I’m inclined to be religious, to crave transcendent purpose, because I’m mortal. De/re-constructed Christianity is the only remote possibility that I have. That’s not a straw man argument. All else here are.
Again is it because your genes said so?
Of course, pre-wired for social experience. What isn’t?
Clearly i believe in something called free will. Your argument here is basically that you are a robot predestined to be inclined (ir to prefer something above something else)
I have no idea what free will is, does God have it? We are all evolved autonomous conscious mammals on the spectrum of ‘moral’ taste reception expressed according to culture. Is that what you mean? Or something else?
The freedom of choise . To chose something over the other not because you are inclined to but because you want to . I was a smoker . My dad and grandpa are as well. Was in my dna to be inclined to chοose smoking? Yes. Did i chose it? No. Does it mean that because i didnt chose it i wasnt inclined to it? Absolutely not
I can’t follow your argument which seems self-contradictory. I have no idea what freedom of choice means apart from not being coerced by someone else or an ideology or circumstance, but by predilection which will have nonetheless been conditioned upon. Can you demonstrate it in any meaningful way?
What about my example?
It’s incoherent.
How so? You said that people are inclined to something and eventually they will choose it didnt you?
Something like this
Yeah, I’m genetically pre-disposed to it in my sacred taste receptor, my yearning for transcendence. It had me by the throat if not lower down for 45 years as it acceleratingly deconstructed until there was nothing left to deconstruct; the balancing force of reconstruction is much harder.
There comes the free will. It doesnt matter if you are pre-disposed tou can still choose not to
I don’t understand. I have no idea what choice has to do with it. I have no choice in the matter. I see no choice in my moral development over 66 years, even though I curse myself for my feckless ‘fails’ to this day.
My example above. I was pre-destined to smoke yet still chose not to
After having been one. You gave up for multiple rational and emotional reasons. What did choice have to do with any of that? It was determined without anyone holding a gun to your head.
Doesnt pre-destined mean something that im more keen to chose over something other?
Sure, that’s what genes expressed through environment do.
And im making the point that people can still refuse to do what they are pre-destined to
That’s a pretty depressing way to live I should think. We can’t step outside of any free will or choice to analyze them, much less prove to skeptics that they exist, but all of us (skeptics included) do live with and by the conviction that it very much exists, and rightly so. To toy with its “non-existence” as if that could even be a real thing beyond word-games and philosophical pedantry seems dangerous at best. Choose life … choose kindness … choose love … reject greed … reject cruelty … etc. I can’t imagine much that would be more dehumanizing than to convince somebody they don’t really have any choices in any of this, so they may as well just go along with whatever their momentary urges tell them.
We do have choice. And I choose to plant my flag on that hill and defend it. Not by “proving” it to anybody (as if that were even needed). But just by choosing that as a faithful call and knowing that love really means something when people can choose to give or withhold it.
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