Why do men like to kill men?

[henry quirk]

Funny he'd bother to argue for it, then. Nobody's free to believe him.

GIA sez man has free will but is a useless bit of unfree flesh.

Now all you have is lies.

Get the quote or be seen as the liar you are.

Regards
DL

-----

Because your answer was the answer to your own question.

I don't know when you started following the law of the land so only you can answer that question.

Your answer is "when you started following laws?" That's your answer?

You mean you think "freedom" means lawlessness? You think "freedom" is inherently antisocial? You think there's no way to reconcile living among other human beings in a society, and being a free person?

Just asking.

We all have a free will, but not freedom.

You are always free to break the rules and live with the consequences. Vigilantes do just that.

Are you, or can you be free of society? As Socrates said, who would make your shoes. Meaning of course that we are tribal and all rely on each other.

If you think you have the freedom to live on your own, tell us how long you would last in the bush on your own.

Freedom, IMO, should be written as freedumb, just to show us how foolish of an idea it is.

Are you denying that you rely on others?

Regards
DL

Granted this: We all have a free will, but not freedom.

...is not exactly this: GIA sez man has free will but is a useless bit of unfree flesh.

...but it's close enough.

You don't think much of man as autonomous.

That's your prerogative.

I disagree with you.

That's my prerogative.

'nuff said.

[Greatest I am]

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[d] a slave to the law of sin.

The law of sin is god's law buddy.

Who else, from a believers point of view, made all natural and un-natural laws? Only Yahweh.

Unless you wish to put some other name above him as creator of some concepts.

Christians are conflicted on this issue as they sing of Adam's sin being a happy fault and necessary to god's plan.

The law of sin, if Adam had not followed it, would, according to their hymn, have derailed Yahweh's plan.

That being the case, you should follow Adam's example otherwise you would derail Yahweh's plan. Right?

"Part of my reason for being Christian is the extraordinary depth of its ideas."

The Christian bible, a consolidation of many thinking systems from the ancients, indeed holds extraordinary depths of its ideas, that is lost to most literalist Christians.

As one who chose Christianity, I assume that you are not just following your inherited religion, can you tell me why or how you can think that a genocidal and infanticidal god is a good god?

You seem more thoughtful than the average Christian and might not run away from that question the way all Christians do.

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

Granted this: We all have a free will, but not freedom.

...is not exactly this: GIA sez man has free will but is a useless bit of unfree flesh.

...but it's close enough.

You don't think much of man as autonomous.

That's your prerogative.

I disagree with you.

That's my prerogative.

'nuff said.

You can take whatever prerogative you like and I do not mind disagreement, but that should not include lying.

Thanks for admitting you lied, sort of.

A man with couth would have apologized without the reservation you show.

Regards
DL

[henry quirk]

Granted this: We all have a free will, but not freedom.

...is not exactly this: GIA sez man has free will but is a useless bit of unfree flesh.

...but it's close enough.

You don't think much of man as autonomous.

That's your prerogative.

I disagree with you.

That's my prerogative.

'nuff said.

You can take whatever prerogative you like and I do not mind disagreement, but that should not include lying.

Thanks for admitting you lied, sort of.

A man with couth would have apologized without the reservation you show.

Regards
DL

I didn't lie, I editorialized.

No apology was or will be offered.

get over it, snowflake

[Greatest I am]

Bite me, pathetic piece of lying garbage.

Regards
DL

[henry quirk]

Bite me, pathetic piece of lying garbage.

Regards
DL

[commonsense]

I believe GIA was drawing a distinction between being free (I.e., having free will) and having

Rather than quibbling over semantics, I prefer to view free and freedom from GIA’s perspective as much as I can understand it.

So, by GIA’s view, as I interpret it, people have free will but must exercise their agency within the constraints of an interdependent society.

GIA, please correct any mistakes I’ve made in restating your meaning.

Seems to me: GIA argues man is not free cuz man is dependent on his fellows for everything, not cuz he is restrained or must restrain himself.

Substitute “doesn’t have freedom” for “not free” and I think you have delineated G’s argument in a nutshell, allowing for the distinction he proposes. Baffling.

[Immanuel Can]

You indicated that some do not answer to the collective and need it for survival.

I did not say that. If I said anything you took to mean that, it was, perhaps, poorly put.

Perhaps you should quote the passage from which you are misunderstanding that, so I can clarify.

[commonsense]

I did not indicate that all our rules are opposite to freedom, but if you have to follow them, then you are not free of them, thus have no real freedom. You are just free to follow the rules, which is not freedom.

Regards
DL

But you do not have to follow social rules. You can steal, even murder, and either get away with it or face the consequences. You can be late for important business meetings and either be permitted to continue doing this or possibly be fired from your job. But you are free to ignore society’s rules and therefore you can possess freedom from society.

[commonsense]

I am still waiting for the example you suggested exists above.

Sorry...which "example"?

You indicated that some do not answer to the collective and need it for survival.

Show any person that does not need others for survival.

Regards
DL

A survivalist doesn’t need to rely on others and can even make his own shoes.

[henry quirk]

I did not indicate that all our rules are opposite to freedom, but if you have to follow them, then you are not free of them, thus have no real freedom. You are just free to follow the rules, which is not freedom.

Regards
DL

But you do not have to follow social rules. You can steal, even murder, and either get away with it or face the consequences. You can be late for important business meetings and either be excused for doing this or possibly be fired from your job. But you are free to ignore society’s rules and therefore you can possess freedom from society.

GIA, more than once, has said if you can't make your own shoes, you ain't free.

Mebbe only cobblers are free... 🥾

[commonsense]

You are bastardizing the language to try to win a cheep point.

A silly comment. I didn't do anything to the language...well, except use it as a person who knows it does.

And "cheap" is spelled with an "a."

You have freedom as having degrees. One is either free or not.

One is free or not...but sociability and social rules are not the opposites of freedom. So one can be sociable, and follow social rules, and be volitionally quite free.

Your own country has a Statue of Liberty. Not a statue of freedom.

Not my country.

But it's a very nice statue, nonetheless. And I'm not sure what your point is there.

Your last does not surprise me. You do not want to recognize that all you have is liberty and no freedom.

"One is free or not...but sociability and social rules are not the opposites of freedom. So one can be sociable, and follow social rules, and be volitionally quite free."

I did not indicate that all our rules are opposite to freedom, but if you have to follow them, then you are not free of them, thus have no real freedom. You are just free to follow the rules, which is not freedom.

Regards
DL

You don’t have to follow the rules.

[Immanuel Can]

Your last does not surprise me. You do not want to recognize that all you have is liberty and no freedom.

No -- it's actually true. My country does not have a Statue of Liberty. I'm not an American.

I did not indicate that all our rules are opposite to freedom, but if you have to follow them, then you are not free of them, thus have no real freedom. You are just free to follow the rules, which is not freedom.

This is, in one sense, partially correct, but ends up being all the more wrong in its conclusion. For it is true you cannot be "free of all rules": no person who ever lived has been. At the same time, it is wrong to imagine that following rules is the opposite of freedom. For there are many cases in which having some rules to follow makes one more free, not less.

Go back to your Hobbesian "state of nature."

Nature is not our friend. If you think it is, go and live outside for a few days, with nothing but your skin, and see how you feel.

Nature is that which tries to kill us every minute of every day. Most of human history has involved a brutal struggle against nature. And while I am personally trained in survival, and no doubt could outlast you in a real "state of nature" by a long, long time, and perhaps indefinitely, even I would not want to live in a "state of nature" on a continual basis. Eventually, nature would kill even me. I suspect it would get you, if you are like most people, within two or three days. And I'm guessing it would be exposure or hypothermia that would kill you fastest.

Now, imagine yourself in the state of nature. You live alone, unfettered by any association with other people. Yet, because of this, you are of all men the LEAST free. Why? Because nature itself imposes terrible, crushing burdens on you every day. You have to grow all your own corn; you must raise all your own beef or chicken. You must bake your own bread. You must fetch your own water. You must catch all your own fish. You must make your own wine and beer. You must create all your own tools, weave your own cloth, acquire all that you possess, then defend all of that against any marauders and against decay, corruption and decline. You are, from morning to night, engaged in demanding tasks of which there are far too many. And you die young, because of the hardness of your existence.

Moreover, you shall not even reproduce. For without at least one other person, you shall not be capable. Because of your "freedom," there shall be no more people.

This is how antithetical your conception of "freedom" is to nature, to life, and to any genuine freedom.

So you band together with a few others. And immediately, they put a strict rule upon you: you shall raise beef. You might say, "Hey, that's a demand...I'm no longer free!" But you are wrong. For among those others with whom you have banded is one who is strong, who will defend the boundaries while you tend cattle. Another will bake your bread. Another will weave your cloth. Another will brew your beer...

So, by taking one rule upon yourself, you have been freed from a thousand other necessities. You now only have to concern yourself with your cattle; all else shall be done for you, and you will be able to trade from your herd to acquire all that you need. And now, since you are married, you can reproduce, and your children can also work with you, and eventually, you may not even have to work at all.

So by accepting a little curtailing of freedom, you have become a much freer person than the man in the mythical "state of nature" by himself. Laws have, for you, not become a source of enslavement but the opportunity for you to gain much more freedom. You have many, many more choices, options and alternatives than the person outside of society. And you have leisure time -- which a man alone never has at all. You even have time to think.

This is what I find so pathetically insufficient about the allegation that freedom and rules are opposites. They are not. Absence of rules is anomie -- or, if you prefer the word, that horrible "state of nature" in which necessity forces every decision to be exactly what it has to be for survival, and you have no freedom at all. But a limited set of rules is actually a grounds for much greater freedom and choice than any "state of nature" can ever offer.

Modern Western people are actually more free than human beings have ever been at any time in history, or may ever be again, for all we know. So what are we complaining about?

[Greatest I am]

You indicated that some do not answer to the collective and need it for survival.

I did not say that. If I said anything you took to mean that, it was, perhaps, poorly put.

Perhaps you should quote the passage from which you are misunderstanding that, so I can clarify.

Do we all answer to the collective and can you live without doing so?

If not, and using you as an example, who would make your food and shoes?

Have you noted in all those, live off the land programs, that they always have rifles, chain saws etc.?

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

I did not indicate that all our rules are opposite to freedom, but if you have to follow them, then you are not free of them, thus have no real freedom. You are just free to follow the rules, which is not freedom.

Regards
DL

But you do not have to follow social rules. You can steal, even murder, and either get away with it or face the consequences. You can be late for important business meetings and either be permitted to continue doing this or possibly be fired from your job. But you are free to ignore society’s rules and therefore you can possess freedom from society.

No argument.

I have put that caveat above somewhere, where I said we are free to break the rules, but then have to live with the consequences.

I think I put it where I said I broke the law to challenge it, and lost because the law cheated.

Even while doing it, I was not fully free as I cannot make shoes or grow my own food.

Regards
DL