Disability In A Christian Worldview

[Castiel233]

Some years ago, through my then job, I had contact with a family who had a severely disabled adult son. This young chap had been almost fatefully staved of oxygen at birth and as a result he was very disabled. He could not talk or walk. His family loved him very much (I say loved in the past sense, purely because I haven’t seen them in years) He could not focus on people, so when I was there he had no acknowledgement of anyone. He had a lovely and loving supportive mum.

 

His disability makes no sense from a Christian point of view. God creates us to glorify Him. Yet this poor lad had the most very basic grasp on life. Why would God make people with zero ability of comprehending themselves let alone theology. Christians might say God has a purpose, but given the OT demands that disabled people are kept out of the temple, as they are an abomination to the Lord, one assumes His purposes are sinister. 

[Castiel233]

 

Some years ago, through my then job, I had contact with a family who had a severely disabled adult son. This young chap had been almost fatefully staved of oxygen at birth and as a result he was very disabled. He could not talk or walk. His family loved him very much (I say loved in the past sense, purely because I haven’t seen them in years) He could not focus on people, so when I was there he had no acknowledgement of anyone. He had a lovely and loving supportive mum.

 

His disability makes no sense from a Christian point of view. God creates us to glorify Him. Yet this poor lad had the most very basic grasp on life. Why would God make people with zero ability of comprehending themselves let alone theology. Christians might say God has a purpose, but given the OT demands that disabled people are kept out of the temple, as they are an abomination to the Lord, one assumes His purposes are sinister.

I agree that Yahweh and his purposes are sinister. But Jesus seemed to have a more humane treatment of all people. In the gospel story, Jesus healed a man aged 37 or 38 who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus whose sin, the man's or his parents' caused this. Jesus answered that no one's sin caused it, but it provided an opportunity to glorify God. Presumably Jesus meant an opportunity for God to show his glory by healing the man, which Jesus did. However, that seems to imply that God wants to heal all disabled people in order to manifest glory. So, why aren't all disabled people being healed? Is God a sadist? How many people have prayed, with sincere hearts, for healing for themselves and for others and the healing did not occur...

 

Good points.......although as I mentioned The OT says the Lord is against disability, so God creates disabled people  for no purpose that be ascertained if He does not heal them......The NT says that believers can be healed and with God all things are possible.....although not actualised in reality.

 

On a slight side note: Some years ago the then England football manager, Glen Hoddle, publicly implied (in line with his theological views) that people are born disabled as punishment for the sins they have done in a previous life. Naturally and rightly he was roundly condemned and fired.

[Castiel233]

 

 

 

Some years ago, through my then job, I had contact with a family who had a severely disabled adult son. This young chap had been almost fatefully staved of oxygen at birth and as a result he was very disabled. He could not talk or walk. His family loved him very much (I say loved in the past sense, purely because I haven’t seen them in years) He could not focus on people, so when I was there he had no acknowledgement of anyone. He had a lovely and loving supportive mum.

 

His disability makes no sense from a Christian point of view. God creates us to glorify Him. Yet this poor lad had the most very basic grasp on life. Why would God make people with zero ability of comprehending themselves let alone theology. Christians might say God has a purpose, but given the OT demands that disabled people are kept out of the temple, as they are an abomination to the Lord, one assumes His purposes are sinister.

I agree that Yahweh and his purposes are sinister. But Jesus seemed to have a more humane treatment of all people. In the gospel story, Jesus healed a man aged 37 or 38 who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus whose sin, the man's or his parents' caused this. Jesus answered that no one's sin caused it, but it provided an opportunity to glorify God. Presumably Jesus meant an opportunity for God to show his glory by healing the man, which Jesus did. However, that seems to imply that God wants to heal all disabled people in order to manifest glory. So, why aren't all disabled people being healed? Is God a sadist? How many people have prayed, with sincere hearts, for healing for themselves and for others and the healing did not occur...

 

Good points.......although as I mentioned The OT says the Lord is against disability, so God creates disabled people  for no purpose that be ascertained if He does not heal them......The NT says that believers can be healed and with God all things are possible.....although not actualised in reality.

 

On a slight side note: Some years ago the then England football manager, Glen Hoddle, publicly implied (in line with his theological views) that people are born disabled as punishment for the sins they have done in a previous life. Naturally and rightly he was roundly condemned and fired.

 

Right, politically incorrect statement. But also contradicts Jesus' theology that no sin caused the disability. Jesus did not teach "original sin." Jesus and Yahweh were not always on the same page on all matters. (More perplexity about who/what Jesus thought God/Yahweh was. But that's off topic, sorry.)

 

Staying off topic......Paul didn't agree with Peter, Peter denied Jesus, Jesus offered a different theology to the father, Judas abandoned Jesus( so to speak)...its all a bit convoluted  

[Ouroboros]

Some years ago, through my then job, I had contact with a family who had a severely disabled adult son. This young chap had been almost fatefully staved of oxygen at birth and as a result he was very disabled. He could not talk or walk. His family loved him very much (I say loved in the past sense, purely because I haven’t seen them in years) He could not focus on people, so when I was there he had no acknowledgement of anyone. He had a lovely and loving supportive mum.

 

His disability makes no sense from a Christian point of view. God creates us to glorify Him. Yet this poor lad had the most very basic grasp on life. Why would God make people with zero ability of comprehending themselves let alone theology. Christians might say God has a purpose, but given the OT demands that disabled people are kept out of the temple, as they are an abomination to the Lord, one assumes His purposes are sinister.

While we were still Christians, my wife and kids were in a terrible car accident. As a result, one of my sons is paralyzed from hip, down. The transformation we had to go through mentally and emotionally was a huge part in why we lost our faith (all of us).

[Storm]

I have a disability. I'm hearing impaired. I think its a crock of shit that "god" allowed me to "get" this, then gave me the desire to be a musician and to work with counseling people. How cruel is that?

Of course, now it makes more sense. I just had a bad infection and lost some of my hearing. Life sucks on its own. No god needed. I just make the best with what I have.

So far, so good.

[Roz]

It makes sense, what christianity says about disabled people.  It just makes a very hideous point clear: Yaweh/jesus made disabled people so that very few of them might be healed in order to glorify himself.  It's fucked up beyond all measure.

 

Thus says the lord:

Exodus 4:11New International Version (NIV)

11 The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

 

However jesus (also the same god with the whole trinity bullshit) says:

John 9:2-7New American Standard Bible (NASB)

 

2 And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

[Castiel233]

Both those quotes are  particularly nasty. What sort of God disables Humans so He can make Himself look the big I am. A child born so disabled that he doesn't even know of of his own existence. Yet this disability is the work of God.....and Christians pretend to love God.

 

I state again that the OT calls disability an abomination.....yet they are created that way on purpose by God.......WTF

[Castiel233]

It makes sense, what christianity says about disabled people.  It just makes a very hideous point clear: Yaweh/jesus made disabled people so that very few of them might be healed in order to glorify himself.  It's fucked up beyond all measure.

 

Thus says the lord:

Exodus 4:11New International Version (NIV)

11 The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

 

However jesus (also the same god with the whole trinity bullshit) says:

John 9:2-7New American Standard Bible (NASB)

 

2 And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

Shouldn't that be "but it was  so that the works of ME might be displayed in him".

[Roz]

Yes C, it should be.  The god of the bible is one of the most evil characters in fiction.

[Leo]

I'm totally blind from birth. I believe I understand the most common views on disability within evangelical Christianity:

1. The Christianity of my upbringing, aka Reaganomics, the Wall Street Journal, Original Sin, but no modern miracles: God made you blind for a purpose. You're nothing special just like the rest of us. You're to deal with it and making the most of it is how you glorify God with it.

2. Many Pentecostals - what I now call the Dancing Bears Phenomenon: God wants to heal you. He prefers to fix broken things. For a time, I actually tried to allow for them to try their hand, or should I say, sleight-of-hand. Naturally, nothing happened. But more to the point, they were wholly incapable of realizing I had a job, helped out with the kids around the house, and so on. I didn't know the term confirmation bias back then, but I certainly did call them out on their stupefying inability to see the obvious. Needless to say they were not terribly pleased.

3. The church dove who lives inside the church bubble, rarely makes any rational sense: You're disabled because you're somehow special. Again, I wasn't in the least convinced.

Of course all these phenomena can appear in mixes and matches in people. To me, just understanding something went wrong on the assembly line, just made more sense.

I don't think people in churches are any worse or any better than anyone else at understanding disabilities. They just have particular dogmatic paradigms to give them reasons for it. Also, in a church, you are required to tolerate certain behaviors that I wouldn't tolerate with my work friends when we were out at a bar on Friday nights. But in the main, it's a system. As a system it is designed to keep order, and so you aren't to push back too much with these things when people start bugging you about it.

But what I heard about once was positively awful, and I did say so. A friend's sister, when they were kids, was constantly preyed upon ... er I mean prayed for. ... at one of the dancing bears churches. A evangelist would come through, see a blind girl no doubt think he could pull it off and make some extra followers or something, and they'd drag her up front and go at it. Always to no effect. The reason it's so brutal on the psychology with those people is they grind them down to the point they actually believe they're supposed to believe it. Not kick the tires or test the scenario, I mean some of them actually do buy it to varying degrees. And part of 'buy it' is acting like what they're asking for has already come true. And feeling guilty when it doesn't.

I think no other Christians can come up with anything as awful as that for disabled people.

Also another reason they're allowed in many places to react in certain ways is their meme is already black and white. They are always trying to see who is and who isn't, and the insular nature of the church itself just lends itself to that kind of behavior. That's not even the beliefs. It's just a small in-group of peple who meet sometimes 3 times a week or more, and alienate themselves from outside knowledge that isn't filter3ed by their apologists.

A good example of how this works is you see these occasional kids coming out of North Korea to get an education. But they're primed way ahead of time to not take any of this western thought seriously. They're already taught how to believe about what they will see. And they're taught what to think, not how to think. And if anything conflicts, they are always to defer to the State, North Korean  ideology.

An absolute stupendous analogy of how Christianity as a faith system works. Because once you understand it is just a self-replicating machine, no more and no less, all the intricacies become infinitely easier to understand.

All their sects? Not Satan's two-legged helpers dividing: It's just the mutation that any self-replicating entity would go through to permeate new environment. Insularity? Since transference of itself depends not on DNA instructions, but learned behaviors and conditioning, there's your explanation.

It's no more and no less than a self-replicating machine. Although, if I say so myself, we have developed far smarter artificial intelligent ones by now, and will develop said intelligences to be way smarter than even their alleged god, in most of our lifetimes.

The disabled thing is just a minor irritation for some mutations of the meme, while other mutations are truly threatened by it, and some mutations can even totally coexist with it.

[Castiel233]

God makes you disabled (He knows you are strong enough to carry it and witness your faith)

God makes you able bodied (He loves you)

God kills you  (he is calling you home)

God gives you cancer but you recover (praise be unto the Lord)

God sends a fatal Earthquake (It will all be explained in Heaven) 

 

He never ever gets the blame....wow He has some seriously good PR

[Roz]

Leobirdman wrote:

" A friend's sister, when they were kids, was constantly preyed upon ... er I mean prayed for. ... at one of the dancing bears churches. A evangelist would come through, see a blind girl no doubt think he could pull it off and make some extra followers or something, and they'd drag her up front and go at it. Always to no effect. The reason it's so brutal on the psychology with those people is they grind them down to the point they actually believe they're supposed to believe it. Not kick the tires or test the scenario, I mean some of them actually do buy it to varying degrees. And part of 'buy it' is acting like what they're asking for has already come true. And feeling guilty when it doesn't."

 

That... really makes me angry...  

[Castiel233]

I'm totally blind from birth. I believe I understand the most common views on disability within evangelical Christianity:

1. The Christianity of my upbringing, aka Reaganomics, the Wall Street Journal, Original Sin, but no modern miracles: God made you blind for a purpose. You're nothing special just like the rest of us. You're to deal with it and making the most of it is how you glorify God with it.

2. Many Pentecostals - what I now call the Dancing Bears Phenomenon: God wants to heal you. He prefers to fix broken things. For a time, I actually tried to allow for them to try their hand, or should I say, sleight-of-hand. Naturally, nothing happened. But more to the point, they were wholly incapable of realizing I had a job, helped out with the kids around the house, and so on. I didn't know the term confirmation bias back then, but I certainly did call them out on their stupefying inability to see the obvious. Needless to say they were not terribly pleased.

3. The church dove who lives inside the church bubble, rarely makes any rational sense: You're disabled because you're somehow special. Again, I wasn't in the least convinced.

Of course all these phenomena can appear in mixes and matches in people. To me, just understanding something went wrong on the assembly line, just made more sense.

I don't think people in churches are any worse or any better than anyone else at understanding disabilities. They just have particular dogmatic paradigms to give them reasons for it. Also, in a church, you are required to tolerate certain behaviors that I wouldn't tolerate with my work friends when we were out at a bar on Friday nights. But in the main, it's a system. As a system it is designed to keep order, and so you aren't to push back too much with these things when people start bugging you about it.

But what I heard about once was positively awful, and I did say so. A friend's sister, when they were kids, was constantly preyed upon ... er I mean prayed for. ... at one of the dancing bears churches. A evangelist would come through, see a blind girl no doubt think he could pull it off and make some extra followers or something, and they'd drag her up front and go at it. Always to no effect. The reason it's so brutal on the psychology with those people is they grind them down to the point they actually believe they're supposed to believe it. Not kick the tires or test the scenario, I mean some of them actually do buy it to varying degrees. And part of 'buy it' is acting like what they're asking for has already come true. And feeling guilty when it doesn't.

I think no other Christians can come up with anything as awful as that for disabled people.

Also another reason they're allowed in many places to react in certain ways is their meme is already black and white. They are always trying to see who is and who isn't, and the insular nature of the church itself just lends itself to that kind of behavior. That's not even the beliefs. It's just a small in-group of peple who meet sometimes 3 times a week or more, and alienate themselves from outside knowledge that isn't filter3ed by their apologists.

A good example of how this works is you see these occasional kids coming out of North Korea to get an education. But they're primed way ahead of time to not take any of this western thought seriously. They're already taught how to believe about what they will see. And they're taught what to think, not how to think. And if anything conflicts, they are always to defer to the State, North Korean  ideology.

An absolute stupendous analogy of how Christianity as a faith system works. Because once you understand it is just a self-replicating machine, no more and no less, all the intricacies become infinitely easier to understand.

All their sects? Not Satan's two-legged helpers dividing: It's just the mutation that any self-replicating entity would go through to permeate new environment. Insularity? Since transference of itself depends not on DNA instructions, but learned behaviors and conditioning, there's your explanation.

It's no more and no less than a self-replicating machine. Although, if I say so myself, we have developed far smarter artificial intelligent ones by now, and will develop said intelligences to be way smarter than even their alleged god, in most of our lifetimes.

The disabled thing is just a minor irritation for some mutations of the meme, while other mutations are truly threatened by it, and some mutations can even totally coexist with it.

Leo , you are most definitely one of my favourites writers on here...you write beautifully  

[moanareina]

One of our Christians on this forum would probably say God does not make disabled people...it is due to original sin that there are people born with disabilities...

 

While still a Christian I thought disabilities where to show the world that we could show love to everyone and did not have to strive for perfection. People could either get healed, or learn to live with it or the surrounding would be challenged to show their love to their disabled community/family members.

What I never understood though was why there was Alzheimer's. Why would God let this happen...I mean a persons mind stop knowing anyone in his life including God...how would that work out in the end?

[Castiel233]

 

What I never understood though was why there was Alzheimer's. Why would God let this happen...I mean a persons mind stop knowing anyone in his life including God...how would that work out in the end?

A guy could live his most of his life in prayer and devotion to the Lord......get Alzheimers a few months before the end and lose his identity and thus his faith and then what. He dies not as a believer, so he goes downstairs!!!!!

 

 

[Ouroboros]

One of our Christians on this forum would probably say God does not make disabled people...it is due to original sin that there are people born with disabilities...

And the same is said about bacterial, viral, and genetic diseases. But why do we have an immune system then? Why did God create blood clothing and white blood cells in Adam and Eve if the diseases were the result of the fall? Did God create it because he knew it would come? What were virus before it was damaging? Or did God create all these things after the fall (two creations)? The theology is so full of holes that it puts a swiss cheese at shame.

[moanareina]

 

One of our Christians on this forum would probably say God does not make disabled people...it is due to original sin that there are people born with disabilities...

And the same is said about bacterial, viral, and genetic diseases. But why do we have an immune system then? Why did God create blood clothing and white blood cells in Adam and Eve if the diseases were the result of the fall? Did God create it because he knew it would come? What were virus before it was damaging? Or did God create all these things after the fall (two creations)? The theology is so full of holes that it puts a swiss cheese at shame.

 

 

As a Christian still I would have told you that due to the fall our bodies changed...something like it.

Actually I once attended a lecture of a guy named Richard Wiskin, don't know if he is known internationally in the Christian circles. He cared about creationism and what he said sounded quite persuasive. He made clear how plants for example became thorns...with examples of in between stages...like plants with sick leaves that formed into thorns...and other stuff like that. So why not while humans sinned God...or no, no, the fruit or course had something within that changed the way human bodies worked with some magic trick God put in there...I mean it is God. He can do everything...

[moanareina]

 

 

What I never understood though was why there was Alzheimer's. Why would God let this happen...I mean a persons mind stop knowing anyone in his life including God...how would that work out in the end?

A guy could live his most of his life in prayer and devotion to the Lord......get Alzheimers a few months before the end and lose his identity and thus his faith and then what. He dies not as a believer, so he goes downstairs!!!!!

 

 

 

 

Yes and even worse, he could become a satanist, haha, oh, but he probably forgets about this too.

[Ouroboros]

 

 

One of our Christians on this forum would probably say God does not make disabled people...it is due to original sin that there are people born with disabilities...

And the same is said about bacterial, viral, and genetic diseases. But why do we have an immune system then? Why did God create blood clothing and white blood cells in Adam and Eve if the diseases were the result of the fall? Did God create it because he knew it would come? What were virus before it was damaging? Or did God create all these things after the fall (two creations)? The theology is so full of holes that it puts a swiss cheese at shame.

 

 

As a Christian still I would have told you that due to the fall our bodies changed...something like it.

 

Yeah. But that means that our bodies "evolved". *shudder* That dreadful word that is so hated in the fundamentalist community.

 

Actually I once attended a lecture of a guy named Richard Wiskin, don't know if he is known internationally in the Christian circles. He cared about creationism and what he said sounded quite persuasive. He made clear how plants for example became thorns...with examples of in between stages...like plants with sick leaves that formed into thorns...and other stuff like that. So why not while humans sinned God...or no, no, the fruit or course had something within that changed the way human bodies worked with some magic trick God put in there...I mean it is God. He can do everything...

Sounds like evolution and genetic change to me. The phenotype comes mostly from the genetic code (genotype). It's not 100% true completely, but to a large extent it is true. The thorn in a plant is defined by one or many genes in the DNA. Those genes came from somewhere. Either God created them (which we have no evidence for or documented observation) or they came to be through evolution (as has been observed many times over).

[Leo]

I've heard some of these creationist ideas before. I really made a Christian angry by dissecting that idea, here is what I said in a nutshell. Keep in mind I'm looking at this situation, as I generally look at things, from a design / materialist perspective:

God created the capacity for all these ills to come about. God created viruses after the fall, they said. So he had to already have created cells beforehand who could be receptive to these viruses. After all, as a supreme engineer, he would have to have conceptualized the success and fail scenarios ahead of time. Design 101.

More baby steps in design 101: He would have had to create the characteristics for carnivorism already in the now-carnivorous species even if they were living on protein-rich vegetation beforehand. That means he already created species ahead of time who were future food items for future carnivores. Again, you cannot escape this. Baby school from a design / engineering perspective.

The capacity for poisonous stings not only in the stinger, but the stung, would have to have already been predefined, even if he throws some mystical switch to set everything in motion. In order to be poisoned, you have to already have a vulnerability, which presumably was beforehand not exploited.

Of course, this all presumes that there was one "magic moment", well two if you count the carnivorous move after the Flood. I don't believe any of it, naturally. But that is what it would take to prefabricate a Fall-friendly environment into which the Fall and its effects could physically happen.

And I only hit on a very few constructs here, and not so in depth.

The take-away is, A systemic design with a failure to Adamic proportions either had a serious flaw in the design, or the platform was designed to account for the failure ahead of time and all subsequent fallout is the work of the designer itself.

Proof 101 that the Bible's contributors definitely did not come from the engineering community.

To my thinking, the Fall is just the stop gap explanation for anything. Kind of like some people you know who blame the government or the corporations or pick-your-favorite group, for every ill in their country.

Granny has a brain tumor and starts cussin'? The fall.

Baby born without lungs? Good thing you didn't abort, but, the Fall.

Wars that aren't won by Christian Powers? The Fall.

Disabilities? The Fall.

Is the designer, who created a fall-friendly platform and environment, in any way responsible? Of course not! or, in the words of Paul, 'God forbid!'

I dare any Xian to try designing a missile or other complex system, doomed to fail by design, and with encoded negative reactions once it fails, and see how far they get trying to blame the system they designed.

meanwhile, as we create artificial intelligences that monitor banking systems, Internet gateways, the Stock Market and other common infrastructures, said artificial intelligences usually have less agency than they have "knowledge" - data and the programming necessary to contextually retrieve it.

Yahweh did it completely backwards from what we now know. Artificial intelligence is in a lot more places than you can imagine. There was a move by a group of religious organizations, I think it was in 2010, to legislate against artificial intelligence. It was stopped because the window has already closed: we are far too systemically dependent on artificially intelligent systems even now for such a ban to be anything but destructive.

I don't remember who, I read about it in a technical science journal most normal people don't bother with.

But I am convinced that what DNA did for evolution, artificial intelligence is going to do against the Christian understanding of free will. I'm not talking fairy tales of talking robots that pass the Turing Test. I'm talking machines that are intelligent enough to do what we need them to do without being constantly babysat, and those machines always have access to more data than they actually use, not less.

I hope this doesn't bore anyone, but here: If a bunch of us software engineers, and some elite computer scientists, created an artificially intelligent Eden simulation, here's what we would inevitably do. I know: I'm breaking what I already said about not creating a fall-friendly environment, but this is just a simulation:

The Adam and Eve avatars would be flagged about the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They would be completely "aware" (in an object-oriented sense) of that tree's fruit and its roles and behaviors. Every term like "die" would be understood fully by the avatars. Also that tree being flagged, the human avatars would by definition know that regenerated versions of themselves would be coded for a serious mutation. Of course they would be coded against accepting that. They would also have some sort of comparative analysis / difference engine to understand the difference between the environment they now have versus the environment they would have after the fruit was consumed. The snake could be coded according to the myth, but the snake's word on the situation would only be comparative to all the remaining data the avatars had on the situation. Even if you coded impulses - something we have not yet done in any meaningful way - the human avatars would be preset in favor of not eating the apple.

I know a lot of what I put here is pseudo and what-if. I get that. But seriously, anyone serious about designing intelligences today design things that look something like what I just described. Sure, you have the simplistic robots coded against collisions in factories. But more often, you have robots who are aware of the temperatures they can handle, and against danger avoidance, doing internal calculations to determine distance of danger, etc. And the more of these systems that are online-based, result from commonly-acquired knowledge banks.

The Yahweh model, and I'm even being generous to dignify it by cdalling it a model, is ass-backwards and stupefyingly ignorant of some basic constructs. If I was going to convince you to allow me to install an artificially intelligent "gatekeeper" on your bank's systems, I'd have to convince you that it knows enough about its environment to make predictions, and even today, to analyze new data from online data systems as they are updated.

By contrast, Adam and Eve had no predictive ability, no differential analysis, no capacity to understand what the consequence was, and were not even advised that there would even be a Fall of Creation. The Fall was just an ad hoc response after the eating of the fruit. Presumably, they thought that was what it meant to die, since Yahweh said that "in the day you eat of it you will surely die."

Agency without knowledge is not agency. Go to any contract court in the U.S. or any other free nation, and see what happens. Someone was mislead by something in the contract, and if they can convince the judge that all the fine print was not forthcoming, that contract is rendered null and void.

Anyway, I realize I kind of hijacked this topic, but the subject of the Fall just made me think of this stuff. And I will stand by what I said: Artificial intelligence will do to the Christian Free Will arguments what DNA in general, and decoding the human genome in particular, has done to the Creationist arguments. Once it quits being eggheads like me telling you about it, and it's you directing it to do things for you, people are going to understand decision-making on a whole new level.

[Leo]

Oh, and thanks for the kind words. I know I tend to ramble, so I'm really appreciative of the kind words that were directed to me.