How does God's omniscience negate an individual's agency / free will?

[Benjamin McGuire]

At the very least, I would consider some of the criteria that Lehi presents in 2 Nephi 2 - opposition, enticement, choice (the freedom to act and not be acted upon), knowledge of good and evil, and so on.

[The Nehor]

On 7/23/2023 at 3:48 PM, Stargazer said:

I have sometimes thought that one lifetime is nowhere near enough testing for exaltation.

I'm 71 years old now, and I've had a fair number of opportunities to choose one thing over another during that time. But not so many as others. I've had my stresses and strains, but nowhere near the stresses and strains which others have had. My late wife's father died somewhere and sometime in 1945 after the Soviets took him and his wife into forced labor in the Soviet Union. His wife eventually returned, but he did not. We don't know what happened to him, but given that a huge percentage of German forced laborers died during their captivity, we can guess. I ghost-wrote a book of my mother-in-law's experiences in the USSR. If you've ever read Solzhenizen's Gulag Archipelago you can kind of imagine what she experienced. Neither of them knew what would happen to their four little daughters (aged 4 to 10) all alone in a burned out town in what became part of Poland. Neither knew what would happen to each other. 

I have never been in that kind of position. My life has been blessed in so many ways over what my wife's parents experienced. In fact, I have been just fine the whole time. I've had some disappointments, but overall things have been very good. They were tested to destruction. I've been on a bed of rose petals in comparison. How can Heavenly Father consider me "tested and proven good" when I haven't had anything like the kind of experiences that they had? Or had to face the same kind of choices they had to face?

So I have sometimes entertained the theory that I must be tested on other worlds as well. Or maybe on this one! That's one argument for Seelenwanderung, or reincarnation. It would be kind of economical, in a way. Get put through the wringer in one incarnation, and a bed of rose petals in another one. Do you test well in adversity, but not in abundance? Maybe you aren't suitable for good times, and go off the rails.  How many lives would it take to be thoroughly tested?

But I expect that HF knows what he's doing. Either way I cool with it.

If I believed in reincarnation I would switch to an Eastern religion and find the quickest way possible to get out of this cycle.

[manol]

On 7/23/2023 at 3:48 PM, Stargazer said:

I have sometimes entertained the theory that I must be tested on other worlds as well. Or maybe on this one! That's one argument for Seelenwanderung, or reincarnation. It would be kind of economical, in a way. Get put through the wringer in one incarnation, and a bed of rose petals in another one. Do you test well in adversity, but not in abundance? Maybe you aren't suitable for good times, and go off the rails.  How many lives would it take to be thoroughly tested?

Imo this is entirely plausible.

An arguably somewhat similar theory is that there is actually only ONE of us, progressing along something like a hundred billion different timelines (and counting), via a hundred billion different personalities in a hundred billion different circumstances and facing a hundred billion different packages of challenges, some eight billion such timelines being in play at the present moment.   This theory implies "love your neighbor AS yourself" is more than just a commandment, as it has been hiding an incredible teaching in plain sight for two thousand years.  "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" becomes more than just a maxim for good citizenship, being simultaneously a description of the way things really are.  Such otherwise eye-rollingly unreasonable teachings as "turn the other cheek", "if someone takes your coat give him your cloak also", "lend without expectation of repayment", "love your enemies", and "forgive seventy times seven (i.e. without keeping score)" suddenly make sense IF that other person is actually US on a different timeline.  And "the worth of souls is great" now hits quite a bit closer to home. 

Many near-death experiencers have described experiencing Oneness, and it's kind of mind-blowing:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3DYRbVa9A0&t=1s

 

On 7/23/2023 at 3:48 PM, Stargazer said:

But I expect that HF knows what he's doing. Either way I cool with it.

Likewise.  I cool with it too, whatever "it" actually is.

Edited July 25, 2023 by manol

[CV75]

I think the Indiana Jones movies are very instructive on this topic: the bad guys always do themselves in, in such a way that we would see the same outcome without a moment of Indy's involvement at all!