No soul? No free will and no responsibility then, yet the latter's essential...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Have we done the "atheist lifer" yet?

Atheist doesn't fear an after life. This is all he gets. So he rapes and murders and pulls the tags off mattresses. Then he gets caught and spends the remainder of the only life he gets in prison.

Any wonder believers should be mocked?

[Sal]

Have we done the "atheist lifer" yet?

Atheist doesn't fear an after life. This is all he gets. So he rapes and murders and pulls the tags off mattresses. Then he gets caught and spends the remainder of the only life he gets in prison.

Any wonder believers should be mocked?

IDK, man. I'm of the conviction that people act, as if, they're not gonna die, in my day to day experience. I mean, either you're gonna be busy living or you're gonna be busy dying, as the saying goes. This is the same deal regardless if someone believes in a sky wizard or not.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Have we done the "atheist lifer" yet?

Atheist doesn't fear an after life. This is all he gets. So he rapes and murders and pulls the tags off mattresses. Then he gets caught and spends the remainder of the only life he gets in prison.

Any wonder believers should be mocked?

IDK, man. I'm of the conviction that people act, as if, they're not gonna die, in my day to day experience. I mean, either you're gonna be busy living or you're gonna be busy dying, as the saying goes. This is the same deal regardless if someone believes in a sky wizard or not.

Rational people will disagree with that. Religious people won't.

[HappySkeptic]

If there were some kind of ethereal supernatural "soul" in the picture (for which there is, of course, zero evidence) then perhaps some from of free will would be possible, but for the atheist, it's a simple impenetrable brick wall. No human has free will. And yet,

For society to function in any kind of moral way people need be held responsible for their actions (eg - crime). You frequently hear the line "they did it of their own free will" etc. I say this is the core paradox of being alive in society and that the sooner everybody gets on board with it the better, instead of giving a lame ass shrug and carrying on as normal. Here's my new mantra, to be drilled into my puny, malleable, yielding, fickle mind:

We need be held responsible for our actions, including by ourselves, although in truth the logic and evidence overwhelmingly directs that we are not. This is the fundamental foundation of a modern, atheistic, civilised society, and the bolded bit need be drilled home from infancy.

Yup, it's the mother of all paradoxes, but there we have it, it's....inescapable.

Forty thoughts AF?

The universe does not seem to be deterministic.  It is causal, but some of those causes are pure quantum randomness.

Either way, deterministic or causal-with-randomness, this still does not allow for a strong concept of free will.

True free-will would require an agent that is apart from causality.  Such a thing doesn't even make sense.

Free will is the ability of an entity to make choices based on the situation.

These choices may be chaotic, and thus appear to be more "free", or they may be something that could be predicted with a high degree of certainty, and appear "less free". 

To be able to able to justify punishment for behavior, one only needs to be able to establish that fear of punishment, or social values promoted by punishment, have the ability to affect that choice in most people.