The Free Will argument tells us that we should not be conscious beings
who are living in a hedonistic paradise served by a loving God who protects us
from all danger by a force field or whatever.
That would allow us to have free will but do no serious harm to
others. And the argument is even more
against the idea that we should be happy beings whose wills are not our own but
feel like our own but which are operated by God unknown to us. Love is a voluntary thing. And according to them, it is better to be
able to love which means having free will, and according to them again, to be
able to harm than to be a tremendously happy person who is not free and not
capable of love.
In that world where we think we are free and all is nice and pleasant we would feel free like we do now but we would be immensely happy and God would have programmed us to be good. We could feel free in that world just like we feel free under the influence of drink in this one though we are not. That would not require deception for they say that unbelievers in free will and who do not feel they are free still have free will so it would be possible then for people in that world to feel free and not be free and know or believe they are not free. And anyway God has rigged creation as it is to be often deceptive so he can deceive and we could say he has no choice but to deceive in the hypothetical world of pleasure and happiness and this is not lying for he has no choice but to hide the truth. If God loves babies he can love the inhabitants of the imaginary world because neither can use free will. And he could give us free will but prevent us abusing it and we would not abuse it anyway and lose the happiness he gives. He could prevent abuse by force if necessary.
Theologians warn the world
that Atheists have made the error of assuming that God should make us all happy
and that atheists conclude from the reality of suffering that there is no
God. But would that be an error?
The quick answer is that if God's love is perfect then when he loves a
person that love is more important and valuable than any love that person could
manage. For him to make a person so that
that person could love would be crazy when his purpose is to make more love for
his own love does the trick. If God
makes people like us who according to him are not much good for anything but
sinning then he is reducing his own love for loving the sinner and hating the
sin is impossible. He can only do what
increases love and making people who are so prone to sin is not doing that.
Theists say that love as in selflessly willing good is good and since
love is not happiness love is better than happiness. This kind of love does not exist and is not
possible so religion and God condemn everything we do when they say that. Love the emotion gives the reward of pleasure
and satisfies some need in us so it is never selfless.
But is this selfless love better than happiness?
If it is then it is better to murder a baby than an adult for the baby
can't love. To say the baby will be able
to love if it is allowed to live is not an
answer.
Happiness is self-evidently good and love is not. Even happiness that rejoices in evil is good
and it is just the motives and circumstances that are bad. Love looks bad for it demands pain and
suffering and seeks to be an example of such to the people "helped".
Love, as theists understand it, is not good just because it is sacrifice. God
of course disagrees. So he could have a free being should be brought into
existence just to be unhappy and sacrificial. That is a chilling idea and
nobody likes it. Many find it impossible to
believe. But love could be good for no
other reason. God would not need to
create if he is almighty for he could satisfy himself if he is lonely. And also, if he did, making one free person
would do. Love must be good for it makes
us happy. But it doesn't. Your feelings
cannot be produced if they are not there. Feelings happen to you not
because of you. You could love and the feelings not come. People
assume that free will is for happiness. Free will would disprove the existence of a good God
whether we assume love is for
happiness or not.
If God wants us to be happy and we are able to be happy without free will
then we should not have free will to threaten it. If we have free will it is a punishment for
no reason but to satiate divine insanity and not a blessing. If God is good then we have to be completely
misanthropic and heartless for he wants us to be like him.
Love in the religious sense is not helping others but struggling to do
it. It is not the people that matter but
the struggle for if helping was the most important God would do it himself the
fast way for he has miracle powers. If
it were the people you would be allowed to enjoy helping them and to do it for
pleasure. Love under that understanding
is evil and an unnecessary evil. We
better hope that we do not have free will.
Religion says it is not enough to want to do good but you have to go out
and do it and that that is the way it should be. But the truth is the world
should be in such a state that we would want to suffer to help others if
necessary but have no reason to and that would not make us inferior people in
any sense. If we don't abuse children for
example will God have to do it for us so that we can have the struggle of
helping the victims? The suggestion of theists
that good is good when it is only an intention or will to do good but not fully
good until it is put into action assumes that we should be able to do good
which is not clearly true. True a will
to do good is better if it is carried out in the sense
that it heals a bit of the world but we are saying the world should not need
that healing and it is down to their God that it does. The free willists
are saying you are not as good a person unless you prove your good intention by
carrying it out. Ideas like that suggest that
the cripple is not as useful a person as a person who is not a cripple. The
believers mean that healing
is not important but what you do with the will is what is important. I could be as good as the person who can put
their good into action only if I can't so it is wrong. Being able implies that others should have
problems to enable you to help them which makes no
sense so a good God would be happy enough with our good intention when it is
the best we can do and it should be the best we can do for there should be no
suffering or not much anyway.
If free will is a gift we have from God then that means that God wants us
to make sacrifices for others by loving and wants us to be evil and do evil so
that there will be plenty of opportunity for sacrifice and love when we
repent. Free will implies that there
should be mostly suffering and that it must come to pass one way or the other
and suggests that if we scientifically come up with a way to prevent evil
forever we should shelve it.
We would not need to be free if love were for happiness. If happiness is the goal for us and God approves then we can't have free will. That is because free will is not for happiness. It is not needed for it. If God is good, God would not give free will.
Sacrifices for ourselves are not real sacrifices because we will benefit from them. That's what we are performing them for. What about sacrifices for ourselves and others as well? But then you avoid any sacrificing simply by doing the things you like that will benefit others and get the same results. For example, you could get praise and help the sick to get better if you don't want to do it but pretend that you do. You can get the same results by doing it because you want to and are only doing it to make yourself feel good in which case it is not sacrifice. It is motive that determines if an act is a sacrifice or not. God does not want this: he wants sacrifice so God made us to freely sacrifice ourselves for others selflessly.
Why is sacrifice for love good? Because it makes others happy? But then what about your own happiness? It forbids you and every other person to be interested in your and their own. It is contradictory to say that you should forget about your happiness in order to give it to another person for why them and not you? If you should avoid making yourself happy then it is hate to make another happy. Therefore happiness is more important than love and the free will defence is wrong for saying otherwise and certainly cannot be interpreted as being pro-happiness. Yet the fact that unhappiness is seen as an evil is the reason the defence was made up in the first place. It is all very confusing and very hypocritical and very incoherent.
It is the way people are made that makes them happy. Nobody can just reach out and grab happiness. It happens to them not because of them. Sacrifice is done for its own sake. It is done for the sake of suffering.
When I am more sure that I exist than that anybody else does then to
suffer for others in such a way that I am putting them first and not me is to
refuse to love myself especially when I cannot tell if it is I or they who are
suffering most. I only know what is in
my mind. Love as in free-willed
self-sacrifice for others could not be better than happiness and unfree will when it is impossible in such a situation. It is impossible because you are asking
others not to love you when you try to love them. If they loved you they
would not let you help them. I want to
make them evil so my love is fake. That is evil.
God could not give us free will if he were good. However, it is possible to suffer for others
in such a way that you can still put yourself first but you have to believe
that you come first and not God and so it contradicts the free will defence
which says that God or good comes first.
All martyrs put themselves first anyway except when they are crazy.
You do not choose what is in you that makes doing sacrificial good a
severe pain in the neck and if God cares so much about free will he would say
in person that he wants it to be a pain for you and will then ask you to accept
the pain and will stop it if you tell him to stop. Each person should be on an illusionary
planet on their own with God though they think other people are there too so
that the time will be all spent doing this and accepting the sacrifice if as we
have seen others get in the way. If each
should find goodness difficult then it would be each one helping herself or himself but only to please God and that should be
hard. If God wants us to help one
another then he is degrading us. People
may still suffer but there will be less accidents and people getting caught up
in other people's messes.
Sin is that which should not happen or which is useless. If God gave us free will to sacrifice then
God gave us free will to sin for there is no sacrifice where there is no sin to
cause suffering. Yet the defence says he does not intend that we sin with our
free will. So sin is not useless after
all. Thus belief in the free will
defence encourages sin as long as it is repented later and a sacrifice is made
over it - that's having the best of both worlds isn't it? And the worse the sin the
better to enable others to sacrifice more and to sacrifice more ourselves to
atone for it. When we have free
will all the time we must be meant to sacrifice all the time or to make up for
sin by immense sacrifices now and again and when there is nothing else to do
which requires serious sin to make them possible. The defence is a complete failure. Yet it is supposed to prove that sin and
suffering are not God's fault but ours.
Should people who do wrong, always feel unhappy by the power of God until
they repent? Religion says no for it
will mean that they avoid evil not because it is evil but because it will ruin
their happiness. Unhappiness or the
prospect of it makes it more likely for a person to do wrong. When retribution makes a person sin more,
retribution should be scrapped.
Cancelling retribution is only rewarding a sin when it is cancelled for
nothing. Christianity rejects this
sensible fact. It says that though we would have been trapped in sin
forever had Christ not saved us by his death, God was right not to pardon
without it though it meant an increase of sin so that inhuman creed rejects this
sensible fact. However, God would only have the right to keep
us in sin if he couldn't stop us sinning which he could do even without force if he is
omnipotent. If wrong makes you happy and
right does the same you might as well do right and probably will. But the free will defence says that good has
to be a free willed sacrifice. The sacrifice
doctrine is not worth the sin it causes.
God would have to do without the sacrifice. He should have made us as happy robots when
we cannot sacrifice.
Unhappiness must always be a vindictive and corrupting punishment not
mere retribution for sin if you believe in God.
How else could you explain it then?
It cannot be a sin to do harm in that case or if the harm is permitted
by justice. When you cannot sin by doing
harm then God should not let us be able to harm at all if he is just worried
about free will.
Many think that you should not suffer for it's
own sake but for some good that is worth it.
Suppose you accept your sufferings for God's will.
When you are not as sure that you will live to see the results but are
sure you suffer now for something that means you are willing to suffer and put
a greater certainty before a lesser one.
That means you should suffer for its own sake
and degrade yourself by suffering. But
that is only if you have free will. This
argument proves that God could not give free will even if he wanted to and that
we should all be conscious robots.
God claims to be perfect goodness and therefore the being to be loved
above all things. Free will then would be given so that we can make the
choice between loving God alone or something else in his place. When God implants reason in all mankind and does
not implant the truth that he alone is to be loved and others for his sake only
what is the use of the free will defence when only Christians and Jews know
it? Perhaps everybody should be robots except
Christians and Jews.
Suppose we had no method of proving that love is better than
happiness. We would not be able to prove
that it is worse either. The free will
defence would not be a defence at all in that case. There would then be absolutely no evidence at
all for it and therefore for God. Even
the greatest miracle would not be evidence because there is no evidence for the
free will defence which would be the only thing that could declare it possible
for God to exist for even miracles prove nothing if free will cannot exist or be
believed in.
We should all be happy instead of being free. We see then that if happiness is good and
holy the unhappiness refutes the existence of God.