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

[ShinyCrystals]

Only if none of it is subjective.  Subjectivity is like piss in the pool.  Once it's in there you can't get it out.  There is no such thing as a fact about a thing that can make it desirable in and of itself.

I guess that's one opinion.  Is it a fact?  Is it free of the piss in your pool?  Mind you, -I- don't demand that you be somehow free of piss in your pool in order for your opinion to be factual.  I think you can probably still communicate at least some facts from a pissy pool.

What purpose do you think is served by pointing them out?  It seems a pointless digression even if you could get clear of the fallacies.  

If you'll recall, the comments of mine that you weighed in on were in response to a position on blame, retributive justice, and free will posed by a guy named Robert Sopalsky.  Another poster had mentioned that positions like his would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Maybe so for retributive justice.  I'd call that part of the bathwater, not the baby.  

Who can we blame for arson?  The arsonist.

How can we justify imprisoning or committing people who commit arson?  To prevent them from starting more fires.  

Why don't we imprison or commit people who haven't committed arson?  Because that won't more prevent fires.  

Why do we imprison or commit arsonists for starting fires when we don't imprison or commit smokers for smoking (drinking, jaywalking, debt, littering, etc).  We do.

I haven't needed free will to explain or justify any of this.  

No, nothing about fires themselves leads to a justification for holding arsonists accountable.  It is solely a fact about a subjective state.  Free will seems necessary if we are to hold people accountable for what are in other people's minds, but you seem to think that lacking an intention relevant to you, I am somehow responsible for what is or isn't in your mind or someone else's mind.  That's why the just so facts necessarily including subjective ones is a problem without free will.

I'll give you a tip.  This all traces back to your being confused about the nature of the moral system you have endorsed.

No one freely wills themselves into a fender bender, but people often pay for it.  I may not want to pay for it.  I may not like paying for it.  However, I can see that I should pay for it.  I did the damage.  I'm responsible.  I'm accountable. 

More than this, as in retributive justice - for example...is, as I stated above, not something that I think is objective or arising from any objective place.  So if you mean "hold you accountable" in some way other than acknowledge that you did it and believe that you should make or be made to make whatever reparations you're capable of.  Hold you accountable as in punish you until I feel better or society feels better - then I wholeheartedly agree.  There's nothing about being an arsonist (freely willed or otherwise, in a world where free will exists or where it doesn't) that objectively leads to those sorts of "justice" schemes.  Honestly, I don't think that they're justice at all, objective, subjective, whatever.  

Bringing me right back around to Sopalsky and Istvans criticism.  I don't think that conceiving of people as essentially bioautomata prevents us from doing a great deal of the effective work our justice system does.  If you take the suggestion seriously you might conclude that if we're being told that a person is in some sense not responsible for the arson they committed (some sense outside of..you know, having themselves committed it) - that all we are is a bundle of compulsions and exterior circumstances and preexisting routines.  That his poor circumstances made him this way - that his shitty life made him this way - that his abhorrent culture made him this way...that's an even better argument for locking a person up than "they just freely chose arson one day" would be.  He's fire starting bioautomata - might wanna put him in a fire retardant cell.  He didn't make a mistake, it wasn't because he was ignorant.  Arson is, apparently, what that person is.  Maybe, if people can be made a certain way, they can also be unmade that way.  A justification for rehabilitation.

I wish to elaborate on the very last thing you said in a way, mainly about a person's life making them the way they are...

First off, I have to agree with what you said, and secondly, if a person's life is shaped by external factors and the environment, wouldn't that make it harder for a person to choose who they want to be? I mean, if people's lives are shaped by things around them, I do not think they can choose freely without getting shaped. In fact, people's lives are shaped by a number of factors, from friends to family to...pretty much anything else. As I said before, people can develop devotions and allegiances to people and even fictional supreme beings to the point that they appear to have no freedom of their own; they just follow what others go with or want them to do. Combined with the shaping of people's lives part, I think that all takes away free will to a significant degree.

Plus, someone said the mind is more deterministic. Now, being free does mean you don't really need others or anything else to do something for you, nor are you dependent on them to do something yourself. As I may have also said before, the mind is something we don't really understand to this day, and with people's lives being shaped by the environment, we seem to be dependent on a lot of things, and behaviors, emotions, overall thinking and the like are shaped by the environment as well.

What I am trying to say, or ask, is...

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?