If God Has A Plan For Everyone, Then Why Is It Planned For Some People To Be Non-Believers?

As I just explained, I don't doubt the efficacy of MBSR and meditation as therapies. In fact, I've benefited from them. Many different therapies with conflicting theoretical assumptions work, as do placebos. I'm just suggesting that they don't demonstrate that self is an illusion. The idea of selflessness may itself be an illusion in the western sense. My statement that a truly selfless person would have a hard time in our society is a judgement that I think is based on more than pure speculation. The fact that meditators and Buddhists can get along quite well, and even demonstrate superior functioning does not necessarily refute my observation, since I don't think any of them are literally selfless. I think there's also a certain amount of evidence from human evolution and physiology that the self is very real and important. I think we are organisms governed by our individual brains contained in finite bodies. We, and our non-human ancestors survived by working, individually and collectively, to protect and advance those bodies. Because we also depend on society, we have evolved ethical systems based on reciprocal altruism and empathy. But there is always tension and struggle between self and others. Religions like Buddhism and secular ethical systems based on them can be invaluable in overcoming the centrifugal pull toward selfish behvior, but they don't eradicate it.

 

which begs the question why would he make us, its almost like he felt , i dunno, incomplete.

 

why do you htink God (however you define it) has a plan for every one? Seems a bit presumptuous to think that...

 

Hear this, but I'd raise the possibility that we may also in fact be bound to instinct, but rather our instincts differ to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Due to a unique biological makeup, self reflection is made an instinctual possibility. We still operate within our horizons(as opposed to boundaries or limitations).


I'd also put forward that we have mutated the concept of biblical freewill, whether we like it or not the original conception is so far away from our grasps due to a completely different cultural context, we may as well use what we got and apply it so. It's still just as mysterious, being asymptotic in nature(at least from the point of desiring to know).

 

One of our problems, in trying to figure out why God would do thus and so, is that if there is a God, (S)he would probably be so utterly different from us that we couldn't possibly fathom the answer. It would be like my dog trying to figure out why I get upset when he shits on the rug. We tend to anthropomorphized God--i.e., to give God human characteristics. But these are at best metaphors. As theologian Karl Barth puts it, God is "wholly other".

 

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I don't think it's Free Will that imagines that, but some unsophisticated humans might. It was once thought that there was a "homunculus" (little man) between our ears who watched reality through our eyes and made decisions. Descartes introduced the idea of the "Mind-body" division in which our bodies are essentially shells inhabited by a soul that is the I in "I think, therefore I am". But contemporary scholars who believe in free will don't think that at all. Neuroscientists present a model of the brain that is more like an unruly committee of sub-modules vying for power, with the decision being made sometimes by our autonomic system or our subconscious and sometimes by our conscious self. Dennett's model seems to be essentially that, and his Multiple Drafts Model fully explains how we can make conscious decisions among alternatives, consistent with his compatibilist conception of free will. In that sens, we have, as Dennett puts it, freedom that counts.

 

Why does it happen? Because it happens.I have always been a strict determinist when it comes to free will,but it isn't a problem for me as long as I 'feel" free,even though I know this apparent act of self willing is an illusion...The grand illusion if you like.I do however think that developing your mind and personal moral code allows for better informed decision making.As for fate,well,it's not over till it's over.

 

Do we primarily make stuff like AI because we feel incomplete? Why is there not only us but a universe in the first place? And wtf is it What's outside of it? Did God made that too? Has God different plans for other universes or are they all part of the same?

 

Do we primarily make stuff like AI because we feel incomplete?

kinda yes, i think if i were a omnipotent and omniscient i would have no reason to create AI, but as humans we are still challenged by this on many levels.


Why is there not only us but a universe in the first place? And wtf is it What's outside of it? Did God made that too? Has God different plans for other universes or are they all part of the same?

we dont know any of these answers, but i think as humans we strive to come up with methods to answer these questions. one method can be science and another method can be just guessing. i think that the "God explanation" is just guessing.

 

There's guessing and educated guessing. Besides science, there's philosophy, which applies reason to solutions of the big questions--with varying degrees of success. And of course there's religion, which purports to offer solutions that are even more definitive than philosophy. It's been said that a philosopher is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn't there. The theologian is similar, except that (s)he finds the cat. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes that while our cognitive and intellectual faculties for grappling with the workings of nature and the universe are far greater than might be predicted for a species that evolved from hunter-gatherer primates, there are structural limits that we can't move beyond, although we think we can. The frustrating tease is that we can pose questions that are much bigger than our fundamental capacity to answer them, just as we can't hold ten thousand words in short-term memory, see in ultraviolet light, or mentally rotate and object in the fourth dimension. Pinker thinks that God, consciousness, and free will are among these intractable problems and that, because they seem like problems we can solve, we're destined to centuries of interminable bull sessions like the one we're currently engaged in on this thread. But it's addictive, as my 4,510 posts bear witness. The best I can come up with is okie existentialism: educated betting with the realization that life is a crap shoot and I'm probably wrong about a lot of my ideas.

 

While I'm not endorsing the theory, I'm holding it out as a possibility to be considered as an alternative to hard determinism. One reason why Sam Harris and other "hard determinists" have trouble with the concept of free will is that it doesn't seem to fit into the usual dichotomous boxes of "either-or". Sam says over a dozen times that a choice must be either caused or random, and free will seems to exclude both of these possibilities. Science, to be sure, has an historic bias toward determinism--not because it has been proven by science but because it is an operating assumption leading to the search for causes. Yet quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity have shattered the mechanistic assumptions of nineteenth century science and led to models that alllow for the influence of quantum noise, chaos, and emergence. One approach to this alleged dilemma is Dennett's and Nahmias's: "free will" is the name for caused but not presently predictable interactions between a complex conscious computer-like organism that can select among alternatives in response to changing external and internal environmental inputs. Another is to incorporate into that model an element of randomness possible resembling quantum phenomena suggested by the work of Penrose. While there is no real evidence of this, there are good reasons to suspect that such quantum phenomena might be at work. Quantum Mechanics tells us that indeterminacy (not necessarily randomness) is pervasive at the subatomic level, and that subatomic particles behave like a probability distribution within a wave form. Quantum noise might induce random associations of items called up from our memories--accounting for human creativity. Speculative, sure, but this distinguished scientist thinks it's quite possible--enough to warrant not shutting the door and dismissing it as an "illusion" . As biologist Jerry Coyne observes in foonote 15 in the last chapter of Harris' Free Will: "No possible experiment could test whether any action was free from compulsion by previous events or influences".

 

To quote a late Roman prefect of Judea, "What is truth?" Nothing is certain, not even that, and if we did discover it, we wouldn't know it, or know how to interpret it. Scientific facts are always contingent on the assumptions of our paradigms. Relativity and quantum mechanics have placed the facts of Newtonian physics in an entirely different context. And any evidence in favor of hard determinism s inconclusive. We have your phenomenological introspections, some psychological experiments in highly simplified conditions that have been questioned and criticized by Dennett and others, and the reports of practitioners of meditation and mindfulness whose sense of the illusoriness of self may itself be an illusion. When the evidence is inconclusive and we nevertheless must act, pragmatism makes sense.

In Free Will and The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris makes a valiant attempt to reconcile hard determinism and responsibility, but his solution strikes me as incoherent. He says he is responsible for actions that are "sufficiently in keeping with my thoughts, intentions,beliefs and desires as to be considered to be extensions of them," as opposed to actions that are "totally out of character." This is because "what we do subsequent to planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of my mind." Why is that,if they're all determined by forces beyond ourselves and out of our control? You and Harris seem to think there are circumstances where we make conscious decisions and engage in deliberation, and he thinks it's at least sometimes appropriate to hold people responsible and recognize a degree of social and political freedom. This fits within Dennett's "varieties of free will worth wanting." Harris frets that "You can do what you decide to do, but you cannot decide what you will decide to do." From a pragmatic standpoint, who cares?

 

a tree is a tree. a rock is a rock. a word is a noise made by one creature to be heard by another creature, or written down to be read.

 

Karma.

 

The sound of one hand clapping, or a dog with Buddha consciousness.

 

I just meant it as a one word answer to the original question.

 

God created atheism as a refuge for recovering Catholics and fundamentalists. The Plan wasn't to send non-believers to hell, but to get victims of toxic faith syndrome out.

 

If it is within gods plan to allow interpretation of the holy scriptures, then the beliefs, and fate of religious folks is just as questionable as those of the non believers.

We still havent decided yet who has the correct interpretation.

Or if a correct interpretation exists at all.

The world is what you make it, right? Why would the bible be any different?

 

if there's a god, and its gods plan for their to be unbelievers,
maybe
just maybe
god PREFURRS THEIR COMPANY.