Our life is a constant fight between Good and Evil. Inside every human being there is a never-ending battle for choices we make and consequences that they can lead to. If God exists it is clear that he gave us free will- one of the greatest gifts of all. He also thought us feeling of guilt, fear before the punishment, happiness as an award, pain and cruelty and also existence of evil. Having a free will puts human’s nature in between. Human’s nature, effectively, becomes neither, good or bad- and it depends fully from us which ever way we will turn to. And so it is not God that dictates our lives or we are not part of his “great plan” but it is our choice whether we follow good or bad desires in our lives. (Ref.1 Paulo Coelho)If something unfortunate happens in our lives we tend to question the existence of God and his greatness… Why? That is wrong! It is not God’s fault, it is the man’s decision that has effected our life in a dramatic way. On the other hand, if something pleasant happens to us, we tend to believe that because God’s values stand for good- it must have been another gift from Him or an award for our good choice.
Good things happen thanks to the right sequence of events in which we made right decisions which effected in our happiness.
When ancient thinkers like Plato or Aristotle based their theories on God’s law they must had been fully aware of God’s gift of free will, in that respect God’s laws have been created for individuals with free will who will be making their decisions to the best interest of theirs and then perhaps follow the laws.People are certainly driven by many different intentions and conscious as well as sub-conscious desires and this looks like a power of the human’s mind rather than “God’s Will”. One of the greatest philosophers once wrote that will is “free, both from law, and obligation (…)”, (Ref.3) and “all men are competitions in their efforts to achieve what they have willed”. (Hobbs, Ref.3)
In XVIII century, the point of history for one of the famous philosophers Hegel, was a restoration of the Kingdom of God on earth, for Marx, the end point of history was Communism (ref 2). Both, Hegel and Marx saw the progress of the world as the vehicle of historical change, and any change seems to prove that our free will or new desires push us in new directions.
Further on in XIX century, James Joyce, said that history is a “nightmare” from which he was trying to awake and God is only “a shout in the street”.
XXI century philosopher, David Icke, created one of the most shocking theories about Jewish Reptile Conspiracy in which he indirectly puts “children of Jerusalem” (where Jesus was born) on top of the world. He puts Jews in charge of politics, economy and media, manipulating peoples minds to rule the world incognito. We also could refer these thoughts as a parallel to theories of Freud and Bernays (XIX century) about manipulation of sub-conscious desires, in order to gain a fortune (just like he did himself through his controversial theories followed by media).Could we then see our sub-conscious desires as our evil and dark parts of the nature which are controlled by our conscious thoughts – which we could refer to as our free will?
Or does our sub-consciousness equals free will, and consciousness dictates which desires to follow? But in this case, free will would stand for our dark parts of mind which our conscious thoughts would have to fight to lead them in direction of good? In this case also, free will is not a tool of good, it is rather a voice of our natural desires fulfilling basic, selfish and biological needs rather than gift from God…
Applying Freud’s discoveries about his studies on human’s mind, our free will can be equally, a tool of good or evil and not necessary coming out of God but being part of human's mind function.
Every century has its own philosophies, will God still exist in XXII century symbolising good or rather global tool of manipulation invented by a philosopher, Jesus Christ from Nazaret?References:
1. Paulo Coelho, Demon and Miss Prym
2. Winchester University Journalism Course
History and Context of Journalism Part III Lectures from weeks 1, 3 and 4
3. Plato to Nato, Studies in Political Thought, Bryan Redhead
3. Bible/internet: http://biblescripture.net/Commandments.html
