Boy oh boy,
isn't this a tough one?! Free will is a real conundrum. First I have to ask myself, who is the I whose will could be free? Is the soul, which would choose a body to be born into and a life to lead, as Shannon's position suggests, a free enough being in the first place to be able to choose its destiny? This suggests that there is some higher realm with higher beings of our selves who act something like humans in our disconnected earthly reality, up there somewhere still separate from each other, and from God, making free will decisions about being born, lives to live, parents to raise them. And then we become those beings down here in the flesh, and still live separately, still make free will decisions, still determine our own destiny?
My mom has frequently shared this view with me, that no matter how miserable she is, she knows that she chose this life, chose these situations, and is sort of stuck down here, by her own choice. This always struck me as a fairly depressing way to look at things. I mean, I do tend to love my life, but when I don't, I rather like having something other than myself to blame for my circumstances. Choosing to think that I or some higher form of myself has chosen every idiosyncratic little detail of my reality really puts things in an oddly self-centered perspective in the first place. Putting myself as the determinator of both my physical birth circumstances and my life choices brings up some odd questions, and seems to me to lead to a very dark opinion of our species. If we are all in charge of everything, individually, we sure have screwed things up royally, not just for ourselves, but for everybody else, and for many of the life forms we share this planet with. But in such a broad world, with so many infinite possibilities, and billions of years behind us, and billions of years before us, with our physical homo-sapien-sapien present realities as just a blip on the radar of physical existence in this infinite universe of non-physical energy, we really aren't such a big deal, and seems to me, we really don't have quite as much control as we think, or as much power as our free-will dogmas might lead us to believe.
Free will, in these temporary bodies, in this world of instantaneous limitations, of time, gravity, and bathroom stops, is true, but only so far as it goes. It's like saying you have free will within a prison, you can do what you will, but only within these parameters. Someone can go out and kill someone else, but there are consequences. Hitler was responsible for the murder of millions of human beings, but in the end he really just ended up killing himself, literally. We can kill each other in these bodies, but our bodies are going to die even if we don't. Choosing love, life, and hope, using our free wills to their highest potential, does not change the fact that we are going to die. What happens when we die is all just speculation, no matter how convenient we may find putting our faith in some story written at the hands of man. Divinely inspired or not, it is still limited by the hands of authors in the midst of dilapidation.
In regard to Horace' question on the perspective that God needed Jesus' mission fulfilled by Judas' betrayal of him, I can only wonder, did He? What kind of God would send his most beloved son down to earth as a human sacrifice, to pay for the sins of His own creations? I have to admit, it is the kind of thing an Old Testament God would do. It fits in the context of many of his Acts as documented in the Tanakh. He liked sacrifices and could be a ruthless killer, even His own. But I wonder, did the authors of the Book, telling the story the way they did, really have a choice? I think maybe the guilt of having the blood of such a perfect and innocent Man on our own hands had something to do with Judas' betrayal. We say that Judas did it. It was part of greater plan, it wasn't even his fault, it was part of God's plan. It takes some of the responsibility off ourselves. Maybe we had to tell the story that way, to keep from killing ourselves like Hitler. Maybe all this responsibility, in relation to our own ignorance and our potential, was just too much to bear. Nietzsche, one of the fathers of existentialism, certainly went nuts thinking about it.
Blessings,
Andrew S.
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