FREE WILL DEFENCE DENIES THE REAL MOTIVE WHY WE ACT - IT IS FOR GRATIFICATION
The Church says God gave us the gift of free will so that we could face the choice between evil and good and choose good.
Now as verifiability is part of goodness, a big part, and as the Church says there can be no justice or love if there is no truth, we have a problem.
We cannot go back even one second to test if we choose x that we can choose y instead.
Free will if it is real is not really about real goodness. It is about what you want to be goodness. It is a necessary evil at best. It is not something we should celebrate as a gift from God.
Worse, the Church says we do harm and evil not God. This is how it manages to say that God is good though the world he has made has gone wrong. This is the Free Will Defence and it is a charter for self-righteous hypocrisy. It is seriously risking making excuses for evil and suffering in order to maintain God. We tend to condone evils. But that aside, it is also inherently an excuse in its way.
Free will is supposed to enable us to love and love is sacrifice.
But you know the world will not give you exactly what you want
when you want so sacrifice trains you for that. It dulls the
pain. So sacrifice is an oxymoron. You get a reward from
it. You get a reward from thinking you are free for that makes
you feel in control. That is why throwing yourself on a
grenade for your soldier comrades has nothing to do with proving you
are other-interested. It is self-interest in a less obvious
form. Plus if we are so great why are the evidences such as
the grenade episode so rare?
When I sacrifice, I do what I want to do under the circumstances. Therefore it
is not a sacrifice for I am after gratification. I crave the pleasure and
nothing else. The person who does things for God or mammon is really doing them
for herself or himself. The will does not deliberately choose good or evil but
only goes for gratification that happens to be good or evil. A person's
programming can be changed by the environment we create so that he or she will
go after gratification that is wholesome for others as well which explains why
some people are good though they used to practice evil. This disproves the free
will defence for if sacrifice doesn't really happen as regards motives then it
follows that we cannot give our will to God for it is focused on ourselves.
But it will be objected as follows.
"Though we are principally after gratification that we still know if what we are doing is evil or if it is good so I should not say that the free will defence is proven false by this fact."
But if I am principally
after gratification then that is the reason I am doing what I do and the good
and evil thing is only like a side-effect. Also, when gratification is so
powerful and is the cause of my good and evil actions and thoughts then it
follows that if it is compatible with free will then God should make sure that
it leads me only to do good. When it runs my life anyway it should run it for
the sake of good. But when all my will really goes for is gratification it is
nonsense to say I have free will. If all I do is to please myself then there is
no point in God giving me the will and power to hurt other people for free will
presupposes the power to please God or to displease him but I am not concerned
about him at all. I am concerned about how I feel and not him. The doctrine of
God implies that free will is true so what Christians are doing is assuming that
God exists and bending the evidence to fit it instead of making sure free will
is possible first. This is only about God and not people. They should not be
willing to hurt people over a belief.
If you believe in God you have to deny that gratification is what free will is
all about. You have to say that good is self-denial, doing good for others and
for God and not giving a toss about yourself and this good must hurt yourself.
You have to believe that love is sacrifice so suffering is to be sought and when
it is found it is to be welcomed. God gave us free will for his own sake not
ours for would you complain if you didn't have it but thought you did and were
happy all the time? Too many Christians because of these corrupting doctrines
look at human suffering and instead of having real compassion they fake it and
just focus on how they are going to salvage God's good name. That is callous
when he only did it for himself.
If the will is just after gratification then how can it be insane for one to do
evil for it is sane to look for gratification and evil is just another form of
it? The answer is that the gratification sought in evil is insane for evil
breeds evil and pain for you. It is because it is an insane way to look for
pleasure that it is insane. You think evil will make you happy but it cannot.
The good commanded by religion is really evil for real happiness comes from
loving yourself and putting yourself at the centre of your universe a view that
religion bitterly opposes.
And experience-wise, your joy and sorrow are so personal that
they are like a universe to you. We know in theory we are not
the centre but that is irrelevant. Our brains bypass that.
They make each one the centre.
