SHOULD FREE WILL BE CELEBRATED AS A GIFT FROM GOD?

Religion says that love is voluntary. Only a being with free will to do extreme evil can give love. So they say God gave us all this freedom we have but we abused it of our own volition and so he is not to blame for evil. This reasoning is called the free will defence or the freedom defence. It is meant to clear God of the blame for evil.

It is just an excuse for we believe that an act does not have to be totally voluntary but just voluntary enough so there is no excuse for how bad God lets us be. I mean we should never assume a person ever does a completely intentional immoral thing. It is kinder to hold that they are not fully responsible and we don't need the concept of full responsibility. It does not serve any practical use.

Clearing God of the blame does not automatically mean that God is good or worthy of being loved. So man is blamed for evil in order to make it possible to hold that God is good. It is evil to blame man when all you get at the end of it is a God who might be good not who definitely is good.

Nobody has the right to accuse humanity of being to blame for all the suffering that happens. If humanity causes the suffering it does not follow that it is to blame. Religion does not worry about innocent until proven guilty as much as it pretends.

If we have to do this evil to people in order to defend God, it makes no sense to say that God gives us the gift of free will so that we might use it to love.

Suppose God did have to respect our free will and not his own. That would make this respect a necessary evil and not something to be celebrated.

Let us put aside the fact that by default any free will is too much. Let us pretend there can be enough free will - that there should not be too much.

The doctrine that we have free will to use it to be good is not as sweet as it seems. It gives the doctrine its false sheen of beauty. We do not have free will to avoid necessary evil but only unnecessary evil. If you have to endure the dentist's drill to save your tooth you do not have free will to get it done another way. Everything involves some unnecessary evil. Free will might not be intentionally bad in any sense but in so far as it involves necessary evil it is evil. There is no free will to get completely away from evil.

Responsibility makes free will super-restricted

If you have free will, you did whatever you did in the past using it. You were responsible then but not now. You are not responsible for the past now. You are only responsible for the present and the future. You are not responsible for what anybody else does unless you force them to do it. So we are not very free at all. If you want to call that freedom it means free will only covers a few seconds at a time. You are still in a framework over which you have barely any control. Your feeling of control is delusion.

You fear admitting that a murder is no longer the murderer's fault. You use free will as an excuse for punishing him. Both free will and the denial of free will still do not give you the right to judge that you crave so badly.