RE: If there is a God, why do so many bad things happen? @ecotrain Question Of The Week
Its because of the tricky questions around whether gods exist that after many years of intermittently thinking on the subject, I conciously decided to give up and became by default an apatheist. I have decided the question, and the answer are irrelevant. If gods exist and control our universes, we cant see it, smell it, touch it, hear it or taste it, therefore they have literally no bearing on our lives; gods arent like parents because they dont communicate with us, they dont say 'Thou shalt not kill, and here is why', they say nothing; our morals are partially innate and partially learned from other humans.
So gods, and whether they exist are a distraction from what we should be really putting our energy into, caring for one another, and being responsible stewards of our small corner of the multiverse.
Freedom is another illusion, none of us are really free. Your unconcious mind makes most of your descisions for you, before you even know about it. Dont believe me, try changing a small routine, like brushing your teeth before you shower. How successful you are in changing what apparently is a minor and totally free part of your life, depends how much effort you put in; but there is the rub, if you dont make effort to remember, then you will fall back to your old pattern quickly. So if it takes effort to change such things, are we really free to change them? How many other things in your life are just unconcious responses to external stimuli, or habitual patterns that you follow without the slightest thought or consideration....?
I would have to almost completely disagree with you, mate. You ask the attempt to brush your teeth before a shower and then connect that with a lack of freedom because of subconscious motives. That simply isn't true. Freedom implies that you can decide to brush your teeth before a shower or you can decide not to brush your teeth before a shower.
I would argue that freedom is a state of being, not an illusion.
I don't mean doing it one time on one aspect of your life, I mean to say that we have a habitual way of living that is so automated that it's something we don't even think to question. Even if we do question it, making a permanent change is much harder than we anticipate. You may brush your teeth first on day 1 and day 2, but there is a pretty good chance that by day 3 you will be in the shower then remember you were supposed to clean your teeth first, because your habits are extremely hard to break.
Deciding to make a change is not freedom, freedom is realisation of change. A slave can decide s/he wants to be free of their masters control, but unless s/he can make it so, s/he is not.