Llyricist

you're on THIS again?? LOL

How absurd, I never "freely chose" to love my parents, nor did I freely choose to fall in love with the woman I worked with a few years ago that was already "spoken for". I TRIED NOT to, I CHOSE not to, but I couldn't stop myself.

Get OFF that ridiculous notion of yours about free chosen love LWF. It flies in the face of reality.

Jobar

Now wait a minute. *I'm* the atheist here, right?

luvluv, we have pages and pages of arguments from Christians proclaiming that yes, God *does* know every tiny detail about his creation. Do you want me to find examples? I'm sure it will be no problem- Albert Cipriani claimed that God's attention was all that kept the entire universe in existence!

long winded fool

So then, you were forced by your parents and the woman you worked with to love them? You may be forced by chemical reactions, but you cannot be forced by someone else's will, including God's, or else the label of love cannot apply.

Llyricist

If they didn't force me to love them and I didn't choose to, where did those chemical reactions come from? Seems to me a Christian would attribute it to God. And that God is responsible for ALL the love we feel, so how can we feel love for Him if he doesn't cause it?

long winded fool

The chemical reactions come from instinct, I'd assume. The ability to respond to chemical reactions according to personal preference is described as free will. Free will, along with everything else, comes from God, according to Christians. So the ability to love and hate come from God, but we have free will. If we grant these two things as premises, then there is no contradiction. How do we know God wants us to have free will? If he didn't, he wouldn't be omnibenevolent. How do we know God is omnibenevolent would be the next logical question. The fact that he wants us to love wouldn't be proof, yet the existence of free will would logically be necessary for a human to truly love, and the desire for a human to be capable of true love would coincide with omnibenevolence in a deity.

Llyricist

So would I, but wouldn't a Christian posit that that instinct came from God? You are starting to sound very deist. And a Deist doesn't need the free-will defence.
But I had a personal preference NOT to fall in love with that woman. I LIKED her Fiance, and I knew ahead of time that that love would only cause me pain. So again, you are way off the mark of Free WILL here. You seem to be talking about instinct combined with environment, both of which according to Christians are created by God.
Not the ability.... the very CAUSES of love and hate supposedly come from God, unless you are a Deist.

The rest is your normal sophistry of assertion and non sequiter that we all love so much. Which I won't bother with since the first premises of your post are so far from proven, not even to be shown to non-contradictory.

long winded fool

Well, if you could point out my non sequiturs I'd be much obliged, otherwise I'm not learning anything. That said, the post granted theistic free will as a premise in order to point out a supposed contradiction, therefore to reject the premises now ammounts to abandoning the original argument to point out the errors in my refutation of it.

Llyricist

Ummm WHAT post granted free-will?
None of mine, I have been arguing most strenuously that love has nothing to do with free will. So what the ^%$ are you talking about?

AmbiguousUbiquity

Thanks for the welcome, Jobar! Didn't mean to seem like a hit and run; just had computer problems lately.

Lauren

Godless Wonder

How do we know that God wants us to have free will, assuming that he exists?

Why, we simply assume that he does, of course!

After all, we're assuming the existence of something preposterous, and then asking why we know that the preposterous being wants something...

How do we know that Leprechauns don't want us to steal their pots of gold? How do we know that the Snuffaluphagous snuffs Luphagous?

The question is nonsense.

For the record I believe in neither god(s) nor free will.