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7777777 wrote:Jesus is saying that if you want to hide behind the excuse that you cannot help sinning because your body makes you do it, then, if you really believe that (which no one can),


1. No one can?
2. How are you sure about that?
3. Do you believe that we can pump enough drugs into you that you would do things you would find abhorrent if you were clear of mind?
4. Do you believe that the body can malfunction sufficiently that the brain's functions are skewed?
5. I don't think it's that big of a stretch to wonder if some sinning is compelled.
6. The body certainly has an affect on our thought processes.
7. I know my judgment can be suspect if i'm starving, or have to pee really bad.
8. It was certainly affected by lust for a large part of it.
9. These are big and crude affects, but i'm not sure if we can completely dismiss the possibility of smaller, subtler affects based on biochemistry.

7777777 responds:

1. No moral agent can deny that his will is free. To deny that the will is free in a court of law is essentially to plead insanity.

2. Free will is a first truth of consciousness, an a priori truth. Because free will is assumed universally (though some may deny it theoretically) and because the idea forces assent as soon as it is intelligibly stated. I am conscious of choosing to write this response, and I am just as conscious that liberty is the law of this choice. I am as conscious of the affirmation that I could will differently from what I do as I am of the affirmation that I cannot affirm, in regard to truths of intuition, otherwise than I do.

3. Yes, I do, but I would not, if drugs were forced on me to such an extent that I lost control of either my will or my intellect, feel myself culpable. The experience would not produce in me a feeling of guilt---a sense of regret, of injustice and of being violated, but not guilt. The law must either treat me as a victim or a madman. Free will is a condition of moral obligation and moral agency. Without free will, intellect and the sense of feeling, a person is not a moral agent viz. no longer obligated. If those same drugs gave me the chills, or the shakes, or made me vomit---this would be cause and effect---physical law, as opposed to moral law: a rule for the direction of the action of free will.

4. If by "skewed" you mean: diminish the brain so that a person cannot tell right from wrong, I'd say I'm sure there are pathologies that do so affect the brain, but this would put the sufferer in the same class as the infant and the mentally ill. If they are "skewed" to a lesser degree, so as to constitute a strong influence rather than a cause, then the will is still free though there is a strong influence exercised upon it.

5. I know what you mean, but to talk of "compelled sin" is to confound moral law with physical law. All mental states or actions, which are not free and sovereign actions of will, must occur under, and be subject to, physical law. Moral law is the law of liberty, as opposed to the law of necessity---of motive and free choice, as opposed to force of every kind. Anything you are forced to do, as in punch someone because some overpowering puppeteer has taken control of your arm, you are not responsible for. In the example just given you would feel no blameworthiness for it is another a priori truth that you are obligated only as far as you able to will correctly, obligation being co-extensive with ability. In the same way, you intuit that you cannot be held responsible for not performing an impossibility. These are all first truths of consciousness.

6. Yes, it does. It sustains to our intellect the relation of an influence.

7. True, mine too, but many have starved to death without breaking the moral law. There may also be times when a lack of prudence can make one blame-worthy for being in either of those weakened states.

8. Myself and many others can say the same, but this is an influence and not a cause. I am conscious that I could have chosen differently than I did when I either lusted or satisfied my sexual cravings in a prohibited manner.

9. I know that scientists are looking for such causal connections in the human brain. If they are ever found---what would this do to our ideas of law? Still, my consciousness testifies that my ill is free. I know that I don't have to sin---I choose to, whenever I do sin. God and the moral law only want and demand what we're capable of.