DEVOTION TO FREE WILL MEANS MY DEVOTION TO MINE BUT IT IS NOT ABOUT ME

God supposedly gave us the gift of free will and we abuse it which is why evil and suffering are so rife.  In other words, he gives us free will to destroy that of others if we so choose.  That is an odd idea.  Even if this does not tell you to imagine your will is so special, what if that is in fact what we are all doing when we love the idea of free will so much?

If God is good he is supposed to tolerate evil for the sake of overcoming it and bringing a greater good out of it. Everything we do affects others. At times people are freer than others. So why can't he tamper with the free will of x for the purpose of maximising the freedom of others? If nobody can be perfectly happy all the time why should we all be perfectly free all the time?

Nobody then should be allowed to do too much harm. To say that is against free will is nonsense for the alternative is far more against it. Remember how many people Stalin robbed of free will?

If you are a Hitler do you really want to tell yourself that your free will is that special?

What if we only think, not know, we have free will?

We should not be saying that God is faultless for giving us free will just because we think we have free will. Thinking you have it is not enough when you look at the vast consequences. And the consequences are another matter. Do the good ones make the bad ones tolerable or right? What you should do is work out if having it even if it can be abused or is abused is for the best in the full picture. This means you have to see the good results and work your way back to free will. You look at the good. Then you decide if free will despite its misuse and the risk of evil would have been worth it in order to cause this good. Then and only then can you argue that we have free will AND then you can also argue that it gets God off the hook. Only then can you call yourself decent in heart.

All about God?

If God exists he deserves all our love for being perfect he would do infinite good for us. Now, that means we must love him for his own sake and love others entirely for his sake. This means that goodness is one thing only, loving God and nothing else. Religion claims that you can do that in mental prayer, being aware of the presence of God. If so, then it is better than helping others for the latter is distracting. If all we are here for is to love God then nobody should be suffering. Though it is true that love is sacrifice, I can love without sacrifice if I cannot sacrifice and it is not my fault. You are good if you would go among the poor to feed them and give your life for them even if you are locked up in a dungeon. Even if love is sacrifice, God should do without demanding sacrificial love from us. He should refrain in order for us to love by focusing on his presence instead.

If God made us to love him alone or pick him then he does not need to enable us to do harm as in causing people to suffer. But isn't love sacrifice? Yes, but what use is sacrifice when its pain distracts from God? God would prefer you to be aware of him and will only good to him than to have you unable to do this in suffering though he will allow enough of pain for you to make sacrifices and do good. The worse the suffering the less it can do to bring you to God in selflessness. The Christian answer to this is that as long as you try and would think of God despite the distraction the distraction does not prevent you pleasing God for effort is what counts when you can't be successful. It is impossible to believe that a child could love his mother if he gave her a pill that stopped her thinking of him! She would love if she could but what use would that be?

Fear and sin

If fear is the root of all sin/evil like all agree these days then why has God made us so vulnerable with the result that fear and evil increase? He could let us hurt one another while building us in such a way that killing would be very difficult if not impossible. Things could be less frightening than they are. When the person is the absolute value, it follows that human life is more precious even than virtue yet this God has enabled us to kill each other. Killing shows that any attempt to justify God and his lousy plan is doomed to failure.

What if all sins are equal?

All sin is equally bad if there is a God who hates sin infinitely and therefore the same for he is infinitely good. If there is a God then it follows that it is as morally bad to commit murder as it is to wish some small evil on somebody. When the two are the same, God should not let us do any harm for he does not need to. Or at least he should not let us be capable of so much harm.

Compassionate people contend that God should not let us go too far in working evil. They say the most important thing is that we choose between evil and good which we can do if God will only let us do the less harmful things. They are right - if it is true that we need to inflict evil at all.

Whether I choose to commit murder or to steal a sweet I am choosing evil. The murder and the theft are only the form of what I am choosing - another reason why it makes no sense to say that if I can sin there are different degrees of sin. There are different degrees of damage that I do, but there are no degrees where what evil says about me is concerned. So it does not matter if God forces me to be unable to choose murder as long as he lets me be able to choose the almost harmless sin for I am choosing evil. God can limit free will and still let us make our own decision about if we are going to be on the side of good or evil. There is another reason why a "small" sin is all we need to be able to commit if we need it at all. To choose one small evil is to will all evil that could be for it is telling evil that it should exist and be availed of. And there is another. All sin is infinite in malice for God despises it as much. These two points show that there is no reason why sin cannot be limited to acts that harm no person on earth.

What about God's will?

Blaming humanity’s free will not God's does not work for God is more important than us and is perfectly good and if he has free will it comes first. To say God who can stop evil should not because it would be tampering with our free will is saying that though there is a choice between our free will and his, his does not come first. This is a foolish doctrine. We are told that he cannot use his free will when he has to let us use ours. It is not an equal contest. It is either the best will or the not so best that has to be put first and so it should be the best. It should be God's. It is not that God won't respect our free will - it is just not possible and even God cannot do the impossible.

God does not need our goodness

If God is infinite good then what does he want us to freely do good for?

He loves good. If he gives us free will it is so that we can be good freely. It is about the good.

He has all the good he needs when he has infinite good in himself. Religion says that it is because goodness is so valuable that it is something that should be freely chosen (page 84, The Truth of Christianity) which makes no sense. Why? Because it really says that good + some evil (good that is partly evil) is the best good instead of having people who are the same as us and think they are free but are not and who cannot do anything other than be happy and be good.

Religion implies that goodness is not happiness because if God made us instinctively see that goodness is in our best interest we would do it better. Most of the time we mistake the good for the best. We even mistake the worst for the best.

If God wants goodness then he shouldn't because he has infinite goodness of his own so he has no business looking for ours.

Evil is not worth the chance we will be good for our goodness is not that important if there is a God!

Free will argument opposes equal dignity for all

It is absurd and inhuman to say that a person has the right to be allowed to try to take away the free will of another by killing them for the sake of his or her own free will. That is really saying the killer is more precious than the killed for the killer's will is more important.

The Christians may even declare that a person without the ability to do wrong is inferior to one that has this power (page 8, 84, The Truth of Christianity) which is an outrageous, and some would add bigoted, thing to say. They are compelled to take that stance when they say God is right to let us sin. This automatically says that you should prefer the murder of a baby rather than the murder of an adult for the adult has free will and the baby has not. And that you should prefer to see a person in the final stages of Alzheimer's Disease killed than a person who has their faculties. We have to be fascists to support this dreadful conception of God.

To suggest that we should have the free will to do the evil that we do even when it is evil of such great proportion that millions die horribly is callous. It is implying that the paralytic who cannot do harm is less of a valuable person than the person who can do harm or has less rights than an ordinary person for the freedom to carry out evil is more limited in a paralysed person.

The argument that we should be so free that we can torture millions to death makes no sense unless you presuppose that we cannot have our full or proper dignity as persons unless we are free to do terrible things. But only a few of us are that free even if we can go about well. It insinuates that the likes of Hitler are better than any of us for they have the power to be totally free to do terrible evil. They are the ones to be treated as superior beings and sort of worshipped. How a God could possibly expect anybody to love with free will is such a mistaken thought that there could not possibly be a God and who in their right mind would want one to exist? A philosophy that claims we should be able to hurt others terribly is just inhuman and could not possibly expect anybody to take morality or right and wrong seriously.

Those who hold that human beings are just conscious but programmed entities are accused of reducing them to machines. They are accused of refusing to admit the full dignity of human beings as free agents. The critics say they have a higher view of human beings than us who deny free will. This is all untrue. If we are programmed then there is nothing wrong with saying we are and we are not smearing human beings. Where no smearing takes place no degradation of dignity takes place. What is degrading is to give people a higher dignity than they have which is what the free willists are trying to do. It is not dignified to tell a pauper he is the king. And yet the free willists fail for free will does not enhance dignity but detracts from it. We are not reducing human beings to machines - they are not for they are conscious beings and deserve all the happiness we can give them.

We feel we have dignity and that is enough for us. We feel that dignity whether we have free will or not. If we have free will and do not have that sense of dignity then free will is good for nothing.

Religion cares more about saying, "Okay we feel dignified. But we want to hold that a person has dignity if they have free will. It is about theory. That is what matters." That is twisted.

FINALLY

To want to believe I have free will is about me wanting to feel powerful and special.  I even want it to matter more than God's free will!  When I humble myself I am using my will to feel special.  That is how it works.