Altruism proves badness of free will
Bad Arguments for Malice of Free Will
Determinism, guilt
and punishment
Psychology Supports Opposition to Free Will
Will determinism destroy morality?
What If I just Believe in My
Own Freedom?
We might have free will, the power to do good or
evil. Or we might be programmed to feel
free and not be free at all. We might be
programmed machines which are endowed with consciousness. There is no way you can
prove that the latter is not true. There
is no evidence for free will.
Everybody admits that
they cannot pin down what free will is like or how it works showing that there
is no way we can be sure we have responsibility for our actions in the free willist sense (page 36,37,198, Mortal Questions).
Some say that it is also a fact that even if we can refute determinism we still haven’t succeeded in proving free will because we still don’t know if we cause our actions by the use of free will or whether some force that mimics free will and is perhaps free from determinism and is indeterministic is the cause (ibid, page 38).
They mean
that if we don’t have free will some other kind of being might have it. Perhaps there is a force that gives us enough
free will to escape the deterministic forces than control us? With such an idea we have no freedom of our
own though we think we have.
But neither determinism or indeterminism really
teach free will. Determinism says we are
programmed by our environment and past and present to do what we do and
indeterminism makes no sense for it cannot explain how a loving mother is unable
to kill her baby.
When there is no proof that we have free will how could it be right to
teach it? How can it be good to teach
it? It is like a neighbour doing
something bad on the strength of prejudice.
It is slanderous. How could the
doctrine of free will give benefits when its voice is the voice of calumny and
spite? Now you see how caring the free willists really are.
The supporters of free will condition people
to accept their doctrine without making absolutely sure they are right. This should be stopped.
Most people keep up the lie that we are free agents because it gives them
an excuse for wanting their pound of flesh and relishing the delights of hatred
towards evildoers – we all suffer from the conditioning of society that makes
us that vicious. People are eager to
imagine themselves to be morally superior to others through their own free
effort. To say that we are determined is
to say we are all equal in value and worth.
Free will believers argue that even if we
disbelieve in free will we will still find ourselves hating people we see as
obnoxious and evil so free will must be true.
This argument is an admission that belief in free will causes hate. To argue that we must believe in free will
for we will always hate people as if they are free is accusing deniers of free
will of believing in free will but pretending they do not. To argue that we must believe in free will
for we will always hate people as if they are free is saying that we should
increase our hate by accusing them of free will. Even if you hated somebody you believed was
not free at least you would be trying to get the right attitude towards them
and stop hating them for denial of free will is incompatible with hating them.
Their argument fails because most of our
emotions are prejudiced and irrational so free will deniers hating has nothing
to do with disproving free will or showing that they believe in free will. We know puppies don’t have free will but if
one kills your kitten you will hate it.
We do not say that disbelievers in free will will
not hate but we do say that they should not hate at all because hating while
believing the person could not help being hateful is totally illogical. The denial of free will should mean we hate nobody. Free will is an assumption that makes hate
more likely. Free will is not a rational
belief but an emotional one. In other
words it is something you say is true not because you think it is true but
because you wish that it were true. It
is an entirely egotistic (egotism is nasty selfishness while egoism is
selfishness that makes you of benefit to others and yourself) assumption. The
free willists want their doctrine even if it does
great harm and all that matters to them is that they like the doctrine. They do not mind if believing in free will
creates more hate than there would be if less believed in it. They put the doctrine before goodness. They do not mind having a doctrine that
causes many to hate when they could have a doctrine that gives nobody even a
partial excuse or reason for hating. The
free will hypothesis plainly suggests that beliefs matter more than
people. No wonder many religious cults
are nasty pieces of work when they regard free will as a cornerstone of their
theology.
When you do evil it is the good in it that
you are really after. Therefore good and
evil are not opposites but cousins. They
are too close to justify revenge or harsh punishments. They are too close to justify a God sending
you to Hell forever or you believing that God will do that to some people which
is the same as willing him to do it if he wills. There is no point then in believing in free
will unless you want to justify cruel punishments but even it cannot do
that. So you may as well scrap the
doctrine altogether.
Some say that it can’t be wrong to hate a
person who will never die or who will not be harmed by your hate. If you like hating it seems you should.
It might be that
you are valuing yourself instead of that person which
you should do for you are most sure you exist but that is only true if you
believe in free will. You will not be
able to hate a person unless you believe in free will. God implies free will so God is an evil
doctrine. The person who denies free
will hates what a person does but not the person and wishes the imbalance was
fixed. Humanists say you should hate
nobody in case they are good persons who are just disordered and not free.
In the chapter Love and Hate in The
Satanic Bible Anton Szandor LaVey
says that you cannot love everybody and it is crazy to think you can. He says trying to love everybody will make
you a bad judge of character. He says
that you cannot fully love unless you hate.
The main point he made was that if you love everybody those who deserve
your love the most will suffer because you cannot have the energy to love them
all.
What I have to say to this is: the Church
says that to love others is not necessarily to like them. That is just a cop-out for if you don’t like
people you will find it harder to help them and they will suffer. So you have to
make yourself like them in order to love them and people want love to be a warm
thing. Nobody likes cold love. Liking a
person is the best way to help them for it helps them like themselves. It
is good for them. Moreover, you would not be loving yourself by putting yourself through the pain of
helping them when you could help people you like and if you don’t love number
one you love nobody and are just play-acting if you act as if you do. Random accidents that kill happen and you
would rather see somebody you dislike being killed than somebody you like when
it has to be one or the other. The
Church gives you more reasons to dislike people for religion is something
surplus to fight over so the Church is abetting many wrongs. You can fully love without ever having hated
– young children do it all the time.
Humanists believe that we can love and like
everybody and indeed should simply because human evil is not a justification
for hatred but for pity for it is a disorder and not a free act. We are convinced that to command belief in
free will is to command hatred. God
certainly teaches that free will exists which means he must be joking when he
says he wants us to be good for he couldn’t possibly mind if we hate one
another’s guts. The same thing is true
of anybody who tells you that we all have free will. If they want credibility as people who want
to improve the world they have to become missionaries of determinism.
The believers in free will claim that God
gave us free will so that we could decide between good and evil. Since we don’t like evil at all but we do
sometimes like to do not what is good but what is less good it follows that
they are lying. We choose not between
good and evil but between good and less good.
We only do evil because we see some good in it. It is the good we want not the evil. Believers in free will know fine well we
don’t choose between good and evil but they slander us and themselves. It is impossible for us to love evil for its
own sake. To say that when we do wrong
we do evil is to say that we are evil. That
being the case to love us is to love evil.
Nobody can do that. They sweetly
claim you must hate the evil a person does but love the person but that is to
hide this. They are inciting to hatred
and that is that. If Christians really
believe that sinners are not completely worthless they wouldn’t be able to
believe that they go to Hell to sin and suffer forever if they happen to
die.
The idea that free will is a choice between
being good and less good has the following difficulty. If God gave us free will so that we could
love and because love is a voluntary thing then the problem turns into us having
the choice between being loving and less loving. We always love something. The person who commits suicide does so often
because they feel that its more loving to die and stop
burdening the family and friends and society.
So we can’t stop loving so we have no choice to stop loving. We have no free will at all. All we have is the power to put the love in
the wrong direction. To say that when we
are forced to love and that love is voluntary is to be totally incoherent. It is to contradict oneself.
Free will to mean anything must mean the
choice to be lovable or despicable. But
if we are to love our enemies and to love the wicked then we are denying them
their choice. We are not respecting
their free will at all. What we are
doing is making their freedom to do evil or to be despicable pretty
pointless. It is like giving somebody
the freedom to steal and not thinking of them as a thief but as somebody to be
loved. You can’t give somebody this
freedom unless you are willing to think of them as a thief. Sinners must have the right to love
themselves as well no matter what they do if we are to love them. What kind of free will is this that doesn’t
allow the despicable to be despised?
It’s nonsense. They are being
treated as if their evil doesn’t matter.
How can evil matter unless you hate the producer of the evil?
If you can’t treat evil or sin as something
that people do and that people create freely then how can you judge when you
have to focus on the person being lovable when they are not? Is a mother a good judge when the child who
is the apple of her eye does wrong? And
you need to judge if you are seriously a hater of sin or an opponent of evil or
wrongdoing.
If we have free will then we have all willed terrible things. If we could not act out our evil desires, we willed it.
If the
act of will alone could have done the evil thing we would have willed it still. This gives people the right to treat us as
badly as they please for we deserve it whether we repent or not. Repenting is not undoing the crime. Forgiving is not removing the guilt but
acting as if the guilt is not there anymore.
The law would have to put some constraint on us not because we deserve
to be protected but because those who behave the best would have to be enabled
to live and have some comforts. When a
person commits any crime there would be no reason why people could not be
permitted to go all the way in brutality with them and abuse them horrifically. To forbid it would be unjust to the people
who want to hurt them.
Anything
bad that happens a person who deserves to suffer or
die must be treated as punishment if we believe in God who is ultimately
responsible for all good and evil.
Why? Because it is worse to hurt
or intend somebody innocent to be hurt for a good reason than it is to hurt or
want to hurt somebody and make it punishment for the same good reason. In other words, the suffering influenced
should be intended to be punishment if necessary. It would be unjust to condemn a person for
killing another if the other person deserves it even if the guilty party is as
bad himself or herself for then her or his fault lies only in what he or she
won’t do to themselves not in what he or she has done to the victim.
The freedom doctrine opens the floodgates to allowing people to go all the way in brutality but up to a point for whatever we have done we have to get living. So only the most dangerous would be allowed to be lynched and then the number would have to be restricted. Some would say that justice is overridden by the fact that happiness is best so free will is no excuse for attacking anybody and that it is best for legal justice to concern itself with violations of justice that affect society. This creates the problem of what to do when people want to sue for a violation of a law that isn't really fair. The law has crimes that will be punished and there will be no exceptions but much room is left for the individual to take others to the law if they want to for any reason that flouts justice. Perhaps if I have enough money then to make the law let me torture somebody I don’t like to death it has no right to stop me. Free will would allow us to abuse some people who have unusually anti-social and criminal ways to our hearts content. It also implies that the only thing wrong in illegally attacking others is not making sure you don’t get caught.
The evil we do no
matter what it is or what it is like is caused by one motive, the relief of
fear. That is because we have two basic
emotions, love and fear. So the desire
to stop being afraid is the cause of the evil we do meaning that when you
murder or steal ten pence you have the same motive. The bigger the crime the more afraid you are
at some level. (Religion increases fear
so that tells you what it is good for!)
From this it follows that the person taking the ten pence is worse than
the person who murders for the fear was weaker in the former. Free will implies then that small crimes are
the worst. The Humanist answer is that
we should not be interested in giving people what they supposedly earn, in
other words, to hell with free will, but in averting further anti-social
actions so we can oppose big crimes the most.
If we have free will then any wrong we do, we
do it knowing the risk that we could suffer terribly for it. For example, stealing an apple could lead to
a person hating you forever and the hatred could
increase to the degree that the person does something horrible to you. If you are free then it is true to say that
you have consented to whatever bad results come from your action merely by
doing it. Thus you deserve what you get
no matter what it is. It would be evil
to hate or punish the person who cuts off your hand for stealing a sweet as
long as the person does not do it just for that but also because you willed it
before. One person has to come first and
it is not the one who chose the evil.
Incidentally, this proves that the Catholic doctrine of venial sin - sin
that is not bad enough to cost you God’s friendship – is an absurdity. Nobody can mean to commit a mere venial
sin. The answer to those who say that
you cannot punish everyone who sins as you please for we will all be dead is
again answered by saying that the people must vote and legislate for the
limits.
The
notion that we have free will now is bad therefore belief in God is evil. It is a crime against decency to propagate
it.
God would not want us to believe in free will
if he existed and he would not have made us if he did. So the wickedness of subscribing to the
doctrine proves that there is no God.
Religion maintains that if there is no free will we cannot know if
anything is true or false because we are just programmed and unless there is a
God we cannot know if we were programmed right.
The sceptic must be unable to use his free will for he does not believe
and think that he is programmed. This scepticism must be the biggest crime of the lot if
there is no love without free will as the believers say. Thus the doctrine of free will sanctions the
destruction or the incarceration of the sceptic. It is better for a sceptic to be killed than
for him to make a convert even if life is the ultimate right for if life is the
ultimate right then anybody who teaches determinism is preventing people from
knowing this and that is evil. The
determinist is a threat to morality and everything else and even to science and
for the sake of life being the ultimate value he has to be eliminated. But despite our being determined we know that
fire burns us. The fact that we had no
intelligent programmer does not mean we know nothing but only think we do. We learn from experience not from
programming. It is interaction with
reality that produces the programming for heaven’s sake.
Would believing that we chose what we were going to be like before we
came into this world even if we don’t have free will now improve the doctrine? That way we would be indirectly responsible
for the evil we do. But
still as much responsible as we would be directly. It makes it no better.
You could act as if we are (or at least were) free.
You could act as if we are determined.
You
could do both and meet them both half way all the time.
You
could act as if we are all free when somebody murders or does something
terrible and the rest of the time act as if we are not free. You could use the
third option in neutral situations when it does not matter which you choose to
follow.
If
you compromise between the first two options and go for 3 then you would send a person to jail to pay for
their crime as in retribution but make them pay half of that and the rest of
the sentence would be for some other reason that a determinist can agree
with such as rehabilitation. You would have to half-forgive
people. You would be treating them as
victims of fate and the other half of you would be treating them as
wicked.
When
belief in free will is bad and free will is bad then it follows that God was
bad for having given it to us for we cannot love with it and we should be
trying to eliminate it.
Free
will does not exist if the religious idea that we sin all the time is true so
they are calling God cruel and condoning that cruelty.
We have learned that free will implies that we should be altruists. If altruism is bad then belief in free will is
bad.
Altruism
or selflessness is completely evil. You
are more sure that you exist than you are that other
people exist. Therefore you have to put
yourself first and others next – which when done correctly means we behave in a
decent way towards all. Those Altruists who argue that extreme forms of Altruism such as
walking one hundred miles to get somebody some small unimportant item are
hopelessly inconsistent.
Egoism
is harmless. Egoism recognises that you
can only love (love as in feel good about and want to help them not altruistic
love) others to the extent that you can love yourself. Altruism tells you that it is immoral to love
yourself meaning that you are not worth loving - and so it must be evil to look
for help from anybody – and must try to eliminate doing anything to gratify
feelings. You will end up murdering
fifty people and go to jail and not care if you become a real Altruist.
Altruism
is not possible for whatever we do we want to do it under the circumstances and
we do it to feel better in ourselves so it is all selfish and there is no such
thing as sacrifice. The impossibility of altruism proves there is no God
because what would be the point in God letting us suffer if we only do what
pleases ourselves? We cannot love God –
his devotees are self-deceivers - or them either and God is supposed to have
given us free will to see if we will love.
We might as well enjoy ourselves all the time when we can make no real
sacrifices – to sacrifice something for reasons of self-interest is not to make
a sacrifice at all for you want to do it to be better off.
We
know that there can be no free will at all without the ability to practice
Altruism.
If
God gave us life so that we can practice altruism, if altruism is the reason we are given life as the proponents of the God
hypothesis allege, then it follows that a life that is not capable of it is not
important or at least not as valuable as the life of a free agent. Free will fans believe that
beings with free will are the highest beings and that that is one of the
reasons why animals are lower. Some
schizophrenics cannot exercise their alleged free will or be altruistic. Neither can the victims of advanced Alzheimer’s Disease.
Altruism or free will then implies that they are only human in
appearance and should be neglected in favour of the person who is “normal” for
according to Altruism or free will, making a person altruistic is the most
important thing and this cannot be done with them. Altruism or free will’s supporters may say
that the insane people cannot use their free will but it is still there and so
they are equal to the rest of us. They
know fine well that it is not enough just to have the power to have the
faculty. The faculty does not exist
unless it is active. It is as silly as
saying that the power to calculate is enough to make you a mathematician but how
can it be enough when you do not generate any thoughts for then you might as
well not have the power at all. Altruism
or free will is elitist which is one reason for its
popularity. It is no use for
Altruists or free willers to respond that they look
after babies and they have no free will.
Babies have to be cared for because if they were not, there would be no
altruists. They might also say that the
person who has severe Alzheimer’s is still a human being with human
dignity. But they hold that animals do
not have the same dignity as us no matter how similar to us and loving an
animal appears to be. Though an animal has some logic, consciousness and
feeling and so it is hardly honest or altruistic to invent an excuse for
treating a person with few faculties as being superior to an animal. The only real reason could be because the
animal has no free will but they cannot admit that for then their elitism would
be made evident. This is all very
offensive to the victims of mental deterioration and their carers for these
victims have no free will either. But
this is what they are saying no matter how hard they deny it. We can avoid being derogatory to those poor
people with these diseases by denying free will. Humanism can and will campaign for laws to be
made prohibiting belief in free will for they incite to hatred and are
unnecessary. It is slander to say
something bad about somebody that you don’t have to think is true so it should
be the same with free will if the law is to have any credibility.
The
Case Against Altruism refutes the arguments that Egoism is bad
news. We also know that anybody who says
they love the sinner but hate the sin is not telling the truth which gives us a
further reason to discard the doctrine of free will as harmful. When all do wrong how can there be any free will to love anybody? The only answer is to deny that sin or immorality exist but hold that wrongdoing is the symptom of
a sickness.
Beware the rejection of free will as a good doctrine for the wrong
reasons.
Argument: Nobody knows what another person is like inside. You can never tell what a person’s motives are. No two persons are alike. Therefore you are never sure if a criminal meant to offend. The criminal might have thought he or she was doing right. Even if you believe in free will you cannot tell if this person is really evil or misguided. So what is the point of believing in it?
Reply: The argument is too sceptical. It would have
you think that all the evidence can do is show who it is safest to imprison. For instance, it is safer to punish a person
who is found guilty of manslaughter in case he did it intentionally than to
punish a person who was not even there or whose sanity is questionable for
it. But this is an absurd conclusion. The doctrine of free will is no use
for anything but trouble because it is pro-judging and is therefore a charter
for those who practice calumny.
Argument: Any good we do freely, merits an infinite
reward because it shows we would do endless good if we could. The bad we do is a vote for chaos and chaos can do
infinite damage. So it is infinitely bad in intent. So, there is a choice between rewarding a
free agent and punishing him. It would
be right to do the reward for doing the latter would then be an unnecessary
evil. This means that complete anarchy
has to be approved. If you believe in
punishment you can never punish too much but too little.
Reply:
When there is a choice you have to pick the one that suits the circumstances
best. For example, you can’t let people
commit murder so you would have to forget the good they have done and make them
pay but if they tell little lies you cannot do the same. We have to tolerate things that are not
serious. I cannot say punish them for
the attitude is that they should not receive retribution but be hurt to deter
them and others off crime. However, the
deterrence theory is dangerous if taken and supported in isolation.
Determinism, being the denial of free will, takes away anger against persons. It makes you angry about what they do but not them.
When we reward, we do it because of the outward actions of the person. Real rewards focus on the motive far more than the achievement. We still reward achievements when the person admits to making the achievements from an unworthy motive. Determinists could reward then like the free-willists do for the rewards are not the real thing anyway.
We could live without rewards and praise being rational activities for they will happen anyway for people like doing them and getting them. So it is nonsense to think we need free will to make them plausible.
If we believe in free will for the sake of believing in punishment then we are vindictive people indeed.
The law of the land and any other law is for public order and not for rewarding or punishing. That’s all and that is how it should be. People believe in free will because they want to believe in rewards and punishing but this is a mistake. It is better to see a bad person as sick rather than as somebody who is wilfully evil when we can and we always can. Always! It is less harsh and that is why God and free will go hand in hand so belief in God is bad news.
The only reason we revere rewards and punishments, paying people back for what they have freely done, is because of their effects. But we can behave as if we believe these things just for the sake of the effects.
Modern psychology supported by statistics knows that hereditary and
environment and perception – no two people see things the same way – all have a
very heavy influence on the way we behave and since nobody can tell how much
pressure is behind a person’s anti-social acts nobody can really judge how evil
a person is and how long they should pay for it. This has only recently been accepted by the
legal system and has been implemented terribly a lot of the time and it shows
that even if there is free will we have to treat people in a way so close to
the way determinists would do it that we may as well do away with free
will. When people worry about
determinists abolishing morality it is the fate of the punishment principle
that perturbs them – for rewards are not for being good but for the actions you
produce and a real reward rewards the motives as well as the actions - but
punishment is no good but painful rehabilitation is. The Christian book, Free to Do Right,
accepts what modern psychology says (page 105-6). It imagines that the Bible agrees. But then how could anybody go to Hell forever
when they can’t be capable of being fully freely evil but only partly freely
evil meaning that their evil act is the product of hereditary, environment and
perception plus free will?
We
know all believers in free will say that when we do evil there is a part of us
that is insane and deluded which draws us to do the evil thing thinking that it
is good. But perhaps the delusional
element could be stronger in one person than another. Religion agrees for some people are more evil
than others. But what if they are
deluded in such a way that they are not as responsible as we would think or as
we would be if we did the same thing?
The force could work unpredictably and be strong one day and be weak the
next. You do not punish a lunatic for
having attacked a person they believe is out to destroy them. You could send a cold-blooded killer to jail
for life and perhaps judging by the amount of real freedom he had when he did
the evil and which level of evil will it would have required he will not be
able to estimate for himself he should only have been jailed for a year. Free will cannot safeguard the current regime
that has been erected on it at all. It is
a foundation of sand. Perhaps he has to
be punished just in case he is fully guilty.
Why then don’t they do the same with all criminals for whom they make
allowances?
This wonderful
thing called forgiveness that people claim is necessitated by belief in free
will on the grounds that you can’t forgive people unless you see them as freely
having done wrong actually destroys the belief.
It is psychologically impossible to forgive without understanding why
the person did what they did to you first.
They all admit that. But why
should understanding be so important? If
a man kills your mother you will forgive him easier if you understand that he
had an awful childhood and took his anger out on your mother. The reason you could not forgive was because
you saw his action as totally unnecessary and free. Therefore understanding could only help you
to forgive by making you see that that it was more necessary than you think and
not as free as you thought. You have to
partly excuse the person to be able to develop forgiveness. In other words, you have to deny that they
were fully accountable. So when
forgiveness needs understanding to precede it, it follows that forgiveness can
only happen to the degree that you understand.
To fully forgive, to forgive properly, you have to understand
fully. You have to understand that the
person was not to blame in order to forgive.
So you were as bad as the poor killer for blaming him! You will still claim to believe in free will
but your saying he was free when he murdered is just from your lips for you do
not believe that he was free – you are slandering him which is hardly what
people who forgive do. Or you are believing in free will except in his case therefore you
are condoning what he has done while in the previous case you are trying to
condone which does not make you any better.
To condone evil is to give evil pride of place on the throne of life and
to deny yourself any right to condemn what a bad
person has done or to do good.
If free will exists, forgiveness is evil. To be able to live in this world and care for others we have to repudiate free will to get forgiveness out of the way. God and Jesus with their gospel of forgiveness were deceivers. They cannot complain if we do evil because of our faith in them.
There is an argument for free will that says that says that if we don't have free will then the following scenario is true. Two people meet. They talk. One replies to the other. If there is no free will they are not communicating. They are the same as two tape recorders playing in which one recorder is set up as if it answers and speaks to the other. People think about this and they conclude that because we communicate we know that free will is true. The same people who speak to a hypnotised person believe that person is communicating with them and they feel it though they deny that the entranced person has no free will. They feel they communicate with a drunk person who the drink is talking through. Determinists believe that that though we are programmed by our past, it is us communicating with our thoughts, with nature and others that make us what we are. For example, if you think of a dog you are communicating with that image because you sense it and keep it in mind and have feelings because of it and it gives you ideas. Communication does not demand belief in free will.
The scaremongers
maintain that if determinism is true then there is no morality. True.
But who gives a damn when we can still behave like moral free agents
would?
Could
we be happy if nature made people behave in a loving way towards us though they
were not free? Yes we would. We are happiest when we are sure that our
girlfriend or boyfriend or siblings or parents are FORCED by nature herself to
have great loving feelings towards us.
The person who freely does good to us gets less
adulation from us. The parent who wants
to hate the child often cannot.
Determinism
does not advocate treating people as automatons. People are not the same as calculators or
computers. What a person wants should be
respected for they have feelings and feel free and have a right to live
according to their nature when it harms none.
All are priceless therefore equal.
Free
will and determinism both might psyche some people up to behave cruelly. Free will implies that we deserve all we get
for deserve means earning and consenting to good or bad treatment depending on
the nature of the act. Free will does justify hurting those who are
supposedly deserving but determinism does not. It means that whoever hurts you is not doing wrong in
hurting you though it may be wrong for other reasons. It would be wrong to have people hurting
themselves to feel sorry for you if you deserve your troubles. Determinism implies that you are not terrible
if you harm others for it is not your fault but nature’s. There is nothing that we can do if people
abuse the doctrines. People will be
happier without the negativity of judgement that free will brings and when
people are happier they are much less likely to harm. Even for free will to imply that it is better
when there is a choice to hurt a person who is free for he deserves it to some
extent than to hurt a person who is not free which it does imply necessarily, is diabolical.
Free will is just an anarchist philosophy.
Determinism
does say that what will happen will happen. But the determinist cannot say that they
should do evil for they will do it anyway for they can just as easily say they
should do good for they will do good anyway.
Determinists
can be more optimistic and enthusiastic in trying to change people for the
better than indeterminists because they believe that if the right buttons were
pressed people would be healthy, happy and good. The indeterminist just has to hope that they
will change and that is all. Hope is
associated with fear. Free willism justifies fear and fear always leads to violence,
first inner violence against yourself and then against others and often
explodes into outer physical attacks on others for it is violence taking over
you. When anybody says that God does not
want us to be afraid of him they should be laughed at. Free will and religion are about fear and
when they are not they should be. But
determinists hope as well you may say.
But not to the extent that free willists
do.
If most people in your
community believed in determinism or at least that free will might exist but we
should live as if it does not exist then sincere goodness would be
commoner. People know they will be seen
as ill if they do wrong and not as bad.
This will encourage them to do good because they want to do good and not just because good pays which it does in a
society that condemns people who do wrong and hates them. To do good because it pays means you never
know if a person is really good or not or is just doing good to be liked and
make a good impression for their own sake.
If
determinism were as harmful as belief if free will it would still be better to
adopt it instead of the latter just in case we are not free.
It
is certainly not any worse. It is
actually best.
What if I believe that I alone have free will and that others are just biological computers with consciousness and feelings? Well then I will believe that others will do what they do and that makes me accept whatever they do and be free from hate and needing anything from them so it quickens the journey to happiness for me and that improves how I make others feel and makes them better people. I’ll believe that it is up to me alone to improve the world for I alone have free will and can use it to make changes for the better wilfully instead of leaving it to the unpredictable forces of chance to make improvements.
Even if I do
believe all people have free will, I believe that that I should worry only
about what I do with my free will for I have no control over what others do
with theirs. Others are going to do what
they want so why should I worry? Worry
does no good. I should protect myself
and toughen myself up to survive the evil they do me and move on with doing
good. So I have no reason to believe
that others have free will. It does me
good and them good not to even if they have it.
Anyway even if it were bad to deny the freedom of others that would not
mean I should deny it for bad things can be true! So having established then that if we have
free will, then only my personal free will is my concern. I should still
encourage people to use what I think is their free will constructively. It
follows that if the lie told by religion that without belief in free will you will not be
motivated to change believing that whatever will happen will happen is true
then you only need believe in your own free will.
You have no need to believe in anybody else’s and therefore no right to
tell them to believe in free will or to delude them into believing in it. You have no right to desire to punish
them. The lie is bad because it is
changing our feelings through learning and intelligence that encourages us not
belief in free will and learning always changes us forever. To believe that I alone can be sure I have
free will and that others may not have it and should be treated as unfree beings by me will have the same results and
advantages. The God belief and the Bible
forbid me to do others the favour of thinking they do not have free will and it
doing so they forbid me to love myself and so they don’t care about free will
after all (for how could they when I can’t love myself?) and God only gave it
to me to torment me.
If I see a need for the dogma of free will that need is my concern only. I cannot make others believe in free will so
I just explain what free will is and it is up to them to decide if they have it
or not. I should believe that I am free
but nobody else is in order to avoid the bad effects and side effects of
believing in free will and retain the advantages for myself.
It is crazy to be dogmatic about free will when it is up to each
individual to decide if they agree with the doctrine that we have free will or
not. What matters is the motive that is
behind your actions not if your action was free or not as long as something
like schizophrenia or some other mental disorder is not warping your
brain. We know from experience that good
motives make you a better person for they draw you towards goodness in the
future by making you learn a habit even if the habit is just to be a bit
nicer. Free willists
themselves pay attention on motives but not enough.
Ultimately, it is because they want to say the motives are controlled by
us and not us by them that the idea of free will even takes their fancy.
Conclusion
Belief in free will is inexcusable
if it does harm. Proponents cannot say
that it is justified because it is true. And that is because there is no proof for it.
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A CONCISE
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CONTROVERSY: THE
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FREE TO DO RIGHT,
David Field IVP
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THE SATANIC
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14/10/2008