That's not the way the brain works. Take the case of Phineas Gage, a railway worker who had a 1 1/4" diameter iron tamping rod blown clean through his head. He lived, but what is even more strange is that not only wasn't he a vegetable, but his behavior was completely altered. He became gruff and irritable, had no impulse control, and took to swearing a lot. Now, perhaps this is just a case of removing all (or most) inhabition. Maybe he had really wanted to swear his whole life, and now he couldn't stop himself. What if the person in the article had had pedophilic impulses his whole life but had managed to control them until the tumor?
For a very interesting look into the wacky world of what can go wrong in the brain and how it can affect one's personality, read Neurologist Oliver Sack's book, The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat.
Hans Reiser is the guy who makes the Reiser filesystem and allegedly murdered his wif. His story has been all over slashdot. No one bothered to mention what his political affiliation is. This wanna be hacker is an aide, not some high up Republican and the hacking had nothing to do with politics. Why is his party affiliation mentioned and not Hans'?
The Repugs pull enough heinous crap that we don't need to reach this far for ammunition to use against them. This only makes us look tawdry and cheap.
There is no fulfilled prohecy. Prophecy is always vague and open to interpretation. If fulfillment of prophecy is an important point in faith, it would have been trivially simple for God to set up an unequivical prophecy. Heck, the Bible claims Pi is exactly 3, how hard would it have been for God to include a few thousand digits as proof?
I'll tell you about my experience. I honestly, and with an open heart asked for Christ's forgivness. I got nothing, I felt nothing, so I tried harder. For over a year. Nothing. I hear about people having experiences of faith all the time, but I, an honest seeker, got none. So I concluded that God must not be very interested in having me follow Christ. Other people had other experiences, and as our own personal experience and judgement are all we possibly have to go on, I do not begrudge them their faith, but I hope they won't begrudge my lack of faith. It comes from the same place.
My question is, how do you reconcile your experience with all the countless billions of humans on the planet who have had very different experiences and come to very different choices? Are they all just wrong? How do you know, a feeling? Other people have different feelings. If there is a God, He's playing a very dirty game and I personally want none of it.
People don't have free will, either, just the illusion or feeling of having free will. The whole concept of free will is unimportant, a mental excercise that has no bearing on how one acts. Free will is a concept invented because people developed the ability to make abstractions, then became lost int heir abstractions, especially their abstraction of themselves. They started taking their abstraction of themselves to be themselves, and this abstraction is completely cut off from the universe. The then needed something to balance and explain this situation, and from the sprang the abstractions of good and evil, religion, and free will. It's a cruth for people caught in illusion.
Not much to correct, plenty to add but nothing important;) I could go on about karmic moments, the sense gates, reincarnation being a moment-to-moment thing, not a life-by-life thing, the fact that free will is an illusion, but an important one, blah, blah, blah, but the important thing to remeber about Buddhism is that there is no dogma. It is all expressed in terms of "Use this if it makes sense to you, in any way you see fit. Don't take anyone's word on anythign, not even ours."
Why are you willing to posit the idea of something like HypnoToad or green slime suckers that can take away choice, but are unwilling to believe in a tumor that can? Can drugs take away choice? Can torture?
Have you heard about the parasites that change the behavior of certain insects so that they get eaten by birds, completing the parasites life cycle? Have you ever wondered if there are parasites that can do that to a human?
The similarity between hypnotoad and the green slime suckers, and the thing that makes them different from a tumor, is that they are conscious entities doing it to you and the tumor is not. Does this play a role in your theory? Exhanging one conscious choice by one entity for another, you still have someone to blame. Why is blame important?
I'm as liberal as they come: anarcho-syndicalist, it doesn't get more hardcore leftist than that. Normally I am all for anything that makes the Republicans look bad, but this is just dumb. It's like how news stations only mention the race of an alleged criminal if they are non-white. Who cares what race a murderer is, or what party a doofus belongs too? What's that got to do with anything?
Until I read the summary, I was hoping this was some kind of political hack attempt that would put another big black eye on the Repugnicans, but no such luck, it's just some dumbass trying to get his grades changed. The story is funny enough to warrant being on Slashdot's front page without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. "Gone through to the other side" means to go throught the void, where you have nothing solid on which to make any kind of a stand or statement about anything. Once you are through to the other side, things become clear again, in a new way. But you still have to get up in the morning.;)
One last commen. If you have questions about Christianity and you go to the Bible, how do you reconcile all the inconsistencies? And what do you do about the things that are not mentioned in the Bible? I mean, how many ecumenical councils did it take over how many hundreds of years to hash out all the important bits that weren't even mentioned in the Bible? Is Jesus devine? Is he a man? Is he both? If so, are his two parts seperate or divided? Where in the Bible does it really, clearly answer any of these questions? Are those answers open to other interpretations, or is it so clear that only one answer is possible? If so, why did it take hundreds of years of sometimes violent conflict to come to the commonly accepted answers and why are there still branches of Christianity such as the Nestorians or the Eastern Orthodoxies that differ on basic fundamental tennants of faith? What kind of God would do that to his followers?
It does not defy logic. I am not saying there are no absolutes, merely that one has no possible way of knowing if there are or are not, and if there are, what they are. There are knowable absolutes within any knowable system, though, so one can say that there is a moral absolute for humanity, for a race, for a locality, for a family, or for an individual. Does the absolute for humanity override the absolute of an individual? From the persepective of humanity as a whole, yes.
I have further explored the issue. Much, much further than you have judging from your arguments. There is no way of knowing, believe me. If you think there is, you are fooling yourself. Any way of knowing could be faked in a way that is completely undetectable to you. You can deny this based on faith, hunches or gut feelings, but you can not logically refute it.
Your position that moraql relativism is self refuting is incorrect. Saying that all value judgements are relative may be making an absolute statement, but I am not saying there are no absolutes, only that value judgements are all relative and that in itself is not a value judgement. There is no external scale by which to measure things. All scales by which one can measure a part of an infinite system are created internally to that system, by the definition of infinite. Infinity rules out absolutes because there is no outside where you can locate your scale. One can say that infinity itself is the absolute, but this is meaningless.
Ah, good old Moral Absolutism. The problem with this is that you only have imperfect means to determine the One True Morality. You have no way of telling a diabolical entity's machinations from the actions of a just and good entity. In fact, you can't even tell diabolical from just and good without first having access to a true Moral Absolute. So without a Moral Absolute, you can't decide on which Moral Absolute is true. The only judge you have is yourself, same as me. You choose to trust what other humans have told you about a particular entity. I choose to decide for myself. We each have as much justification as the other.
I know what is good for me. Reducing unnecessary suffering and increasing the scope of choice for as many entities as possible. (Hah! I know, it looks like I'm contradicting my earier post. Free will may be an illusion, but it is an important illusion for those who haven't yet got past illusions.) I have no more justification for believing this than you do for believing in your Absolutes. But I have no less, either. My ideals come from my interaction with the world of phenomenon, same as yours.
I don't wish to insult you or your faith. I only want you to see that there may be another way of looking at things. You can even see this if you read the Bible with open eyes. I will try to put this in your terms.
Who is the Son of God? Look to Jesus' lineage and trace back. "Jesus, who is the son of Joseph, who is (snip) who is the son of Adam who is the Son of God. Jesus is the Son of God, as are we all. Did he not also say there would be others who came after him who would be greater? Jesus message was passed down through imperfect humans. His message was twisted. We aren't forgiven, instead, we have nothing to be forgiven for. There is no seperation between you and the Divine. You are one, whether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not.
Did you know that scientists can electromagnetically induce a state in you where you feel that you are one with the divine? If this feeling can be faked in you by other humans, there is no certain gaurantee that when you have that feeling that it comes from a genuine contact with the divine. You have no better way of knowing the truth than I do.
I am under no illusions that my ideas have any kind of moral standing outside myself. Yet for all my wishy washy moral relativism, I am one of the most moral people I know, even judging by others standards.
If there were one true divinely inspired faith, it would necessarily so far surpass any human inspired faith that the truth of it's divine origin would be apparant to everyone. Yet we have a wild mishmash of faiths, all claiming to be the One True. Even if there is a moral absolute, I have no way of knowing which of the many equally valid faiths claiming to be the One True Faith really are. I'll stick with what makes sense to me. Everyone else is free to stick with what makes sense to them, after all, there is no other that can make that decision.
Everything arises out of the conditions and patterns it is enmeshed in. Nothing is a thing unto itself, seperate from all others. Inside and Outside, Self and Non-Self, Beginnning and End, these are null concepts, sound and fury signifying nothing. Even the phrase "all is one" falls infinitely far short of the truth. It implies that "all" is distinguishable from "one," and also that "all" is not "many."
Go ahead and keep your faith in Jesus. Just lose your seperation from him. Christianity was so much more interesting back in the early days, before the Great Schism and especially before the Ecumenical Councils decided fro all Christians what was heresy and what wasn't. Early Christians had to decide for themselves, nowadays it's a kind of McReligion, prepackaged and easily digestible. No insult intended, just trying to get you to look into your own church history and the kinds of far-out thoughts that were common among early Christians. Heck, even later, look at America's Founding Fathers, most of them were Deists.
Justice does not depend on whether people have free will. People should be held liable for their actions for the same reason fires should be put out and levees should be kept in good repair. It is practical and efficient for the proper functioning of society. People should be able to have debt and pay it back because we have a need to share the burden of loss and the benefit of profit. Free will doesn't enter into the equation.
The fire has no free will, and yet we work to put it out. The water has no free will and yet we build the levee. This is so simple and basic, I am surprised I (still) have to explain this over and over to people. Everyone's life only has the meaning they give to it. If you want to call the process by which you give your life meaning "God," that is your right. It is sufficient that we are a collection of matter in a seriously gigantic universe, free will and God need not enter into the equation.
The trap you find yourself in is seperation brought on by dualistic thinking. You are in Hell, right this very minute, eternally seperated from God or the Universe or whatever you like to call it. This is an intolerable position so you must invent rationalization to protect you from the pain and isolation. But this seperation and concurrent pain is entirely illusionary. Unfortunately, to overcome this seperation, you must die. Everything you feel to be "you" must die in order that the real you can be free. As long as you persist in thinking of God or the Universe or what-have-you as "out there" and You as "in here" you will live in Hell.
There is an escape from Hell, and fortunately it requires neither free will nor God. Unfortunately, I could tell you over and over again what that escape is and you still won't get it. You need to discover it for yourself before anything I say about it will make sense. I will give you this one hint: in the phrase, "Judge not lest ye be judged," there is only one thing doing the judging, and that is what needs to stop. Good luck.
Unfortunately, some very old and very well regarded fairy tales seem to make people believe that the brain is just an interface, and consciousness comes from some intangible entity colloquially known as a "soul" or "spirit." So the majority of humans on the planet DO believe that neither silicon nor carbon can be thye basis for a self aware entity. That said, I happen to agree with your major points.
Consider this thought experiment: we develop nanotechnology that is capable of perfectly simulating the behavior of human neurons, down to the quantum level, in the unlikely case that is show to be important. We also develop nanobots that can be injected into your brain, where they can simultaneously disassemble neurons and replace them with artificial neurons. Do this to yourself and at no point is your consciousness gone or even changed, but at at some point it is entirely running on the new hardware.
The soul and free will become moot points. If there is a soul and it is not destroyed by implants or conventional operations on the brain, it won't be destroyed by this. If there is a soul, and the soul operates and is operated on by physical conditions then it must be possible to determine how and ensure that artificial neurons do the job just as well as natural ones. Same goes for free will.
So in our little thought experiment we now have a consciousness running on completely artificial hardware that has a soul and free will. You can attack the experiment by denying the possibility of creating such a neuron, but you wuold be hard pressed to find justification for that stance.
In my opinion, the existence of a soul or free will are completely unimportant and uninteresting questions. I have enough trouble figuring out what life is going to throw at me tomorrow and what I'm going to do about it. I don't have time to worry about what happens after I'm dead. And free will, as a concept, has very little impact on my day to day life. Why should we worry more about such trivial abstractions than we do about the present moment and our personal experience of it?
Just when you think you have the groupthink of the slashbot mods figured out, they go and mark a perfectly good anti-MS screed as "troll." Go figure.;)
Humans are "programmed" to discover how to want things, and yet most of us are not psychopaths. Most of us want other humans around,too. It's not an either/or thing. You can program somethign to discover how to want things within certain parameters. For instance, you could program a robot with a reward system so that it felt incredibly good for it to do what we wanted it to do, and very very bad if it didn't do what we wanted or if it tried to change the first part. You could then program it with free will and it could discover all sorts of desires and behaviors for itself without compromising it's core motivations because doing so would feel very, very bad.
Doing this, you would have a robot that would still go into situations unquestioningly, but with a flexibility to adapt that would make them even more useful.
Ha! That's the plan! You see, aliens have been landing at the south pole for years. This is just a way to throw the conspiracy theorists off the trail. The world must know: penguins are actually super-intelligent aliens from the planet fishstickus. It wasn't humans that overfished our oceans, it was the alien penguins. Now you know the truth!
Christ, is it that hard to discern from context when "animal" means "Heterotrophic eukaryote" and when it means "Heterotrophic eukaryote that isn't human?" You are deliberately blurring the meanings when it should be perfectly clear.
So if I send a work I've copyrighted through email, the ISP owns it? Damn! Should the Fed have the right to open your snail mail, too? What's the difference? Even when in public, I have a right to reasonable privacy. For instance, it's illegal to take pictures up someone's skirt. UP their skirt, you know, from ground level? If someone happens to be leaving a car and wearing no undies, that's different.
You seem to be making up legal precedent to suit your argument. The internet is not "the public domain." How is it different than phone lines? I mean, your phone conversation passes through many different telcos and any of them could easily listen to your conversations, but this is illegal. How is the Internet different? Don't ISPs have common carrier status, and doesn't that preclude them from monitoring your communications? And doesn't the government have to play by different rules ayway? In the US, our government is bound by the Constitution which precludes them from doing certain things that a company could do.
In short, your argument makes no sense It almost seems as if you are being contrary just to be contrary. I can say that black is no different than white, but that won't make it so any more than your claims about our legal and governmental systems make them true.
Never try to help anyone but yourself. Trying to help yourself is noble and good. Helping others is based on the delusion that you can even try to put yourself in another's shoes and understand what they need or want. It will only lead to heartache. Selfishness is next to Godliness. Which is next to sarcasm, in case you couldn't figure that one out.
Can't you come up with anything better than that? Face it: the country is not on your side anymore. Everyone hates Bush, everyone hates this war. You lost, give it up. Snide, idiotic comments like this just prove you are a sore loser with too much hate in your heart.
Liberals under-reacted. Based on what has actually happened, they should have reacted much more. If you think we aren't torturing people, would you mind if I cam over and waterboarded you? Are you really equating Clinton's fuck-ups with Bush's? Not that Clinton did the right thing, but they are orders of magnitude apart. Plus, Clinton admitted he did the wrong thing and apologized, which Bush is incapable of doing. The majority of Democrats were LIED TO BY BUSH! Finally, the last statement reveals the true depths of your ignorance and bigotry. Who attacked us? Shiite or Sunni? Do you even know the difference? What country were they from? Do you even care? Or is it all just evil brown heathens to you?
Does it burn knowing you are in the minority? Does it burn knowing the world does not share in your hate-fest? I certainly hope so, people like you are one of the root causes of suffering in the world. We would all be better off without you. FOAD.
There aren't any extra data points. Spacetime is not an array. You are thinking about this in a Cartesian/Newtonian way, and the universe is not like that. I'm not a physicist, just a physics enthusiast who doesn't know enough math to comprehend more than a layman's explanation, but I do know that space is not like an array. It's just not scientifically accurate to think of a thing's location in spacetime as being characterized by X,Y, Z and T coordinates. I can't explain it, but I know it's more complicated than that. Unfortunately, at very large and very small scales, normal human intuition about the physical world ceases to have any relevance.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the way the brain works. Take the case of Phineas Gage, a railway worker who had a 1 1/4" diameter iron tamping rod blown clean through his head. He lived, but what is even more strange is that not only wasn't he a vegetable, but his behavior was completely altered. He became gruff and irritable, had no impulse control, and took to swearing a lot. Now, perhaps this is just a case of removing all (or most) inhabition. Maybe he had really wanted to swear his whole life, and now he couldn't stop himself. What if the person in the article had had pedophilic impulses his whole life but had managed to control them until the tumor?
For a very interesting look into the wacky world of what can go wrong in the brain and how it can affect one's personality, read Neurologist Oliver Sack's book, The Man Who Thought His Wife Was a Hat.
Hans Reiser is the guy who makes the Reiser filesystem and allegedly murdered his wif. His story has been all over slashdot. No one bothered to mention what his political affiliation is. This wanna be hacker is an aide, not some high up Republican and the hacking had nothing to do with politics. Why is his party affiliation mentioned and not Hans'?
The Repugs pull enough heinous crap that we don't need to reach this far for ammunition to use against them. This only makes us look tawdry and cheap.
There is no fulfilled prohecy. Prophecy is always vague and open to interpretation. If fulfillment of prophecy is an important point in faith, it would have been trivially simple for God to set up an unequivical prophecy. Heck, the Bible claims Pi is exactly 3, how hard would it have been for God to include a few thousand digits as proof?
I'll tell you about my experience. I honestly, and with an open heart asked for Christ's forgivness. I got nothing, I felt nothing, so I tried harder. For over a year. Nothing. I hear about people having experiences of faith all the time, but I, an honest seeker, got none. So I concluded that God must not be very interested in having me follow Christ. Other people had other experiences, and as our own personal experience and judgement are all we possibly have to go on, I do not begrudge them their faith, but I hope they won't begrudge my lack of faith. It comes from the same place.
My question is, how do you reconcile your experience with all the countless billions of humans on the planet who have had very different experiences and come to very different choices? Are they all just wrong? How do you know, a feeling? Other people have different feelings. If there is a God, He's playing a very dirty game and I personally want none of it.
People don't have free will, either, just the illusion or feeling of having free will. The whole concept of free will is unimportant, a mental excercise that has no bearing on how one acts. Free will is a concept invented because people developed the ability to make abstractions, then became lost int heir abstractions, especially their abstraction of themselves. They started taking their abstraction of themselves to be themselves, and this abstraction is completely cut off from the universe. The then needed something to balance and explain this situation, and from the sprang the abstractions of good and evil, religion, and free will. It's a cruth for people caught in illusion.
Spitting is fine, just as long as there aren't any ice picks involved...
Not much to correct, plenty to add but nothing important ;) I could go on about karmic moments, the sense gates, reincarnation being a moment-to-moment thing, not a life-by-life thing, the fact that free will is an illusion, but an important one, blah, blah, blah, but the important thing to remeber about Buddhism is that there is no dogma. It is all expressed in terms of "Use this if it makes sense to you, in any way you see fit. Don't take anyone's word on anythign, not even ours."
Why are you willing to posit the idea of something like HypnoToad or green slime suckers that can take away choice, but are unwilling to believe in a tumor that can? Can drugs take away choice? Can torture?
Have you heard about the parasites that change the behavior of certain insects so that they get eaten by birds, completing the parasites life cycle? Have you ever wondered if there are parasites that can do that to a human?
The similarity between hypnotoad and the green slime suckers, and the thing that makes them different from a tumor, is that they are conscious entities doing it to you and the tumor is not. Does this play a role in your theory? Exhanging one conscious choice by one entity for another, you still have someone to blame. Why is blame important?
Yes! You get it. Now you are one of us. (chanting) One of us! One of us!
Is Hans Reiser a Democrat or a Republican?
(think about it...)
I'm as liberal as they come: anarcho-syndicalist, it doesn't get more hardcore leftist than that. Normally I am all for anything that makes the Republicans look bad, but this is just dumb. It's like how news stations only mention the race of an alleged criminal if they are non-white. Who cares what race a murderer is, or what party a doofus belongs too? What's that got to do with anything?
Until I read the summary, I was hoping this was some kind of political hack attempt that would put another big black eye on the Repugnicans, but no such luck, it's just some dumbass trying to get his grades changed. The story is funny enough to warrant being on Slashdot's front page without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. "Gone through to the other side" means to go throught the void, where you have nothing solid on which to make any kind of a stand or statement about anything. Once you are through to the other side, things become clear again, in a new way. But you still have to get up in the morning. ;)
One last commen. If you have questions about Christianity and you go to the Bible, how do you reconcile all the inconsistencies? And what do you do about the things that are not mentioned in the Bible? I mean, how many ecumenical councils did it take over how many hundreds of years to hash out all the important bits that weren't even mentioned in the Bible? Is Jesus devine? Is he a man? Is he both? If so, are his two parts seperate or divided? Where in the Bible does it really, clearly answer any of these questions? Are those answers open to other interpretations, or is it so clear that only one answer is possible? If so, why did it take hundreds of years of sometimes violent conflict to come to the commonly accepted answers and why are there still branches of Christianity such as the Nestorians or the Eastern Orthodoxies that differ on basic fundamental tennants of faith? What kind of God would do that to his followers?
It does not defy logic. I am not saying there are no absolutes, merely that one has no possible way of knowing if there are or are not, and if there are, what they are. There are knowable absolutes within any knowable system, though, so one can say that there is a moral absolute for humanity, for a race, for a locality, for a family, or for an individual. Does the absolute for humanity override the absolute of an individual? From the persepective of humanity as a whole, yes.
I have further explored the issue. Much, much further than you have judging from your arguments. There is no way of knowing, believe me. If you think there is, you are fooling yourself. Any way of knowing could be faked in a way that is completely undetectable to you. You can deny this based on faith, hunches or gut feelings, but you can not logically refute it.
Your position that moraql relativism is self refuting is incorrect. Saying that all value judgements are relative may be making an absolute statement, but I am not saying there are no absolutes, only that value judgements are all relative and that in itself is not a value judgement. There is no external scale by which to measure things. All scales by which one can measure a part of an infinite system are created internally to that system, by the definition of infinite. Infinity rules out absolutes because there is no outside where you can locate your scale. One can say that infinity itself is the absolute, but this is meaningless.
Ah, good old Moral Absolutism. The problem with this is that you only have imperfect means to determine the One True Morality. You have no way of telling a diabolical entity's machinations from the actions of a just and good entity. In fact, you can't even tell diabolical from just and good without first having access to a true Moral Absolute. So without a Moral Absolute, you can't decide on which Moral Absolute is true. The only judge you have is yourself, same as me. You choose to trust what other humans have told you about a particular entity. I choose to decide for myself. We each have as much justification as the other.
I know what is good for me. Reducing unnecessary suffering and increasing the scope of choice for as many entities as possible. (Hah! I know, it looks like I'm contradicting my earier post. Free will may be an illusion, but it is an important illusion for those who haven't yet got past illusions.) I have no more justification for believing this than you do for believing in your Absolutes. But I have no less, either. My ideals come from my interaction with the world of phenomenon, same as yours.
I don't wish to insult you or your faith. I only want you to see that there may be another way of looking at things. You can even see this if you read the Bible with open eyes. I will try to put this in your terms.
Who is the Son of God? Look to Jesus' lineage and trace back. "Jesus, who is the son of Joseph, who is (snip) who is the son of Adam who is the Son of God. Jesus is the Son of God, as are we all. Did he not also say there would be others who came after him who would be greater? Jesus message was passed down through imperfect humans. His message was twisted. We aren't forgiven, instead, we have nothing to be forgiven for. There is no seperation between you and the Divine. You are one, whether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not.
Did you know that scientists can electromagnetically induce a state in you where you feel that you are one with the divine? If this feeling can be faked in you by other humans, there is no certain gaurantee that when you have that feeling that it comes from a genuine contact with the divine. You have no better way of knowing the truth than I do.
I am under no illusions that my ideas have any kind of moral standing outside myself. Yet for all my wishy washy moral relativism, I am one of the most moral people I know, even judging by others standards.
If there were one true divinely inspired faith, it would necessarily so far surpass any human inspired faith that the truth of it's divine origin would be apparant to everyone. Yet we have a wild mishmash of faiths, all claiming to be the One True. Even if there is a moral absolute, I have no way of knowing which of the many equally valid faiths claiming to be the One True Faith really are. I'll stick with what makes sense to me. Everyone else is free to stick with what makes sense to them, after all, there is no other that can make that decision.
Everything arises out of the conditions and patterns it is enmeshed in. Nothing is a thing unto itself, seperate from all others. Inside and Outside, Self and Non-Self, Beginnning and End, these are null concepts, sound and fury signifying nothing. Even the phrase "all is one" falls infinitely far short of the truth. It implies that "all" is distinguishable from "one," and also that "all" is not "many."
Go ahead and keep your faith in Jesus. Just lose your seperation from him. Christianity was so much more interesting back in the early days, before the Great Schism and especially before the Ecumenical Councils decided fro all Christians what was heresy and what wasn't. Early Christians had to decide for themselves, nowadays it's a kind of McReligion, prepackaged and easily digestible. No insult intended, just trying to get you to look into your own church history and the kinds of far-out thoughts that were common among early Christians. Heck, even later, look at America's Founding Fathers, most of them were Deists.
Justice does not depend on whether people have free will. People should be held liable for their actions for the same reason fires should be put out and levees should be kept in good repair. It is practical and efficient for the proper functioning of society. People should be able to have debt and pay it back because we have a need to share the burden of loss and the benefit of profit. Free will doesn't enter into the equation.
The fire has no free will, and yet we work to put it out. The water has no free will and yet we build the levee. This is so simple and basic, I am surprised I (still) have to explain this over and over to people. Everyone's life only has the meaning they give to it. If you want to call the process by which you give your life meaning "God," that is your right. It is sufficient that we are a collection of matter in a seriously gigantic universe, free will and God need not enter into the equation.
The trap you find yourself in is seperation brought on by dualistic thinking. You are in Hell, right this very minute, eternally seperated from God or the Universe or whatever you like to call it. This is an intolerable position so you must invent rationalization to protect you from the pain and isolation. But this seperation and concurrent pain is entirely illusionary. Unfortunately, to overcome this seperation, you must die. Everything you feel to be "you" must die in order that the real you can be free. As long as you persist in thinking of God or the Universe or what-have-you as "out there" and You as "in here" you will live in Hell.
There is an escape from Hell, and fortunately it requires neither free will nor God. Unfortunately, I could tell you over and over again what that escape is and you still won't get it. You need to discover it for yourself before anything I say about it will make sense. I will give you this one hint: in the phrase, "Judge not lest ye be judged," there is only one thing doing the judging, and that is what needs to stop. Good luck.
Unfortunately, some very old and very well regarded fairy tales seem to make people believe that the brain is just an interface, and consciousness comes from some intangible entity colloquially known as a "soul" or "spirit." So the majority of humans on the planet DO believe that neither silicon nor carbon can be thye basis for a self aware entity. That said, I happen to agree with your major points.
Consider this thought experiment: we develop nanotechnology that is capable of perfectly simulating the behavior of human neurons, down to the quantum level, in the unlikely case that is show to be important. We also develop nanobots that can be injected into your brain, where they can simultaneously disassemble neurons and replace them with artificial neurons. Do this to yourself and at no point is your consciousness gone or even changed, but at at some point it is entirely running on the new hardware.
The soul and free will become moot points. If there is a soul and it is not destroyed by implants or conventional operations on the brain, it won't be destroyed by this. If there is a soul, and the soul operates and is operated on by physical conditions then it must be possible to determine how and ensure that artificial neurons do the job just as well as natural ones. Same goes for free will.
So in our little thought experiment we now have a consciousness running on completely artificial hardware that has a soul and free will. You can attack the experiment by denying the possibility of creating such a neuron, but you wuold be hard pressed to find justification for that stance.
In my opinion, the existence of a soul or free will are completely unimportant and uninteresting questions. I have enough trouble figuring out what life is going to throw at me tomorrow and what I'm going to do about it. I don't have time to worry about what happens after I'm dead. And free will, as a concept, has very little impact on my day to day life. Why should we worry more about such trivial abstractions than we do about the present moment and our personal experience of it?
Just when you think you have the groupthink of the slashbot mods figured out, they go and mark a perfectly good anti-MS screed as "troll." Go figure. ;)
Humans are "programmed" to discover how to want things, and yet most of us are not psychopaths. Most of us want other humans around ,too. It's not an either/or thing. You can program somethign to discover how to want things within certain parameters. For instance, you could program a robot with a reward system so that it felt incredibly good for it to do what we wanted it to do, and very very bad if it didn't do what we wanted or if it tried to change the first part. You could then program it with free will and it could discover all sorts of desires and behaviors for itself without compromising it's core motivations because doing so would feel very, very bad.
Doing this, you would have a robot that would still go into situations unquestioningly, but with a flexibility to adapt that would make them even more useful.
Ha! That's the plan! You see, aliens have been landing at the south pole for years. This is just a way to throw the conspiracy theorists off the trail. The world must know: penguins are actually super-intelligent aliens from the planet fishstickus. It wasn't humans that overfished our oceans, it was the alien penguins. Now you know the truth!
Christ, is it that hard to discern from context when "animal" means "Heterotrophic eukaryote" and when it means "Heterotrophic eukaryote that isn't human?" You are deliberately blurring the meanings when it should be perfectly clear.
So if I send a work I've copyrighted through email, the ISP owns it? Damn! Should the Fed have the right to open your snail mail, too? What's the difference? Even when in public, I have a right to reasonable privacy. For instance, it's illegal to take pictures up someone's skirt. UP their skirt, you know, from ground level? If someone happens to be leaving a car and wearing no undies, that's different.
You seem to be making up legal precedent to suit your argument. The internet is not "the public domain." How is it different than phone lines? I mean, your phone conversation passes through many different telcos and any of them could easily listen to your conversations, but this is illegal. How is the Internet different? Don't ISPs have common carrier status, and doesn't that preclude them from monitoring your communications? And doesn't the government have to play by different rules ayway? In the US, our government is bound by the Constitution which precludes them from doing certain things that a company could do.
In short, your argument makes no sense It almost seems as if you are being contrary just to be contrary. I can say that black is no different than white, but that won't make it so any more than your claims about our legal and governmental systems make them true.
Never try to help anyone but yourself. Trying to help yourself is noble and good. Helping others is based on the delusion that you can even try to put yourself in another's shoes and understand what they need or want. It will only lead to heartache. Selfishness is next to Godliness. Which is next to sarcasm, in case you couldn't figure that one out.
Can't you come up with anything better than that? Face it: the country is not on your side anymore. Everyone hates Bush, everyone hates this war. You lost, give it up. Snide, idiotic comments like this just prove you are a sore loser with too much hate in your heart.
Liberals under-reacted. Based on what has actually happened, they should have reacted much more. If you think we aren't torturing people, would you mind if I cam over and waterboarded you? Are you really equating Clinton's fuck-ups with Bush's? Not that Clinton did the right thing, but they are orders of magnitude apart. Plus, Clinton admitted he did the wrong thing and apologized, which Bush is incapable of doing. The majority of Democrats were LIED TO BY BUSH! Finally, the last statement reveals the true depths of your ignorance and bigotry. Who attacked us? Shiite or Sunni? Do you even know the difference? What country were they from? Do you even care? Or is it all just evil brown heathens to you?
Does it burn knowing you are in the minority? Does it burn knowing the world does not share in your hate-fest? I certainly hope so, people like you are one of the root causes of suffering in the world. We would all be better off without you. FOAD.
There aren't any extra data points. Spacetime is not an array. You are thinking about this in a Cartesian/Newtonian way, and the universe is not like that. I'm not a physicist, just a physics enthusiast who doesn't know enough math to comprehend more than a layman's explanation, but I do know that space is not like an array. It's just not scientifically accurate to think of a thing's location in spacetime as being characterized by X,Y, Z and T coordinates. I can't explain it, but I know it's more complicated than that. Unfortunately, at very large and very small scales, normal human intuition about the physical world ceases to have any relevance.