A thing about religious (and other) people and the illusion of free will

[ShinyCrystals]

Are we truly free, or have free will, when we seem to be dependent on outside factors and the overall environment and when our lives are shaped by those things as well as our minds? Are we truly independent at all, when we may let others shape our lives and even (in terms of some people, like religious people) don't think for ourselves and just follow others like a supposed supreme being?

I don't think we are truly free or have free will.  Traditionally, for us westerners, free will was just an excuse for why our god seemed like such a cunt.  We freely willed all the nasty business - we deserve it, we had it coming.  Same bullshit crept into our legal systems.  Freely chose the homo sex, lets kill em.  Freely chose the wrong religion, lets kill em.  Freely chose to be black, lets kill em.  Freely chose to mock us for our idiocy - you know the drill.  We wash our hands of the blood of the other this way.

The idea that humans are somehow outside of the causal chain, or that each of our decisions is the beginning of an entirely new causal chain is ludicrous on it's face.  It's never not been a silly idea, but it's almost always been a useful one.  Even today, people who assert or acknowledge that we are not free in any of the ways free will demands still think we have one, a compatibilist free will, and that it's meaningful or useful to something.  I think it's just us clinging tightly to an idea that we've been so thoroughly indoctrinated to we're uncomfortable disabusing ourselves of it.  We've internalized all the batshit doom and gloom about how the world would be without a thing that doesn't exist.  How we are without a thing that doesn't exist.  Same exact meltdown the abrahamists have/had over it.

What I find interesting about that...is that free will wasn't even a thing until abrahamism was a state religion.  We were fated.  Our fates are the thing (or one of the things) that god(s) knew.  Theological determinism.  The nuts only got in an uproar about determinism when we figured out that their god wasn't The Determinator.

Now that's what I'm talking about, or was talking about. It would probably be that free will was a mad made concept, in other words, artificial, not occurring in nature. So, with that, free will can't possibly be something that is actually real. Plus, like religion and supreme beings like God, which are thought up by humans and thus fictional; free will is something that was thought up based on a lack of knowledge of how reality works, or in this case, the mind. I do think free will, possibly like fate, was created due to a lack of knowledge of how the mind works in the past, possibly even now.

I also agree on what you said about the idea of humans being outside the causal chain and all being ludicrous. That would be defying physics and causality, would it not? I mean, nothing, not even humans, can be exempt from the laws of reality and physics, or in this case, causality.

As for the first part of what you said about things like "chose to be black, homo, etc., let's kill 'em" stuff, I do think that partly goes with what I said about people's lives being shaped by others and the environment, and how that takes away from free will if it did exist somehow.