On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 11:24:59AM -0400, John Clark wrote: > > Yes I agree that is certainly needed, and yet I see on this very list > endless debates about if people have free will or not or if God exists or > not and there is not the slightest agreement about what "free will" or > "God" means. People very very literally don't know what they're talking > about, but whatever they're talking about they are doing so with great > passion. It's no wonder the debate never goes anywhere!
I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. I do claim to know what I mean by "free will", which in accord with how Bruno uses it, but I also note that there tends to be no agreement on the term, and that the debates typically shed more heat than light, so I usually delete all threads with "free will" in the title without reading them. I can only surmise that the religious crowd have appropriated free will for their own purposes, and the anti-religious crowd seem to be hell bent on showing the nonsensical nature of that usage, rather than simply using a more sensible definition and getting on with it. As for "God", if a Christian asks me, I would say I'm an atheist. It most clearly describes my position in terms they understand. If it is someone aware of philosophical nuances, I might give a more nuanced answer, such as Einstein's "I believe in Spinoza's god". Is that so hard for the militant atheists to get? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
