Olgratin_Magmatoe

Like if you’re not an omnipotent being with every power you can imagine then you have no choices?

That is not even close to what I was saying.

But then you also think that the fact that world is some primitive video game where there’s only very simple A) B) C) style options it would be a paradise

This is an oversimplification of a very easy to understand thought experiment.

and you’re angry at God because the world doesn’t work like that.

I'm not angry at god, I don't believe gods exist. Are you angry at Thanos?

And the atoms from that burnt building will go elsewhere and allow for the creation of new life. Nobody ever teach you about the circle of life, Simba?

Thanks for this waste of time.

Atheists have killed a great many people in history, that’s a fact.

A fact that has nothing to do with any of this.

You can choose to fly because airplanes exist

That's not what I meant, and you know it.

Also nuclear weapons exist and people can choose to drop them on cities and many thousands of people will die.

Other people have that choice. I do not.

It feels like you’re desperately trying to miss the point

Given that you seemingly intentionally missed the point about the things that I cannot choose to do, I'd say this is projection.

to avoid having thoughts that conflict with your current belief (or non-belief if that’s how you choose to term it)

This conversation has nothing to do with the existence of god(s), it instead has to do with the existence of tri-omni god(s).

Matter can’t be created or destroyed and energy cannot be created or destroyed.

This is a false equivalence. If I burn down a building, it's been destroyed even if the matter of the building still exists.

Do you consider this to be a religious belief simply because conflicts with your argument?

Are you here to have a serious conversation, or just waste time?

How much suffering was caused by the religious oppression done by atheists like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot?

This has no relevance. You completely missed the point of everything I've said, I hope not intentionally. Because this line of thinking isn't coherent.

Putting a limit on people’s choices is the antithesis of free will.

There will always be limits on people's choices. I don't have wings, I cannot choose to fly. I don't own a nuke, I cannot choose to nuke something.

So because limits on free will are inevitable, they should be reasonable, which means no evil.

For there to be distinct consciousness there needs to be the capability to make choices, which means there’s there’s the capability to make bad choices.

As is demonstrated by the sandwich example, even when no evil choice is available, choice is still possible.

For me to be incapable of throwing a jar of jam at you there would need to be an omnipotent being governing my decisions.

As is demonstrated by Forever Peace, this is not the case. The mechanism for Forever Peace being that humans see others as an extension of themselves, thus being incapable of harming others, but there is no limit to other mechanisms that would do this.

Destroying things is the opposite of creation, which would be against everything God is supposed to be.

That would appear to be blatantly false. The universe constantly is destroying things. Celestial bodies get destroyed every day. Stars die, black holes consume, planets get bombarded with rocks from space. This planet alone has had 5 mass extinction events.

Not a year passes where there isn't some child starved to death or slowly killed by disease. Natural disasters wipe people's homes off the face of the earth and kill thousands.

The universe is an incredibly hostile place.

But is mocking other people’s beliefs making the world a better place?

When it is ultimately a force for suffering, yeah absolutely.

Significant varied complexity would be more of 5 condiment choices, 2 bread choices, 3 ham choices but 1 might be expired even though it’s your favorite, 3 vegetable choices, peanut butter, 3 jam choices.

This doesn't fundamentally change what I'm getting at. Of all the choices, none of them are evil. Yet they are still choices.

None of these choices are evil, but they can lead to suffering or the potential to make a bad choice.

Call it evil/suffering/sin/etc, the label is irrelevant to my point.

False equivalence. The thing is, you can play tic-tac-toe without intelligent decision. You could win a game through sheer randomness by just flipping a coin (heads = x, tails = o) and randomly picking a square. Want to take it further? You can draw the # on ground in the autumn, and leaves could just fall in place (red vs yellow) and form what looks like a game of tic tac toe.

I don't think you quite understood what I was getting at, so let me rephrase. An intelligent actor with free will and an unintelligent actor without it will both have patterned outcomes to games of tic tac toe.

So patterned outcome cannot be a deciding factor for what is and what is not free will.

For sure, that is still a big part of this.

But a blanket statement pointing to cyclists as the source of the problem is just ridiculous.

The solution for large scale behavioral problems isn't telling loads of people to do better, it's systemic change, and in this case that means infrastructure for safe biking. That includes traffic calming measures, separated and protected bike lanes, regulation to reign in vehicle sizes and weight, etc.

If I throw a jar of strawberry jam at your head, is that not an evil choice? You chose to make a sandwich with that jam, but someone else can choose to do something evil in the same situation.

You've missed the point of the example situation. Throwing the jar at a person's head isn't one of the available choices. The only choices available are ones that do not harm to anybody, and are in no way sinful. Yet despite that, there is still a choice, there is still decision making.

One my favorite books is Forever Peace, and in the book humanity has found a way to have digital connections directly into the human brain through a port at the base of the neck. The military uses it for remote control warfare drone warfare. The civilian population mainly uses it to connect directly into another partner during sex, which has the effect of feeling what both people are feeling mid-act. Eventually the protagonists find out that if people are connected in this manner for extended periods of time, they become "humanized", meaning they see all other humans as extensions of themselves, incapable of willingly harming other humans. They become pacifists to the extreme. The protagonists go on a fight against the government to humanize the entire world, and eventually they do so, ending all war and crime across the planet.

If free will was really so important to create us with, god could have done so in a manner similar to the humanized people from the book. They still have the ability to make decisions and chose things for themselves, but the option to harm others is never available. If god exists, they could have done something like that, maintaining this need for free will.

So it’s been mathematically proven that not everything in mathematics is provable. Seems paradoxical to me!

That's not a paradox. Just because some things can't be proven doesn't mean everything can't.

I guess that means the field of mathematics is just a weird superstition we should mock, right?

No, because nothing in mathematics requires everything to be provable.

Look through this list of mathematical proofs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_proofs

Not a single one requires "all mathematical problems have a solution" to be a premise.

On the other hand, the false belief in a tri-omni god is in fact a prerequisite for a number of religions, and therefore are indeed weird superstitions deserving of mockery.

The only agreed upon thing would be that significant varied complexity is what is needed to be determined a chaotic environment, philosophically. How significant would be the disagreement.

Ok, then let's assume there is a sufficient number of choices to be deemed chaotic. You have 1000 condiments for the sandwich at your disposal, it's chaotic. However none of them are options which are evil.

The rather arbitrary requirement of chaos is present, a choice is still at hand meaning free will is still present, all without evil.

Well, we’re still trying to determine exactly, precisely is “intelligence”. But ChatGPT is definitely not intelligent, that I do know. I think Google really helped elucidate that point recently to Americans.

So do humans who play tic tac toe lack intelligence? There is a finite and very small number of choices a player can take. It's a patterned outcome.

As for chaos needed for determination of will, that’s because will requires intelligence. A controlled environment doesn’t lead to intelligent choice but rather patterned outcome. ChatGPT is a good example of this

So what turns a controlled environment into a chaotic environment? And what is the problem with a patterned outcome? Intelligence was still used, so what do the results matter?

This all seems quite arbitrary.

As for the “all-loving” part, an argument could only be made for that, from my perspective at least, depending on how you define “love” here. If they sees us the same way we see creations we make and love, then it would explain to some degree why the suffering is still allowed.

The problem with this is than an all loving, omni-benevolent being not just has love for all, but maximal love for all, which contradicts the notion of willingly allowing suffering to exist in any form.

it could be the same point of view that we have towards a vehicle.

"You are so lowly that it is permissible to harm you" is not the point of view of an omni-benevolent being.

There can’t be free-will if there wasn’t any choice. If there there are choices, there is the potential for evil choices.

I am hungry. I decide to make myself a sandwich, with peanut butter, and one of the following:

• strawberry jam
• honey
• grape jelly

None of these are evil, yet they are choices.

Also if proving something about religion is paradoxical proves that religion is wrong, by the same logic proving something about math or science is paradoxical proves those are wrong.

This is a false equivocation. Proving that a fundamental part of a religion (such as a tri-omni god) to be paradoxical means everything built off of that idea is wrong. The same applies for math and science, but when large swaths of things in math and science get proven wrong because of a underling assumption that later turned out to be false, we get closer to the truth. That's how we went from a geocentric model, to a heliocentric model, to the understanding that there isn't any discernible center to the universe.

Halting Problem? Math is false! Schrodinger’s Cat? Physics is false!

Those problems do not prove math and science to be false, as they do not challenge fundamental assumptions.

Following this trend means that all of the efforts by atheists to point out paradoxes in religion doesn’t accomplish anything.

Nah. This paradox quite clearly debunks the idea of a tri-omni god presiding over the universe. This is a fundamental assumption within some major religions, and it's wrong. By extension the ideas built off of it are wrong.

Do the same for math and science and you'll lead to new discoveries.

What a terrible age to have eyes.

I have no horse in this race, but the fact that you're being communicative and taking any responsibility means you're probably a better mod than most. Admittedly, it's a low bar but still.

Probably best not to do it again though.