[Alvin]

Originally Posted by impaul99

For the purpose of this discussion, lets assume for a second that there is a God and we are spiritual beings beyond just the human life we encompass right now. Meaning, we're not just biological blobs of chemicals that are born, and then die and cease to exist.

What kind of God doesn't matter. By God I don't just mean the Christian kind. You can substitute the word for Universe, Supreme Being, Allah, etc. etc. I just mean some form of supreme organizing power.

Now, lets assume that the supreme being grants us free will to do whatever we want for eternity. How would this being, giving us complete free will, prevent us from accidentally using that free will to take away our own free will? Meaning, would this being have a rule set which says "You can do whatever you want, you can have total free will and I will not step in and change anything. You express yourself whatever way you want. However, if you accidentally have the intention to live a life without free will via a single or multiple decisions which end up imprisoning you inside your own self, I will have to step in and free you from the jail you created for yourself because if I allowed you to have the free will to take away your own free will then that wouldn't be free will anymore."

Do you guys get the "gist" of what I'm saying? Supposed we all had free will but then we accidentally took it away from ourselves by a stupid decision to see what life would be like with less choices. Wouldn't this supreme being have some form of protection system in place to give us back our free will so we dont' have to suffer for eternity in our own self-made prisons?

Just a random thought to see if anyone's thought about this.

This is an old question; could God make a rock so heavy that even he couldn't lift it? I think greater minds have thought this through and have better answers than mine

Originally Posted by Frans

I love thought experiments

So, let's begin...

God has only one purpose: he wants to be 100% happy.
Happiness is a dual concept: you can only experience happiness, if you first have experienced what it means to be unhappy.
So, before God can become happy, he must first experience what it means to be unhappy. As he wants to become 100% happy, he must undergo everything that makes him 100% unhappy (miserable!).

The problem is: God knows everything, he cannot experience ignorance, and when he needs to experience a bad feeling, he knows that it is only temporarily.

Solution: God "writes" a scenario. He creates a dual universe where everything exists thanks to its opposite. He makes a dual entity of himself: he "divides" himself in two "parts": an abstract ego (the Universe, Nature, God) and a concrete ego: that concrete ego takes an ordinary male human body.
This concrete ego knows nothing about his true existence and must experience what all humans experience.
His abstract ego executes the scenario and let everything happen that the concrete ego must experience.
When all negative things are experienced and the concrete ego knows everything about his true identity, the abstract ego takes a female human form. They find each other and God is 100% happy. The End.

So, the split between a concrete and an abstract ego (unconscious and conscious mind) is a good way for God to make "free will" experiments.

This is interesting. If I remember my Kabbalah correctly, it's said that God became divisible the moment he became self-aware, therefore knowing what He is and isn't and the universe split into duality at that point, and began to divide into the 10 sephirah.

Another theory goes thus; that we are all bits of God experiencing life so that God may know life in all its richness, and it is our job in the end to return to God. It's nicely and entertainingly covered in Scott Adams' free ebook; God's debris.