Free will doctrine arises from our selfishness
Christianity is famous for saying that God cleans your sins and offers you eternal life and there is nothing you can do but just accept the gift. You cannot earn salvation or deserve it and in fact you don't. This looks humble right? Paul wrote time and time again that the plan of salvation gave you nothing to boast about. Now we know that you can be proud to be nothing. That is just another form of self-absorption. So there is no guarantee that the the doctrine innoculates against boastfulness. You may boast to yourself and to another. And a gift is only a gift for it regards you as amazing despite the fact that you are not. There is no real humility in any of it.
Free will supposedly is a gift from God to give you dignity and to learn you to use it wisely. It makes you feel like a mini-god that you control all in your mini-universe, the cosmos in your head and immediate vicinity. So it is at least a low level self-deification and is not really capable of caring about a God for real. If free will is to be validated then the religious version is total nonsense. There can be no selflessness then before a God.
Religion plays the following trick. "Just because I don't think I am God and don't think I can command the universe I am humble." But control is control. You can think you are God of your mini-universe, the room you never leave with all the things you want. If you were the creator that might be all you would make. So you don't have to aspire to run all creation or make an unimaginably big universe to self-deify and be riddled with pride. Everybody controls something and takes pride in it. Pride is pride. Our hypocrisy does not like obvious pride so that is how we get away with it.
A species that thinks it has free will and uses it selfishly has no right claiming that free will is a gift from God by which we bring love into the world and that it is worth the risk of harm and the risk of us blowing the world to pieces in a nuclear war. If we have free will it is nothing to crow about considering the use it is nearly always put to.
Free will cannot be called a gift until we
get to the last day and look back. The reason is if somebody
uses it to destroy nearly all life and make the world un-liveable
then it is clearly not to be called a gift. Calling it a gift makes
us feel it will never get that bad. Thus it has a dangerous
placebo effect. People felt that way when rumours of the
Holocaust got out. Then nothing was done until it was too
late.
If we lie to ourselves as much as some
authorities say, if we distort our memories every time we recall
them, then clearly we let our desires pollute our reason and logic.
Our free will - if we have it - is not so much about God as about
ourselves. The Church then when it claims that we are healed of the
bias towards self-interest at baptism is fibbing and deluding. We
did not create the bias but God did so the free will excuse for God
letting us do evil does not hold water. Our bias to be selfish
instead of serving God is stronger than the bias to be selfish and
trample on the needs of others. All selfish people do good just
because they want to impress others and feel good. They may or may
not engage in anti-social activity up to a point. Nobody can be
completely and always harmful. If we help one another that does not
prove that we are unselfish. We are selfish in every sense simply
because we need to engage with others and protect ourselves and
improve our lives. We do not feel the same need or pressure to worry
about God.
God might think free will is worth all the
suffering in the universe but would we think that? We would put
limits on it. We do not have the right to condone all that suffering
being allowed just to please God. God is a theory but the people who
bleed are real.
Those who worship God really worship
themselves. Great is the vulgar selfishness in the person who cannot
worship God but who says, "He is right to let so much evil and
rottenness happen for he gave us free will and it is a priceless gift
that is worth all the hassle it has caused." The atheist avoids that
evil and yet much religion finds the atheist despicable.
Read the works of the philosopher of religion Brian Davies. He believes in God but says that the notion that free will means we can go against God is wrong. We supposedly have this freedom BECAUSE of God and not in spite of him. So God is somehow responsible for everything you do. A pair who plant bombs seem to think that what they are doing is not a sin or much of a sin for God is enabling them. For a God who is bigger than evil and against it he is not doing much about it. Their personal faith in God was to blame even if their religious faith can be exonerated.
The notion that God is at work even as we sin for he is bigger than our sin is not the same as saying he condones and agrees with what we do. But it is too close. Don't put the nuclear button among the concrete blocks you are carrying around your development. Human nature is going to read it as being no big deal. Human nature does not need a thin line like that to cross. It will use an excuse. Even if it does not do it deliberately, the placebo in the brain will do it for it.
