It is amazing to me that "True believers" refuse to even engage in the reasoning which would reveal the fallacies, untruths, and contradictions in their theology. But, in a way I understand it. As a teenager in a Christian church, I was deathly afraid of doing anything that would send me to hell. That is the club that threatens believers.

The concept of free will, is fraught with problems. Whether someone is exercising free will when under the influence of adrenaline and running for their life from a life threatening situation, or if they are doing what they have been programmed by genetics to do. On the other hand, someone could resist the effects of the adrenaline and go the other way, picking up a weapon on the way and take the danger head on. Is one exercising free will and the other not? Or are they both exercising free will? There have been exhaustive tests done with measuring brain waves associated with decision making and some of the conclusions leave one asking is there any actual free will at all. So since God has effectively been made in man's image, the God possibly doesn't have any of this free will either.

The only sources of an individual's free will are the social and political constructs of the society in which he lives. How much free will did "god's chosen people" have when living as slaves in Egypt under the Pharaoh? How much free will did Africans captured and sold by other Africans to slave traders on the beaches of West Africa have when they were chained in the holds of ships and sold yet again to plantation owners in the Americas? If god gave us all free will why did he let it be taken from these and countless other people? Standing in front of an invading army and invoking god's gift of free will never stopped a people from being conquered and enslaved. As many have claimed that the experiment in American Democracy has proved that freedom and individual liberty can only be achieved under such a system we have to take a hard look at the source and quality of that freedom. Maybe once a Daniel Boone could head West and exalt in his free will but was his freedom taken at the expense of the indigenous people whose social orders were upended by the invasion of Europeans that followed? And how "free" are we today living in a corporatist plutocracy? Free will is an ideal to which we should aspire. It was never given to us as a gift, does not exist anywhere of which I am aware, and is relative to other social conditions more horrendous than ours.