IF YOU GIVE A GIFT THE GIFT IS NO LONGER YOUR BUSINESS
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.