THE LIBEL OF FREE WILL
 

The only problem with believing in a good supernatural being who looks after you is that temptation and evil refute his existence. Religion says they do not for they are the result of the abuse of free will or that God allows evil for a purpose which implies that we are free beings and God cannot make us good by snapping his fingers.

We have a will but it is not free.

Free will is the ability to will to do other than what you will to do without you being programmed by your past or anything to do what you do.   It means you can kill a person as well as save them and that you are the cause of the decision you make.  You are not programmed to make the decision in which case you could have done different and in which case it was not a real decision.  If you are programmed then you only think you have made a choice but you could not have done other than what you did. Free will implies that we are responsible for our actions. Free will is the doctrine that you can choose.

 

So free will is the ability to choose.  This makes us think of two ways we might choose.

 

One, You might be able to choose only between different kinds of good.

Two, you might be able to choose good or bad.

 

It is said that only Two can confer moral responsibility for morality is doing the good in preference to the bad.  It is said that if you can only choose good you deserve no reward for you are unable to do evil.  It is said you are not responsible.  But this is nonsense.  Even if we have the power to do evil, we can make it dormant so it is the same as if it is not there at all.  If we can give our baby a cuddle or a rattle we have a choice between two good works.  Are we to say that just because we have those two in our minds and do one of them that we are not responsible?  If we are responsible then a reward is deserved.  So you can have free will without having the power to do evil.

 

We know that the will is not free but is programmed by the past and by the present environment to do what it does so there is no choice and you cannot avoid doing what you do. You only imagine you have a choice. This is called determinism.

Belief in free will is a sickness, an evil concept and a tremendous libel against humanity for it blackens every human being to the core. The fact that there is no evidence in its support proves that it is these on all counts. We conclude then that free will is nothing more than an incitement to hatred for hatred is less likely with its denial – and if you thoroughly disbelieve in it hatred becomes impossible - and the implications of the doctrine could lead to any crime for setting the roots for crime is the biggest crime of all.

Nobody really believes in free will anyway – though they pretend to themselves that they do - and we know we can get on well without the concept. I am most sure of my own existence for I experience myself and my own awareness and nobody else’s. That is obvious. I know that all I see all around me could be a dream. Therefore anything I do, I do it and should do it for myself and nobody else for what I am most sure of comes first. I only help others because it pleases me and when I behave badly it is a sickness because I believed I was doing what would give me the most pleasure and was wrong. I did not intend to do evil so I cannot have a free will to do evil.

To be responsible for an action, I have to know what I am doing the very moment I am doing it. But I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. The moment I will something it is one thought in my mind that makes me do it. I am not conscious of my motives at the moment I decide so I do not know what I am doing. What I know before or after is irrelevant. I cannot be responsible for what I do therefore there is no free will. Feeling free does not mean I am free - an insane person who is not free feels free. We can believe that we are just programmed to feel free but that everything we do is caused by some programming in our mind. It is thought that if I walk down a street reading a newspaper I am not consciously walking for my mind is focused on the newspaper but I am still walking of my own free will so free will can exist without being aware. It’s untrue. Intention is something I have to be aware of. The intention that caused the walking is in the past and it programmed a part of my brain to carry on without it so I am walking of my past but not present will and the present will is what has weight and what counts. Think of it this way. I make a decision now. I know what was thought and done by me before this moment has made this decision happen. But what if the past was an illusion and I only came into existence this very moment with a false memory? The effect would be the same but nobody sees the choice as being free. So when it is all the same then I cannot have free will. When you just observe how things take place in your mind in steps in which you are unconscious of the steps that came before you see that the feeling of being free goes and you see it is only an illusion and a trick of the memory.

Everybody on earth agrees that we only do evil because we think it is good for it is impossible to do evil just because it is evil. Plato and Socrates believed because of this that evildoing is just stupidity. Stupidity is not a crime for it is the lack of intelligence and for some reason our intelligence often fails us. How then can we be to blame if we do wrong? The world answers, “Because we know we can do evil knowing it is wrong”. But we are deluded and it follows that the more evil the act is the more we are deluded and the less responsible we are. The reason we can know something is wrong and still do it is because the intelligence takes into account not just the badness of the act but the need to satisfy one’s own desire. When the desire comes the perception of the intelligence is changed. It does not see the act as bad any more but sees it as desirable and rational. Behind the view that we can be to blame for the evil we do is the fascist notion of who are called “stupid people” being inferior as persons.

All agree that sensible happiness is the desire that is behind everything we do – the wrong kind of happiness – say, through drink or rampant casual sex - is fleeting and leads to more unhappiness. (To have sensible happiness you have to be a strictly rational person which is another reason why error has to be fought.) But we cannot desire God or the lover for themselves. We only desire the happiness we think they will bring. It is not them we want at all. This makes altruism and loving God meaningless. The suggestion that God gave us free will to choose between love of self and the love of him is therefore completely preposterous. People say there are unselfish desires and selfish desires. But desire is just a need for fulfilment and satisfaction so even if you want to see a person happy though it will do nothing for you it will do something for you for you will enjoy its fulfilment. The idea of an unselfish desire is totally and utterly wrong. Instead of trying to repress selfishness as all the world religions want us to do we must make it work for us and for the whole human race.

The believers in God say that God loves us unconditionally and that we must love one another the same. Obviously, if we can’t love unconditionally there cannot be a God for to love X conditionally is to love what they do for us and not X. But unconditional love is not unconditional liking and we prefer to be liked. We prefer people to like us because we give them pleasure and God can’t feel pleasure because he is a spirit. If God gave us free will then it was a choice between unconditional love and evil so it certainly was not between pleasure and pain which implies that divine morality is cruel. In other words, God has made us to make an impossible choice and for the sake of that choice he makes suffering possible.

It is evil to believe in free will because we can live without believing in it and it rouses hatred and grudges and condemnation and revenge so it is an unnecessary evil and should not be believed even if we could be free. Why condemn hate when you sow the seeds for it by teaching that free will is real? It is evil for anybody to tell me I have free will when I am most sure of my own existence for I have no experience that proves I have free will.

Will denial of free will take away guilt feelings? But guilt should not be stopping us from doing evil and then we would still be evil for if it were not for the guilt we would be doing it so we still want to do it. Even if we are free we are only rewarded for things we got through chance so we can deny free will and still give out rewards. We are rewarded for success not merit which is why you cannot take a gold medal off an Olympic medallist who doesn’t have the right attitude to deserve what she or he gets.

As for punishment nobody knows how guilty a person really is or what kind of pressures and disorders led them to commit anti-social acts. All agree that there is something wrong with a person who does evil but they cannot say for sure how guilty this makes them because it could be that since the disorder is forced on us it might force us without us even realising it. Even free will cannot justify the legalised revenge that is one of its attractions.

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 real reason people want to believe in free will is to justify rewards and punishments – and the latter more than anything else. They want to believe that no other force but the person doing the act is the cause of the act for these reasons. First of all, rewards are not given because you have done well. That is only the excuse for them. They are given because people gain selfish delight from your achievements just like you do. So we can retain rewards and deny free will for they only for gratifying the selfishness that we cannot help. As for punishment, keeping the criminal away from society for a while and using the infliction of suffering to cure the criminal are what matters not getting our own back. You only need to believe in free will if you want to believe in revenge. When we can do without belief in free will we should for it forces many people to hate and condemn. At least if we denied free will we could honestly say that if any denier behaves that way that they did it in spite of their knowledge of the non-existence of free will. Rewarding and punishing are not important. What is important is giving people reasons not to do wrong for whether we have free will or not we do everything we do for a reason so we can be trained to do things for the right reasons. Therefore we can forget about the dogma of free will and do it safely.

The only difference between a believer in choice and a non-believer is that the first will believe in reward and punishment which are founded upon the idea of deserving or earning while the latter will believe in neither. But in practice the believer does not reward and punish anyway so there is no difference. Rewards have to do with attaining goals but it is not the goal I care about but the desire to fulfil the goal. It is just the desire. So I cannot deserve the reward any more than a person who only helps his father to get his hands on the father’s money deserves a reward.  This is because I am responding to a desire and desires are just desires.  To reward desire has this problem.  To reward a desire is rewarding the results of the desire and to punish a desire is punishing the result of a desire.  You don’t reward an eye for seeing black and punish it for seeing white.  The desire itself is neither good or bad.  Our desires control us.  When we go against a desire it is only because we have a stronger desire that wants us to enjoy the illusion that we can get away from desire and be free.

 

The law of the land will send you to jail if you commit murder even if you meant well – in which case you only thought you were doing right but this is not punishment for punishment is only for those who have wilfully done wrong and known it. It is possible to believe that murder is right just as it is possible to believe that nobody else exists but yourself. Legalised murder was believed and felt to be right not long ago - when people disagree so much on right and wrong then why not on murder as well? Criminals are made to suffer for a bad action but that is not the same thing as punishment. When even the choice doctrine cannot defend rewards and punishments why should we be afraid to deny the doctrine? We can still reward and control crime without the doctrine just like those who accept it do for these things influence behaviour and we want to help people become good.

We can deny the existence of choice and still give rewards and as for punishment.   We practice much the same thing as believers in choice do except we do not look upon it as paying the criminal back for doing wrong. The reason is that even if we do accept that there is such a thing as free choice we never reward the person’s motives but the outward actions of the person so what difference does it make? None. We can carry on as we would if we did believe.

You cannot reward choices just because they seem to be good choices for you can’t see what a person is really after. The motive behind the choice has to determine if what they did should be rewarded or not. For example, when you reward the winner of a race you are rewarding the outward actions of the person and not the motives for you don’t know them and if they are bad and driven by smug superiority you are not going to be told that. This is not real rewarding for real rewarding is giving back good for doing good with a kind heart. The less you see if a person’s motive is good the less any reward is intended to be a reward for it depends on the extent of your knowledge of the person’s goodness. And we may ponder if it is right to reward somebody for winning a race and not reward somebody who tried harder and failed?

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. Believers in free will don’t really believe in rewards and punishments for they say that evil is insanity for it is thinking what is not good is good so when it is only the effects they worry about why can’t we do the same?

Denying free will does not make the word should obsolete because even if we are machines the word should still applies. We say a printer should print a letter neatly.

A person should do what they want to do for there is no need for anybody running anybody’s life and there should be as little external compulsion as possible.

People only do evil because they are unhappy. Determinism, the denial of free will makes them more understanding of others and themselves so they can press the right buttons in people to make society a better place. To be happy we should rejoice in people and not in material things and in simple things. It is not true that we can’t live a good life without belief in free will. Nobody can prove it anyway, it is blind faith, and still we are okay.

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.

It is commonly presumed that determinism, and we know determinism is true, denies the validity of reason. If we were produced without the agency of an all-truthful God and are programmed by chance it seems that our reason might be unreliable.   It seems it might not have been programmed or set right.  But no matter what we do we are still assuming that our reason is right anyway. We know by experience that reason works. For instance, reason says that if I step into a hole I will fall and experience verifies this so I don’t need circles and assumptions.

 

If you assume that reason is right for a God of total truth exists and made us and it and that God exists for reason says so then you are using circular reasoning.  It is akin to saying that the Devil is God because I feel he is and that my feeling is right for the Devil is God.  You could prove anything with that kind of thinking.  Its called circular reasoning.  Circular reasoning denies the authority of reason.  You are still assuming with circular reasoning that reason is set correctly.  So you might as well assume it without bringing God into it.  The argument of the religionists is making reason depend on the assumption that there is a God. If you say God exists therefore reason is true it gets interesting.  You are just assuming that reason is true because you are assuming God.  You are saying that God exists without reason which is irrational. It would be more reasonable to simply assume that reason is right without bringing a God into it for the God hypothesis is only a guess itself anyway.

It is said that if we were programmed by our past we would make no progress. But in fact the programming might have planted the power to do better than before in us which lies latent until then. A computer that always performs at the same level of efficiency can contain an element waiting to work that makes it improve.  The computer is not free so progress does not refute the denial of free will.

Also if God exists then reason is probably delusion for he made deception and tolerates it and says he cannot abide temptation and has hypocritically made our bodies to tempt us to sin.

We can only do what we feel or think is good, so evil is a sickness that commands our concern and compassion as much as any other sickness does. Evil is not a sign of strength but of weakness. Evil is not a sign of cleverness but of foolishness.

It is evil to believe in free will because we can live without believing in it and it rouses hatred and grudges and condemnation and revenge so it is an unnecessary evil and should not be believed even if we could be free. Why condemn hate when you sow the seeds for it by teaching that free will is real? It is evil for anybody to tell me I have free will when I am most sure of my own existence for I have no experience that proves I have free will.

Most people keep up the lie that we are free agents because it gives them an excuse for wanting their pound of flesh and we all suffer from the conditioning of society and religion that makes us that vicious. People are eager to believe that what they are they have become through their own free choice. They may not realise it but it is true.