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Only Judeism

Only Islam

Yes to both Judeism and Islam

[penguinofhonor]

Why did someone have to prove ouija boards aren't supernatural? They are the most obviously fake thing ever.

Seriously... Believing in these mass produced jokes is on par with believing in Santa Claus.

[TD1]

"So, grandad, you just rolled a crit! Highest in the game!"

Grandad: "GIVE ME YOUR MONEY NOW"

...On a more serious note, how does demonic possession correlate with free will?

I guess it depends on what aspect you're considering.  It could be said to suspend your free will, and at the same time you could probably argue that anything you did while possessed is still your fault if you subscribe to the idea that possessions only happen to evil people who let it happen.  If you don't believe that then the only reasonable conclusion would be that it's not your fault, but... well, Biblically there's plenty of precedent for people being punished for things that happened outside of their free will.  Pharaoh comes to mind.

I'm pretty strongly of the mind that free will is an illusion anyway, regardless of whether you're talking religiously or not.  That's probably been discussed somewhere in the thread already though, buried too deeply for me to locate it right now.

So you believe in destiny? I have to say, I don't think the universe has any particular plan.

Why did someone have to prove ouija boards aren't supernatural? They are the most obviously fake thing ever.

Seriously... Believing in these mass produced jokes is on par with believing in Santa Claus.

Careful now...find a way to disprove Santa Claus, and you've found how to disprove God

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

It's not that oijie boards themselves work as they do or else I wouldn't be able to walk down the board game isle without getting cold chills
But they, just like anything else except that they are more commonly used and therefore more commonly associated with, can be used to let the devil enter you and mess with you

[TD1]

If demons are actually fallen angels, then can angels also possess the unwary fool who doesn't wear a pentagram or somesuch? If so, then you could have the amusing prospect of the angel possessed meeting the demon possessed, and some form of divine battle being undertaken with avatars of human flesh as the tools.

Edit: Hm, this would also explain the Holy Spirit...

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Minus that the Holy Spirit is god not an angel


Also I'm not sure if all demons are fallen angels

[TD1]

What else could they be?

[penguinofhonor]

But they, just like anything else except that they are more commonly used and therefore more commonly associated with, can be used to let the devil enter you and mess with you

What happens when a demon/Satan messes with you?

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Making your thoughts clouded, sermonizing everything, creating paranoia, making you do off things, etc etc
Though I actually don't know, those are just guesses as I don't mess with that kind of stuff anyways

[Frumple]

What happens when a demon/Satan messes with you?

The somewhat unkind response would be, "You do stuff the person talking about you doesn't like."

Like. Recently enough, I overheard someone saying a person had the devil in them... for inviting someone to lunch in the "wrong" manner. Most of the similar invocations I've heard, on the ground, on the subject are of roughly the same nature. It's less something with meaningful import than it is a way to dehumanize someone you dislike and make it more acceptable (to you) to treat them like shit/think of them unkindly/etc., basically.

Quite sure the theological answer to the question is rather different, but in practice I've found that sort of thing mostly to be an excuse to snipe at people. Is usually fairly petty, y'know? Occasionally you get it for heavier stuff (major psychological disturbance), but that... is usually because the people talking don't know psychology from a particularly malformed carrot.

[Telgin]

So you believe in destiny? I have to say, I don't think the universe has any particular plan.

Destiny is a strong word, but fitting I guess.  To say that the universe has a plan is to anthropomorphize it though, which is kind of misleading.

I just see it this way: from a purely physical point of view of the universe I'm convinced that everything is deterministic.  Even if you don't think quantum mechanics is deterministic, on macroscopic scales everything certainly seems to be.  It's wildly chaotic, even at small scales, but it follows predictable events.  If you set a system up in exactly the same way twice, the exact same outcome should result.  It's hard to find free will in that, right?  Your brain is nothing but a very complex system.

You could probably find some argument that some unpredictable quantum effect^[1] has an effect at macroscopic scales, but even if you could I'm not convinced it matters.  If it's not determinisic, what is it?  It has to be random, right?  That's still not free will.  Remember, we're leaving God and religion out at this point, so you can't just say that God mysteriously makes quantum effects manifest in some free will (which would be kind of internally inconsistent with the way I've phrased it anyway).

From a religious point of view: God knows what's going to happen and He set up the universe that way.  I never have a choice in anything since my decision is necessarily already made.  Again, no free will.

You might could then argue that God doesn't know what we're going to do, but that flies in the face of a lot of established things in Christianity.  He's stated to know everything and predict (and manipulate) people's behaviors and reactions to things, so... does He only have a pretty good idea instead of certainty on what we're going to do?

Alternatively, you might say that we have free will but God already knows what we'll choose.  That's... not free will in any reasonable sense.

So, no, I don't believe in free will.  Everything that will happen is set in stone and there's nothing to be done about it.  I don't let it bother me though, since I don't know what's going to happen, so the illusion of free will is good enough.


[1] - Also note that I don't believe that even currently unpredictable quantum mechanics are really random.  I'm of the mind that it's a simple limitation on observation that is probably insurmountable.  While we may never have a good enough understanding of physics and the ability to measure it, I believe all quantum mechanical processes are fully deterministic and following exact processes with no randomness whatsoever.  The underlying physics might just be unobservable because they're too fundamental.  Note that while this means that things might as well be random sometimes as far as we can see, the point is that if something follows internal but hidden rules then its results are not really random.

I'm aware that there is some proof that this can't be the case, which I really need to brush up on since it was written by someone who is much smarter and more versed in the field than me.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

And that's much different from my view which is that god knows all possible outcomes and certain sets of events but not every choice you make


For example and this isn't a real person or anything
God knows Bill will be killed by a mugger in a week
But he only knows the million different things Bill could do when he gets up that morning such as he may or may not brush his teeth, drink coffee, hit snooze on his alarm, etc etc

[Telgin]

And that's much different from my view which is that god knows all possible outcomes and certain sets of events but not every choice you make


For example and this isn't a real person or anything
God knows Bill will be killed by a mugger in a week
But he only knows the million different things Bill could do when he gets up that morning such as he may or may not brush his teeth, drink coffee, hit snooze on his alarm, etc etc

If you believe that God doesn't know what's going to happen then you can still claim that there's magic going on which allows you to somehow make decisions which are neither predictable nor random, but it does beg the question of how much does God know, and why only specific future events.  Does He have limited memory and only chooses to focus on "important" events?

I suspect that it actually might be the combination of these factors- the human mind is open to random stimulus, but it is the brain itself, unique, that processes these random processes into an appropriate response. It isn't quite free will, but it does give the notion that, at the very fundamental level, our decisions are our unique responses to randomness that each person reacts to differently. So, in a sense, it isn't free will- but it isn't deterministic either.

We're all definitely unique, owing to how unbelievably complex a human is, but it should be in theory possible to make an exact duplicate of a person, who would have the exact same responses to the same stimuli.  And if you put in random stimuli, then you'll get random outputs too.  Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.  Of course the random output is still filtered by deterministic processes.  So claiming that people's behavior isn't deterministic relies on random inputs which might genuinely be the case, but as I think we both agree that's still not free will. 

If I recall, there was a study done a few years back (searching for it has proven quite difficult) that strapped EEGs to people as they viewed a slideshow of images of either neutral or emotional content, set in a random order. They recorded their responses, and found that, as expected, people would react differently to the emotional images than the neutral images. The kicker, though, is that they would react up to 5 seconds before the image was on the screen. So they were unconsciously aware of the emotion carried in the next image, but only to within a few moments of it happening. Would that imply a sort of "range of determinism," where random processes are random up to a certain range of time prior to the process itself? Would that imply that our actions are predetermined within 5 seconds of that action, but are otherwise random?

That's pretty striking and I'd really like to read that.  I remember hearing something similar, but I thought they were only able to predict what people would say their decision was before they decided.  All that was proving was that we make decisions earlier than believed and presumably before conscious thought had any input on the matter.

As for your remark about the predictability of quantum mechanics, you would be wrong for reasons that I will put at the end of the post in a spoiler since it does diverge from the topic. Anyway, I see it in a similar sense- free will is an illusion, but based on a system of randomness rather than a system of deterministicness.

Yeah, don't want to get off on a tangent about quantum mechanics here, so I'll just leave this link: Superdeterminism  That basically sums up my beliefs on the universe.

[Graknorke]

Well he would, given that it is a loophole in his own theorem. One that is apparently unfalsifiable as well. It's not like there's much more he could say.

[Telgin]

Sure, but implausible doesn't mean impossible.  I'm not sure it's possible to prove or falsify the idea of superdeterminism, so it's almost philosophical in and of itself I guess.  More generally I subscribe to the idea of nonlocal hidden variable theories of the universe.

Well, the issue with making the "identical" copy is that it ceases to be identical the moment you apply stimuli. Every single minute detail can alter our brain- even in the test itself, it becomes as difficult as measuring momentum and position- how can you measure the reaction of someone's brain to a stimuli without altering their brain as a reaction to said stimuli?

Realistically it is impossible, yeah.  I was just speaking in a purely theoretical manner.  In theory you'd be applying the exact same stimuli and measurements which would result in the same changes in both brains, but of course realistically you can't do that, so they drift apart in reactions over time.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

God knows everything that can happen
It's not holes in his knowledge that he chooses to know one thing over another
It's that free will dictates all the things you do from birth to death
God puts you in this world and has the power to take you away. He know when you will die but not if you are going to brush your teeth or not
Or if you will ever choose to believe in him or not
Those are things you choose which can effect which reality will happen

God knows all realities that can happen
Also since God is technical outside of time so he can see how long your life is going to be, major events that will happen, where to throw a curveball at you, when he wants to do things to to try to affect your beliefs, and the such.

I dunno, I'll ask my youth pastor about it tomorrow, we had a lesson on this last week and I forgot most of it