All Quotes By Tag: Free-will

“I believe in free will. I think we make our own decisions and carry out or own actions. And our actions have consequences. The world is what we make it. But I think sometimes we can ask God to help us and He will.”

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”

“No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made.”

“All happiness happens in the Now. Therefore, how we interpret every passing moment is one of the most crucial choices we make.”

“Whatever your storybook carries within its pages, own it with love, courage and compassion. Remember that you can change your story at any time- nothing is fixed and we all have free will. We should not seek to love someone else’s journey more than we love our own; the swords of comparison are sharp and cutting to our soul and innermost values. We are all designed unique with our own original paths to walk through; we lose momentum and our natural impulses for creativity and progression when we focus our energy on other people.”

“Anything that comes your way by force was not meant for you. Everything that locates you on it’s own was yours and will be yours forever.”

“Free will is the cutting edge of Creation, don’t you see? The word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, meaning ‘of one’s free will.’ Spontaneity is the impulse, the purest expression of freedom, and the impulse wants to do whatever it wants to do. But you are afraid of what others think, others who are just as afraid of what you think, and so you pussyfoot along the perimeter of the free-will zone, wilting like a wallflower.”

“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.”

“You cannot hinder someone’s free will, that’s the first law of the Universe, no matter what the decision.”

“Even if there can be the first cause of the Universe — God, it wouldn’t necessarily support any evidence that God can convey some information about his will to some chosen persons, that there is some holy scriptures, containing just God’s message to humanity sent in that way. Any information, which you can get from the alleged ‘holy scripture’, is a product of the human mind, written by humans and changed by humans in various periods.There is no invariant version of any ‘holy scripture’, even if the concepts and propositions of it formally remain the same, their meaning is changing constantly, as a result of different interpretations, from one civilization to another, from one period to another. That interpretation is more essential and decisive than what is formally written there. Not ‘holy scripture’ itself, but its interpretation manipulates brains in such a way that a person builds his religious vision on the basis of the interpretation of ‘holy scripture’ made by somebody else. Without that interpretation, a person can hardly perceive anything in ‘holy scripture’ in terms of religion. But the main problem is that there cannot be only one interpretation of ‘holy scripture’, and there cannot be harmony among various religious visions, even within one religion. One interpretation can make you be humanist, while another — aggressive, depending on who and how interpreted what is written there. The naked truth is that when someone interprets something, he does it according to his mental apparatus, that is why any ‘holy scripture’ can only express the state of this mental apparatus with its cognitive and emotional bias, in some cases even its serious defect and disorder, and not the will of God itself.”

“It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance to a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside the system to find our lost empathy and make choices that reflect what we truly feel and believe, rather than what we’ve been taught to feel and believe.”

“So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice. You have to allow freedom. You cannot force love. God gives us the dignity of freedom, to choose for or against him (and friends, to ignore him is to choose against him).This is the reason for what Lewis called the Problem of Pain. Why would a kind and loving God create a world where evil is possible? Doesn’t he care about our happiness? Isn’t he good? Indeed, he does and he is. He cares so much for our happiness that he endows us with the capacity to love and be loved, which is the greatest happiness of all.”

“I’ve never much liked the whole setup of Christianity, with its emphasis on being saved, thereby acknowledging a debt that can only be paid by a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion. Must God’s love have strings attached? People who crave salvation should think about how they’re going to feel if it turns out that this God who saved them is, upon closer acquaintance, completely alien. He, possibly she (or, more likely, it), is not now and never has been one of us. Jesus clearly was not one of us, with his crypto-stories about the prodigal who is more beloved by the father than the dutiful son and the sliding pay scale for field hands, with his magic powers that run the gamut from improving the wedding beverage to blasting trees to raising the dead. These days we have born-agains everywhere, even in the White House, carping about how clear and meaningful everything is now that they’ve seen the light and accepted Christ as their Savior. There they were, just sinning along aimlessly, drinking and fornicating down that slippery slope lined with good intentions and ending you know where, when suddenly Jesus reached out and down or across and saved them. And now they feel grateful all the time, every day. It things go wrong, that’s God’s way of testing their faith, and if they are successful and make lots of money, that proves they have been chosen by God.It’s supposed to be all about free will, but there’s not much freedom in it. And if God is really so eager to save the desperate from themselves, where was he when my mother was knocking back the Seconal with her lunatic girlfriend from hell.”

“Have you ever thought what it means to have free will in terms of religion? Imagine that God created you with a gay brain, and then expects you to be a heterosexual, but not homosexual, because you have free will to choose the ‘right way’.”

“There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.”