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Which was the point I was trying to contend with. I personally do not follow every word of the good book (And many people would disagree with me on such), and instead of viewing it as a factual and indisputable recounting of history, I see it as a rendition of many good morals , and some bad ones admittedly. However, to your point on slavery, the bible never specifically condoned it, rather it outlined how to treat slaves (Typically in a generous fashion). What you need to understand is that slavery was much different in those times. People often willingly sold themselves into slavery in order to pay off debts or to acquire better living conditions. I am trying to outline that the bible has moral value besides faith to everyone from all walks of life.
For a person to actually be in control, it means they would need to be freed of the constant decisions and actions that the reality we exist in forces upon them. None of us are in control, we are along for the ride, and that ride is the universe. We would need to be freed of existential chains.
It was a point accompanied by a challenge, which was made to support the point. You are acting as if the bible has no worth. I don't deny that the bible has been used in history to commit heinous acts, I only recognize that it is not the bible to blame, rather the people wielding it. Religion can be a powerful tool or a powerful weapon, it depends on how man wields it. You may not have said you view the bible as insignificant, but it was spoken in the manner by which you refer to it, the context you put it in. My claim was simply to state that the bible has worth unlike many atheists contend. Nothing more, nothing less.
The human brain operates exactly like a machine, or at least an organic one. I am an electrical current flitting about along the chemical and biological pathways that my brain provides, or the manifestation of the machine. But that does not mean I am actually in control. We are just puppets of the primal instincts and machinations that have been bred and ingrained into us through our time living on this Earth. I 'make' choices because of simple feedback loops, not some willpower that I posses to go out of my way and make something happen. A computer makes choices for a specific set of reasons, but does it posses free will? No, of course not. And the manifestation of that hardware is the software, or the OS, which is simply the means by which a system processes its inputs and outputs, or communicates with external systems. This was the analogy I was trying to make. This essence that you keep referring to, this 'me' is something that manifests itself out of necessity for the machine that is my being to operate. The universe pulls the strings for both my surroundings and my responses.
Free will is the concept that decisions are also the product of something more than pure computational power. A will of the spirit, or something beyond the admirable machines we are. I am trying to express that all human action is derived from past experience and inputs at that moment in time, in which our brain computes what is perceived as an optimal outcome. Our decisions our not our own, rather a carefully tailored response crafted by our subconscious routines, or the part of us that is machine, which to be fair is ALL of us. I was simply trying to clarify upon a premise that is not false, just hard to explain, as is customary of everything to do with this topic.
I seem to recollect liberals being unable to drop the subject of Bush whenever Obama was critiqued. Its only fair. We use contextualization and comparisons with past experiences to determine quality or the degree of an action of event. Bronto simply brought up a reference point. I would bet a considerable amount of euro that if Bronto were to have made a debate about Obama making said mistakes, someone would have brought up Bush or Trump on the opposite side of the isle and made the exact same argument. Its absolute hypocrisy.
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