(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Calvinism, Predestination, Freewill, and a Little Zen [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-08 I was raised in a small community of German Methodists on the edge of a much larger settlement of Dutch Calvinists. The two groups didn’t interact much. When I was small the adults explained to me that the main difference between us was that the Dutch believed in predestination and we didn’t. From what I could understand predestination was basically that people had no say at all in whether they went to heaven; God had decided that long ago and if He had decided against you, tough toenails. No matter what you did, believed or wanted, you went to hell. Later in high school it was explained a bit more elegantly; because God knew everything He knew from the foundation of the universe whether or not you would be saved, and since God was omnipotent and could never be wrong, the mere fact that He knew it meant that it was locked in. If you converted without His knowledge that would have made God wrong and that was impossible. So…. When I was a kid I went through a phase of struggling with the idea of free will and fate. Being a mildly rebellious child, the idea that all of my actions were determined by fate annoyed me no end. I remember walking up the sidewalk into my house, stopping and then taking a step forward, very upset that I knew that each move could have been fate and not my free will at all whether I stepped forward or stood still. Just because I thought it was my will to move or not move, I knew it would still be fate. And of course this is not all just religious speculation. The mechanistic theory of reality insists that every single action in the universe is actually a reaction, that every single event is the direct result of the events preceding it and they are all controlled by a strict mechanical law. Some years ago I read that a famous scientist had said that he knew every single event that had ever happened. He had it all figured out. (I am not disagreeing with this theory, by the way, and I know it has become somewhat frayed around the edges, but….) Ultimately, of course this is behaviorism and Skinnerism, which negates entirely the concept of an individual, free will, and even consciousness itself. We are all literally machines on every level and every thought, action, and reaction is nothing but programmed reflex, twitching in response to stimuli. That we even think that we think is just neurons firing. The fascinating thing about this is that Calvin’s speculation on ultimates and God, crazy as it sounds (and it certainly sounds crazy to me, frankly) wound up in the same place as the purely mechanistic observations of repetitive events in the world, which underlies modern science and scientific theory. The Universe is an unbreakable sequence of events which has carried it forward within that framework, will carry it forward within that framework, and absolutely nothing can or will ever happen outside of that framework, And even human activity is bound by that rule. Even when we think we rebel against it, that rebellion is programmed in. The most fascinating thing, to me, is that God trapped Himself and stripped away His own free will the moment He set the machine in motion. Because He is infallible, He cannot change His own mind. “Knowing the end from the beginning.” Well, God is God, and one can argue that He deserves it, but unfortunately we are trapped in his infallible machine. Oops. So can we do anything about it? Or even, should we try? Dos it matter? We go on day by day pretty well without free will within a totally inflexible regimen of events and circumstances. Actually we do have some flexibility if not in actual freedom but at least within our own perceptions of it. If we know that we are the tiniest of gears in an intractable machine, at least knowing it and observing our lives within that framework builds up a higher perspective- watching the robot. And while it may not be freedom and may all be preplanned, much of modern technology is based on the idea of observing what the universe does so that we can make it do the same things, but under our direction. But the true freedom is not in braking free of the behavior (The Universe will not allow that anyway)) but in our thinking, means, and activity. We will fail, but we can act like not-machines if we do things that natural law either says will not work or will end badly. Any fiction, and specially fantasy based on events that are impossible in 'reality,' is a crack in the wall. At least some Buddhism and many religious ceremonies are based upon the idea of action for the sake of action. They do not do anything but they train the mind. Okay, I have one point with this long hot mess. There has been some discussion that some parts of America are inevitably red, that there is absolutely no reason for a Democrat to even run for office there. That we are bound to lose. In a mechanistic sense this is certainly true. No liberal Democrat is going to win any offices in deeply Republican parts of the country. But it is an act of freedom of the soul to run, without thought of reward or success, to run a candidacy as a ceremony much like the Japanese tea ceremony or a wiccan pagan ritual of calling down the moon. Not as an act of rebellion, not looking for an end beyond the inevitable inner transformations of action and transformation within the self as a result of that action. The Calvinist God and mechanistic scientists may be limited by the inevitable laws of cause-and-effect, but we don’t have to be. Of course we will lose, but at least we can act. God can’t even do that much. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/8/2192188/-Calvinism-Predestination-Freewill-and-a-Little-Zen Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/