FredK can be a bit of an ass, but I suppose in my own opinion, that is what happens when you begin trying to create absolutes where there are none. Anyway, that is a totally different subject I could write about for days.

Anyway Valiya, it's nice to see so many of of us come back from such a long hiatus to unanimously dislike Fred,K and his cryptic and strange insults. Some times I ponder what he writes for a bit before I come to repeating conclusion that he's just an ass who can't quite articulate the ideas he truly wishes to express.

Anyway, I believe we left off debating whether or not a supreme plan can exist in conjunction with free will. You had given an analogy about how both can exist via an analogy about a parent played as yourself (presumably this represents the role of god) who offers a child a choice of chocolate or vegetables. Knowing a child will go for sweets over a vegetable, you already have a plan to give the vegetables to a neighbor. Thus we have a role where a god has offered up a choice, but knowingly had a plan incorporating the known outcome.

But here's the problem. The God role already knew. This seems insignificant, but it really drives home the philisophacle debate. If the god role already knew your decision, and ultimately the outcome incorporated all this not into the plan, but as the known plan, what sort of free will was exercised? If every action you will do is known and is a part of the plan, that seems very much like god had made you to fit the niche, and you had no say in the matter.

Much like a watchmaker must form each cog perfectly in the watch based on mathematical ratios so that the spring tension turns the peices exactly in accordance with the movements of the earth, sun, and moon. He cannot allow one piece to be imperfect, or the watch will move too fast or slow, and the watch will not display the correct time of the daily cycle. He cannot have one piece decide to be too large one day and have the watch slow down, too small and speed it up the next, and just right the third. Such a watch would most certainly be ineffective and referred to as a timepiece solely do to it's cosmetic appearances, as it would almost never display the correct time.

However, I'm slowly tiring of analogies. They certainly are very fun things, very visual, sometimes poetic. But the main idea here is the two philisophacle beliefs. One, being fate, fatalism, or the devine plan, in which we are all parts with a known behavior and role. The other, free will, in which every individual chooses his/her actions, which cannot be known, until the exact moment each individual chooses their action.

Pragmatic, Jeff, CyberLN, Nyarlathter and others. It is inevitable I will get banned again as my perception of all of you is ridicule, blindness, prejudice, stupidity, ignorance, intolerance, and worst of all lack of a sense of humor. You tolerate a "debate with Valiya that goes on for 12 pages. A person who believes he will go to heaven and see God and enjoy eternity with 72 or 73 virgins. Valiya who believes the Koran is the written word of God and if you leave the faith the penalty is death. Valiya whose holy book demands homosexuals will go to hell and the penalty for homosexuality is death. I can go on and on and on and on about the absolute ignorance, stupidity and perversion of morality of Valiya and the Koran. And yet all of you embarrass yourselves by carrying on a discussion with such a moron. Imagine debating whether there is a Santa Claus. Come on lets have a discussion whether there is a Santa Claus. Ridiculous-of course-- Yet all off you assholes continue a discussion with Valiya. What is the difference between the discussion about Santa Claus and GOD. I try sometimes to be funny and make fun of Pragmatic's half a face or use satire to make a point. I accept your intolerance for my ridicule of religion and the exaggerated humiliated way I belittle those who believe in the imaginary man in heaven. Your tolerance for morons like llovequestion, Valiya, and others and your inability to tolerate decent, satire, humor, or often even outrageous ideas by me -----you should be embarrassed- The "horror" of religion is more profound than Jim Crow, slavery and racism. Martin Luther King and people with empathy and passion resorted to "action" although non violence to express there outrage.... Anger, passion, outrage, against religion is at least as powerful as the harm of racism. It is inevitable I will get banned again as I can't control my discussed with the many "characters" who hurt others in the name of God. It may be ok for you to try to have an "intelligent" discussion with Valiya but not me. Maybe my anger needs to be pulled back just a little. If Joel Osteen , Dennis Prager, Bill Oreilly, Sean Hannity, John Lennox, Rick Warren, William Lang Craig, Pat Robinson, or Valiva happen to casually bump into me walking down the street one day--------I may pour elephant vomit all over their stupid face.---That's just me.
Anyways you all are way to serious-Jeff is way way to serious- Except when he "tells" jokes--and then he is funny.

OK, Valiya... Please, enough analogies, I really wanna focus on how absurd this is in terms of reality and things and forces we understand. So I have to ask, if a diety gave you the choice to choose anything you want, how exactly does that diety know what you are going to do before you do it? I mean the full understanding of how a diety knows before you're even offered such a choice, exactly what you will choose?

Valiya, even science has quite a few "I don't know's" left in it.

Science has proven you can have an "I don't know". The remaining "I don't know's" are what makes it interesting in a romantic, naturalist, spiritual sort of way. However, you can have an "I don't know" cause, but you must be able to replicate the experiment for scientific scrutiny. Which, this critical gap of replication, is where most atheists are made.

As an example, science has long struggled to explain how gravity works. We aren't exactly sure why mass creates gravitational pulls. But through replication, we can prove that such a force does in fact exist. You can drop an apple much like the famed eureka moment of Newton. We understand how it works, and it's relationship to mass, and how it affects other forces.

However, the same cannot be said for, say prayer. Not only has prayer failed to show any known cause when it's claimed to work, it has never been able to be replicated. The requested action mist often fail to come about. In fact, prayer has actually been one of the most scientifically tested subjects in history, even beating out psychic claims such as clearvoiyance, prophecy, and telekenesis.

Prayer has been shown to be uninfluencial, often times being so little above or below the statistical average as to be negligible. So not only do we not know how prayer supposedly works, no body has ever been able to produce in a scientific environment how to make it work, or evidence proving that it works at all. Much to the same can be said for miracles.

The OP seems to be saying that if they stopped believing in the existence of god, they would have no reason to be good. That is an extremely immoral philosophy.

The Bible is a truly revolting source of morals. In it, in bot old and new testament it advocates slavery, genocide and murder to name a few. It is laughable that anyone could even argue that the only way to have morals is to follow the Bible (or any other holy book) when so much hate is printed in them.

You wanna wgere I get my morality from? I get it from the notion that everybody has the right to do what ever they want to do, so long as it doesn't bring harm to anyone else.

Now take the word "atheist" out of this paragraph and replace it with the words "religious person." You'll find that exactly the same principle applies.