

Seriously, one of the best Sci-fi authors of all time, here's a list of how much PKD we all know..without even knowing it....(and that would tickle him pink...I'm sure)

A Scanner Darkly. -(great movie btw..Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr...rotoscope..no less)
The Adjustment Bureau.
Paycheck.
Total Recall.
Next.
Screamers.

Blade Runner....Blade Runner ffs! (admittedly a loose adaptation, an amalgam of a bunch of -now- iconic sci fi...but the main thrust is Dicks (ladies).

there are more.....obvs...I'm a fan.

(Look at the swift way he handles the precogs in Minority Report. No real explanation, they can just do what they do for "reasons"...that allows the reader to focus on the moral dilemma rather than how it might be accomplished, that's also why he made the police force so gentle and their manner of incarceration uncontroversial. No distractions, you either realized you were for pre-crime or against it, obviously PKD was against it.)

[Esquilax]

You aren't denying that your example is a cartoonish caricature.

The example is not the caricature. What happens is that in eternity people's being increasing conforms to their true nature. For some, that means becoming a caricature of their previous humanity.

So unless you see disbelief in god as interconnected with all that stuff in your Swedenborg quote, then I guess I'm safe, as are most normal people.

And if you actually think that disbelief in god is connected with that other stuff, then excuse me while I laugh at how ridiculous your religious claims are.

[Tonus]

But I disagree. We don't have total free will, we are restricted by the laws of the universe and also the limits of our minds and bodies. So we effectively have a range of choices. Some of those choices are clearly harmful.

The Bible mostly treats "free will" as the ability to choose between the option to serve god or reject him. Genesis would have been the most straightforward example of this (simple rule- don't eat from this tree) but it confuses the issue by its implication that Adam and Eve did not have free will until after they exercised their free will. After that the number of rules and regulations and commands and threats grows and grows and finally Jesus tells the high priests that god wants "mercy, not sacrifices" which throws the whole thing into even more turmoil by implying that being perfect is less important than being sincere.

So free will might be critically important, or it might not matter as long as you're a "good person." Or the most important thing might be whether or not you convert on your deathbed, in which case neither applies.

[TreeSapNest]

I am a student of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th century scientist and mystic. To answer your question, this life places us in a state of equilibrium in which you can choose to move closer to the Lord's goodness and truth or away from Him. Upon death you continue in the direction of your habits.

How does Swedenborg come to this conclusion?

[TreeSapNest]

I'm starting to wish hell was real....an eternity of sex and happiness and not a single god to fuck it up I want to go to hell so bad now.

You'll want to read further:

but as we could not do otherwise than molest them we were driven away and cast into hell, where we suffer dreadfully.

Swedenborg claims one suffers dreadfully in hell. Hell ain't hell unless it's hell, I guess. :-)

[Losty]

Meh I don't care a lick about Swedenborg. I was basing my desires off of Rhythym's interpretation. :p