CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Free Will is Not a Universal Truth

Friday, February 27, 2009

this entry brought to you by queens of the stone age, "battery acid"


Exactly where does the idea of "free will" in Christianity come from? The concept of God is that he created everything in existence, including our planet, and all the beasts that roam it. But what makes us special, what separates us from the animals is that he granted us free will.

But where does this idea come from? I looked it up. The term "free will" only shows up in the Bible in reference to someone giving up an offering to God in their own freewill, meaning they weren't specifically asked by God to give an offering. Even then, the word only show up in the Old Testament, as giving up offerings to God had come out of fashion in the New Testament.

I've been thinking about it for a while, and the concept of Free Will has been bothering me. I don't mean it's been bothering me in the existential "we have no control of our thoughts or emotions and we are all automatons destined to work in the machine" way, but in a very real, tangible way. I find the concept of free will to be extremely selfish. People-- especially Christians-- talk about free will as if it were a universal truth. Mankind was blessed with free will, they say. This is an extremely convenient statement for someone, especially a white person, here in America to say.

But what about someone living in a caste system, where they are untouchable, destined to scrape shit from the toilets of people higher on the totem pole, socially unable to even look another person in the eye? What about the poor goat farmer in Mongolia who has never been to school, so far away from any other human being but his immediate family, unaware of any sort of life outside of his own? What about the sex slave in Thailand? What about the mentally retarded person living in a cell in Venezuela, bending over and licking the water on the ground that has pooled in the opposite corner of where he shits? What about the person who isn't even mentally retarded, but lives in conditions close to that?

Free will doesn't exist for them in any sense of the term as we now believe it. Their lives are so different than ours their brains are physically wired differently than ours. They don't think about getting up in the morning in the same way we do, they don't think about careers, love, any sort of basic human function except that they need to eat to survive, must somehow cover themselves from the elements, and must, at some point, shit.

But even white people haven't always had anything near what we consider free will. While those living in the Roman and Greek Republics enjoyed relatively free existences, consider serfdom. Not only were the personal feelings, thoughts, and the pursuit of entertainment/joy in a serfs life futile, but he was aware of it. A serf knew exactly what his position in the world was, and he was unhappy with it.

I'm not sure when free will was introduced into Christianity as a concept, but, were I to take an educated guess at it, I would say it probably around the time multiple versions of Christianity started clashing with one another. The term "free will" when it was introduced probably meant that you had complete freedom to believe your version of Christianity or not, and belief in the wrong one meant punishment. But you still had the "freedom" to choose.

And if I'm wrong about the approximate time that the concept of free will was introduced, then when would it have been? The concept of "free will" as we Americans understand it-- the concept of any man or woman believing and pursuing their beliefs, and the right to them pursuing accomplishment and happiness started off as uniquely an American idea, and furthermore, wasn't even cemented to the way we know it until the 1970's, when blacks were able to vote and women were allowed to pursue careers. Even now you could still argue that a Native American living on a reservation doesn't enjoy the same free will you and I do.

Yes, there is of course the science behind free will, and the science behind free will is that it's a concept invented by man, that none of us ultimately has free will, but that's not an attitude that can be taken by the religious at all. When a religious person uses the term free will, what that person specifically means is the definition as it pertains to them, here in America, right now. But how can any person of faith claim that God has blessed humanity with free will, when so much of the population is is essentially in bondage? Perhaps a Christian could claim that Christians are enlightened and are blessed with free will-- and they'd still be wrong, considering the lives of many Christian countries south of America-- but the concept of free will, as some sort of universal thing given to humanity by God, this thing that that separates us from animals, is, honestly, insulting, and completely baseless.
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with love from CRS @ 6:57 AM 

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