In scriptures, although a little misleading today, the term “flesh” refers to your normal animal instincts; wants, desires, lusts, addictions, the seven sins, or whatever. One can become free from such urges so that decisions become the result of a more balanced assessment of ones needs, more disciplined.
When one is addicted to anything, one’s “will” is not free. When addicted, even if you decide to stop drinking alcohol, you will keep drinking it anyway. If you don’t believe that, just try it and you will quickly learn … and be cursed, requiring outside assistance. A respect for God can be deeply felt enough to “set you free”, especially along with the organized assistance of a true, forgiving (aka “Jesus”) church. Today, you are supposed to hate “organized religion” so that there will be far less outside assistance and the reign of desires, lusts, and addictions can resume in making specific people extremely rich and powerful.
If you are trying to avoid discipline, you are suckering into Satanism (being lost in lusts). And it all happens for very exact psychological, physiological, and neurological reasons. It isn’t superstition.
The real game is wealth translation, everyone here except myself it seems, derives pleasure from wealth encryption, which is enjoying the you won and others lost.
No, what I mean, is say, you become celibate or chaste, you’re hurting good people who want to experience the bond of sexuality with you. If you’re sexual, you’re hurting all the good people who can’t have sex with you because of imposed limitations.
If you become president, you hurt everyone else who wanted to be president, if you don’t become president, you hurt all the people who wanted you to be president.
If you are homeless, you hurt everyone who this makes uncomfortable, if you have a home, you hurt everyone who wants that home.
Basically, the more you see life clearly, with sharp resolution, you become keenly aware, that no matter what you do here, you’re hurting someone …
This doesn’t excuse hurting those people either …
The goal , the real game in life, not the distractions, is to solve this problem once and for all, and not just lolly gag through life, living a meaningless life.
Yes, you could argue this; but my point above involves taking these generally abstract, scholastic assessments of the relationship between an omniscient God and mere mortals, and situating it out in the world of actual human interactions.
Omniscient: having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things.
To argue then that an all-knowing God does not know whether Jane will abort or not about her unborn baby, or that Jack will or will not report her to the authorities, seems to ascribe the meaning of the word “omniscient” to God as but one more manifestation of His “mysterious ways”. And, of course, the faithful can always fall back on that to rationalize anything with respect to Him.
Similarly if a bat could only be as God intended it to be how could this omniscient God not know what it is like to be a bat? It is as though this all-powerful entity set life itself into motion such that it would evolve on its own into minds [ours] able to probe these questions self-consciously.
In other words, whatever that means.
And [thus] we are still back to square one: connecting all of these endless “intellectual” and “theoretical” speculations to an actual extant God.
A God, the God, your God.
And not theirs.
Or, sure, maybe it’s just me. My inability to reconcile the idea of an omniscient God able to be the “perfect predictor” with mere mortals able to choose behaviors that would be both “free” and wholly [necessarily] in sync with God’s prediction of what it will be.
And what then is the limit to that which mortals are able to think, feel and behave autonomously?
Are they able to prove the existence of God if God does not want His existence able to be proven? Are they able to teach themselves to behave in such a manner that God is not aware of it? Can they discover how to trick God? To defy God with impunity?
As long as there is a gap between what mere mortals think, feel and do and God’s awareness of this, it would seem to make this relationship considerably more problematic.
For example, am I “free” to not believe in God? Or, as some Christians [among others] insists, “free” or not, will my refusal [inability] to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior result [necessarily] in eternal damnation?
And [of course] always this: with so much at stake how/why is it that God makes answering these crucial questions so seemingly elusive?
Since this is important to me, I don’t want my earlier reply to not get read iambiguous… We posted about the same time.
I want to add for James other examples,
People who are non idolatrists roil in pain when the see crosses, churches, weddings, baptisms…
Most people who think they are good are evil as fuck, not only do people actually do these things … But even those that don’t do not speak out against such evil. That’s called being the asshole through omission … The magnitude of evil in this planet is astonishing…
No, there are an infinite number of universes in a multiverse, and if you’ve learned anything from dreaming, there are many different rule sets in the cosmos
It doesn’t matter how many universes there are … there is no communication between universes. If you could see another universe from this universe, then that other universe would just be another part of this universe. That follows simply from the definition of ‘universe’.