IF YOU GIVE A GIFT THE GIFT IS NO LONGER YOUR BUSINESS so IT IS NONE OF GOD'S BUSINESS HOW WE USE HIS GIFT OF FREE WILL
Let us assume that the Christian reasoning that if God made all things and we have free will then it is a gift from God is valid and correct.In fact if free will is really a gift then it is no longer any business of God's what we do with it. Yet religion claims that it is his business and lays down thousands of laws supposedly enacted by God.
Religion says that free will is necessary to make love possible. Unless we freely become love, we cannot really love but merely go through the motions. Free will is about what we become and is not, strictly speaking, about what we do. What we do speaks of what we are. Evil deeds do not make you evil. You do them because you already are evil. The doctrine then that we are to love sinners and hate sins contradicts the respect that is due to free will if we have it. You have to hate the sin with the sinner for the sinner is the sin. If free will is a gift, free will is only a gift for the loving and a curse for the unloving and those who encounter them for they must hate them.
God supposedly made all things, and made us because he wanted us to enjoy everlasting happiness in a relationship with him. But this is nonsense for God himself cannot have free will. The Church says that God has nothing evil in him at all and no potential to be evil. So he cannot have free will. He cannot really love. A God that does not have free will cannot give free will as a gift to us. If such a God has made us then clearly what we want matters and what he wants does not for his wants are not free. They are not really his wants but his programming. We are better than God if we are free.
If God has free will, his free will comes before ours for it is impossible for everybody to be given full freedom. Your freedom is limited by the freedom of others. Thus there is no excuse for God letting us do evil against his will. Yet religion says he has a reason for letting us do grave harm and that it is all our fault and not his at all.
My free will would be about me and not about God. Free will would imply that atheism is true.
Religion blames us not God for evil for God is said to be all-good and all-powerful. It says he gave us the gift of free will and we abused it. This is the so-called free will defence - it claims to explain how an all good God can allow evil things to happen though he has the power to stop them.
If we have free will, then we have it by luck. We do not have it so that we may love with it. Indeed, if it has no purpose and we give it one that makes us far better people than if we have it from God for the purpose of being able to love. Religion is only demeaning us with its nonsense that it's a gift from God and intended to enable us to love.
We feel pleasure to some degree all the time for we cannot stop ourselves having likes. Even if we have free will we cannot control this. Therefore there is no reason why that pleasure should not be magnified and made permanent in us.
It is said, "To believe that we don’t have free will is to deny that we have any value. You can’t feel good about yourself if you truly believe your good works are just the product of programming not your own free agency. If you feel good about yourself then you believe in free will and can use your free will better for good. We need to believe in free will." What planet are some philosophers on? We don't get motivated to help others by our belief in free will. We help them for we feel happy enough to share our happiness with them and bring them into it.
Believers in free will say it is the faculty that allows us to freely choose to serve the self or to sacrifice your needs for others. But sacrificial love is only important to us in so far as it develops happiness in the practitioner so it can be done without and isn't really sacrifice then anyway. If you want to believe in God you have to claim that free will is important in so far as it hurts the person exercising it for that is the only real sacrifice and the freedom defence is about God calling us into sacrificing what we want to do for the sake of what is right. So who is it good for? It is good only for God if people doing good freely means so much to him. He is thinking only of himself. He shouldn't have made us at all if we are free. The defence does not manage to convince us that God is perfect or lovable or even likeable. The belief of antichrists that the God of Jesus is the God of the slaves is vindicated except that sometimes the masters on earth think something of the slaves.
The free will defence contradicts the fact that the human person is the absolute value. It is obvious that human happiness is our main goal. If people should be happy then it follows that they are more important than happiness. Do not say they are not as important as happiness for that would mean you could kill them to maximise happiness. It is because they are persons that they should be happy so persons are of more value meaning that there is nothing more precious.
It follows from this that it is better not to have the free will to kill. If God has given us that kind of free will then God denies that human life is so important. Our logic tells us that the respect for the supreme value of life sums up what good is and how it differs from evil. It is the essence of what doing right is. God then is a concept that demands that we be amoralists or that we accept that God has the right to arbitrarily decide what he wants us to consider to be good and we have no business disagreeing with him. To hold that free will is a choice between being life-affirming and life-hating is crazy when God has empowered us to kill by failing to put force-fields around people that prevent them from killing one another.
Every moment of life is important when life is of absolute importance. But we lose so much of our life for we forget most of the things we do and have done. God giving us such a bad memory implies that life is not the absolute value and that it is blasphemy to say it is. The Church says we will get our memories back at the resurrection. But as there is no need for them in Heaven then why should we?
The Church pretends to believe that life is the absolute value and yet it says that you should bar a man with heart-trouble who needs your telephone from the house if he would steal if your back was turned instead of telling you to let him come in for his life is so valuable and it is better to be robbed than for his life to be put at risk for he could need to call the doctor to save his life anytime. They say God set their standards so they are accusing him of being a hypocrite - hypocrisy then is worse when they commit it than when an Atheist commits it. The Atheist does not say that hypocrisy is right but if God is a hypocrite and you believe in him you have to say he is right so that is worse than just being a mere hypocrite. Believing in God gives evil more sanction.
The Church says that when anybody hurts me I should agree that I deserve it totally but still hold that it is wrong which is the paradox of holding that it was undeserved and yet my due (page 101, Moral Philosophy). The Church always uses paradox to cover up its incoherent and two-faced doctrines. In practice, if you believe you deserve to be hurt you will not resist the attacker and will feel guilty about reporting him to the police or defending yourself. The Church has been famous for producing doormats. Deserve means you asked for the bad consequences of your actions. It also means you earn them. The principal element is asking for you earned because you asked. The doctrine that evil is our fault is simply saying that we deserve to be exposed to all the evil we meet or can meet for we have asked for it. It could lead to terrible harm. I repeat, because it says we asked and asked is the main constituent of deserving, it is accusing us of deserving all we get and more. To have compassion then would be saying the evil should not be happening which means you deny people should get what they deserve which means that God was evil for letting us stay in this evil world instead of putting us on a better one. It is saying the freedom defence is itself hard faced and evil. If the freedom to harm yourself should be respected then not giving you what you deserve would be degrading you and cursing your freedom. The freedom defence cannot be used as a basis for compassion but only as a basis for pretend compassion for you cannot be compassionate towards people you believe deserve to suffer.
Prayer is said to imply that we must try to do God's will and to do it with a sense of personal responsibility. Keith Ward states the doctrine that we take responsibility for doing God's will (page 209, More than Matter? Keith Ward, Lion, 2010). But if God is creator of all he creates my power to decide and enables it all the way. Suppose a person existed who has no will at all and just lies there. Doctors come along and insert a device to enable her to make decisions. She will then feel responsible for what she does. But is she really when it is the device that is doing this not her? God is even more involved than any doctor could be for it is said that everything returns to nothing if he should hypothetically die. He sustains all things. So, God is responsible more than I am. Or it is more logical to say that I am not responsible at all. There is a better sense of personal responsibility if a person feels that his responsibility is entirely his doing not God's and that he self-creates it. In other words, he would need to be an atheist and theorise that somehow we make ourselves and choose our circumstances though it may seem we don't. Prayer undermines responsibility a lot if not completely. You cannot have responsibility unless you create it yourself as if you are God.
Responsibility implies sufficient freedom, knowledge of what one is doing and the moral sensibility to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong (Ward, page 209, ibid). Freely understanding what one is doing and one's moral options would be another way to put this. It is what responsibility is all about.
There is no real freedom to choose unless there is sufficient understanding. If a person does not understand that killing other people is bad, then he will only get a manslaughter conviction under the law. He is not guilty of murder. But nobody can know if you really understand what you say you understand. If a person says, "I committed murder and I understood what I was doing" you cannot prove that they are telling the truth or just saying what they know others expect them to say. They might not really understand and this could be down to some defect in their biological or or genetic or psychological makeup. Or perhaps they are super-intelligent in a few things and realise that morality is hypocritical rubbish. Or perhaps they made errors of judgment that led them into murdering. People who claim to love sinners and hate sins prove that they are hypocrites for they say that part of loving sinners is refusing to judge how actually responsible for evil they are for nobody can know that. And the same people agree with burglars and murderers going to jail and being accused of fully responsible.
In so far as you do not understand what you are doing, you are not free. There is no real point in believing in free will for the theory of free will lets you down in the most important matters.
It is a very serious matter if John murders his wife and you blame John for it when if there is a God he may have his share of the blame too for letting it happen. John's crime is less of a crime than it would be if there is no God and he has free will. That is because he only sins within boundaries set by God. God enables him to murder and is supposedly right to do this for it is for a good purpose. You do not have the right to accuse a person if you have evidence that there is a God who may be blamed as well. Or blamed even more! Perhaps God is still innocent but you cannot prove it. Then should God be innocent until proven guilty? Certainly not!
Free will or responsibility contradicts belief in God. They are only twisted to make them fit the belief. They are bad things if there is a God or you think there is for that impacts on your intentions.
