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

[FrustratedFool]

Everyone always does what they prefer. Literally one hundred percent of the time. It would never be any different. So it's like, we have free will, but only the free will to do what we wanted to do and were going to do anyway. You are always just doing what you prefer to be doing.

I agree. The free will-determinism debate seems totally beside the point to me, because whether we think we're making completely free choices or believe we're just executing our tasks in the grand algorithm, we still have to make decisions about our lives and abide by them.

I think the issue with freewill is the knock-on effects.  

If our behaviours are determined then not only is moral responsibility/morality as most understand it now a redundant concept, but it also means that if we simply build a big enough computer and get enough information about the present we can with 100% accuracy know the entire past and predict the entire future.  

If, however, we think freewill exists then we have a much greater warrant for believing in immaterial minds, souls, God and ghosts etc. as we've already made the leap to assuming that something is free from the cause-effect chain of physics.

Freewill or the lack of it leads to other things, it seems.