In stage entertainment, deus ex machina is using ropes to make someone appear to fly. Later on, it came to refer to a place in a story where the king, god, fairies, whichever morally elevated authority saved the day almost out of nowhere. Now it has come to refer to things being run by an authority.

I mean it in the sense that ultimate reality runs our lives.

that's sounding a lot like deism there, bubba.

no, deism doesn't believe in an interventionist God.

okay.....interesting.....so it can almost be related to "fate"?

not at all, we make all our own decisions, we have will, but it isn't free. free will is earned. but it is possible, if fate were real, that would mean free will could never exist.

agreed....but how is free-will earned?

self-actualization.

As Samantha Carter said on Stargate's episode Prodigy.

"What we see in our world is an effect preceeding a cause...is actually a cause preceeding an effect in an alternate reality."

cause and effect...blah blah blah.....damn behovrist

self-actualization earns us free-will...........okay, i can see it......sentience leading to free-will would make sense.....but that means that creatures (such as cows, or a human without an emprical observation whatsoever, has no free-will cuz they have no sentience.....)

i don't see a problem with this, but am interested into what this means.......it means, that free-will exists, and at the same time it doesn't exist.....interesting

It means you make your own decisions, but you will only ever make the decisions that you will make, it can't be any other way, until you are much older, much wiser and know yourself much more thoroughly.

eh?

i don't know if i buy that?

i mean....what about nurture vs' nature....that sort of ordeal?

and what happens when we get older and wiser? who or what makes our decisions then?

well, it really depends. self-knowledge means you know how you work, how you react to things, you know your issues and your problems, you know why you make the decisions you make. being old doesn't automatically make that happen, but it does mean you've had more time to think about it.

people with relatively little self-knowledge don't know why they make the decisions they make and they are slaves to their own fucked up psychology. even when they think their actions through, they're not thinking themselves through. these people are relatively predictable, or at least predictably unpredictable.

on whose authority do you claim this?

you don't have to believe me. it's just my observation.

Mmmm chicken.

dammit... now i'm hungry

no, no.....i totally can agree with that Guy.....

this is the only part I agree with Lanthros on here:

"God made humans, humans made gods..."

Thats a total misquote and totaly defeats the purpouse of the thread. I must add though to all posts here a good solid example is the immunity through disbelief scenario. Collectively if people stoped believing in a god (not God since that is grammaticly and technicaly wrong being as god is NOT a name its a job description PERIOD) then eventualy said god WILL lose power over those people. Why? Because a stubourn nonbeliever will never attribute anything to the existence of a god reguardless of the strength of those happenings. The greatest power any god can have over people is peoples beliefs in those gods. Existing in a physical reality or not through that and that alone they shape our lives.

*claps*