When I said that atheism is fatal for a soul, I knew what some reactions will be: “oh, aren’t we supposed to have free will?”
Let me just roll my eyes first before I continue.
Free will is incredibly misunderstood. People think it means that whatever you choose, you’re guaranteed good outcomes. That kind of free will doesn’t exist. Rather, freedom is a dangerous thing where you are allowed to destroy yourself and there’s no safety net, because that would negate your freedom.
Also, people sometimes rightfully think that free will can’t be complete if you don’t actually have options that you would want to choose. Yes, you can’t choose to be immortal, twenty years younger, you can’t choose to go to Mars and see what the weather is like and so on.
In reality, your freedom looks like this: you live in a tall building, and you can go down using stairs, elevator or you can jump through the window. Jumping through the window is definitely an option for you, but choosing it will almost always have a bad outcome. However, if there’s a fire, using the elevator might have the worst outcome because it will stop and you will suffocate, and jumping through the window might save you if the fire department has some sort of a cushion ready for you.
Similarly, you can have multiple bottles. One contains water, the other contains drain cleaner, the third contains hydrocyanic acid, and the fourth contains raw sewage. You have freedom to choose what you will drink, but only one option has a guaranteed good outcome. You can complain that this isn’t really freedom, but tough shit. It is realistic that you will sometimes find yourself in a situation where you have no good options to choose from, or only one good option that you don’t personally like. If you dug yourself into a very deep hole, your options won’t be good, and realistically they are likely to get worse unless a miracle happens. You can say this isn’t justice, but tough shit, that’s what it is. Likewise, for someone who did good things billion years in a row, almost all options are good, great or better. They have options and they can create more options, and their character is such that there’s almost an absolute certainty that they will choose something excellent and have great outcomes. You can say that this isn’t justice, but tough shit – you do great things for a billion years and someone will complain about you having it too good. Until then, feel free to suck it up.
People who assume that freedom means they should have options to choose from are usually children who don’t know how the world works. In order to have options, you have to create them. For instance, if you want to buy good food, you need money. In order to get money, you need a job. In order for that job to pay well enough to actually give you options, you need to be qualified and actually provide a service for others who will want to pay you money for it. Then, as you have money, you have all sorts of options – what car to buy, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, and so on. If you don’t have money, you can wipe your arse with your free will.
The smaller a soul, the more limited their free will. Someone like Goddess can go and create a Universe by snapping her fingers if she feels it’s a good idea. You can’t. You can’t even visit another Universe that someone else created. You’ll probably have difficulties travelling to another continent, let alone world, let alone Universe. No power, no options, no freedom, and your choices are usually not including anything you would actually like. If you’re in something like Ukraine, your options might be between dying from an infection in your apartment, or seeking medical aid and being deported to the front where you will get killed within two days. Some have a choice between begging for food or starving, while someone else might have a choice between filet mignon and grilled salmon. There’s no equality, and there shouldn’t be – there is, however, justice. If you fucked up badly for hundreds of years, don’t expect good choices or good outcomes. For any improvement, you’ll need to work twice as hard as everybody else to have tenth of a result they’ll be having, and that’s if you do everything right, which you likely won’t, because inertia of your many fuckups will condition you to fuck up easily and not fuck up only with great difficulty. If you are a saint who spent hundreds of years doing everything right, continuing to do everything right will come by inertia, and fucking up will be completely counterintuitive and unnatural. Is it “right” that people who fuck up have greater likelihood of a bad destiny, and people who did everything right have greater likelihood of a good destiny? The question doesn’t even pose itself, as equality of outcomes doesn’t exist as a concept in God’s book. Let me repeat: you don’t have a right to have an equal outcome to someone else if you made different choices, because choices are not something foolish like choosing chocolate ice cream over vanilla. If you treat people poorly, they will not like you. Complaining that you had different outcomes from someone who treated people with kindness is foolish.
Also, there’s that question of confession and forgiveness of sin, that Catholics always ask. If you confess a sin and repent for it, and you are forgiven, and then you sin again, and you repent and are forgiven, can you just keep doing that and be safe?
No. Actions have consequences, in a sense that they change you. If you do something bad, and repent, that’s fine, but if you repeat that process for long enough, it means that your act of repentance isn’t genuine and it very quickly ceases to have any meaning, and in fact adds a sin of hypocrisy onto your initial sin, making your situation worse. Also, sin is like carving a path through the woods by the very fact of traversing the woods. Every next time you’re going through the woods, you’ll be more likely to choose the easier path that you already cleared, than to deliberately clear another, alternative path. Basically, sin conditions you the way a magnet magnetises iron. The more you do it, the more likely you are to continue doing it, and even if you choose to repent, the consequences aren’t going to just disappear, and staying on the right path is going to be harder for you than for someone else who did things the right way.
Yes, you can abandon your life of sin and choose another path, the way a river can abandon its usual path and choose another. You tell me how often that happens. So, treat sin the way you’d treat a charged revolver pointed to your head. Free will and having a choice are something that needs to be understood correctly, which means that sometimes you have one actual choice, and the rest of your life might be merely following gravity downhill. You might not have a second chance, and nobody gives a shit whether you think something is just or not. People treat free will as if it’s an ice cream stand, and whatever you choose, it’s going to be either good or great. No. Free will is like seeing a mob spit on some fellow that’s being whipped while carrying his cross to the execution site and you can choose between joining the mob or choosing to be crucified beside that guy, and which choice is easier is going to be determined by the quality of character you developed in your spiritual evolution until that point. One choice is going to have a terrible outcome for you, the other is going to have an excellent outcome, and there are other choices that are going to have various outcomes – you can leave and do nothing, and that’s going to trouble you, and so on, but eventually, you’re going to find yourself in a terrible situation where one choice is fatal, one choice is excellent, and you don’t know which is which. What you’re going to do is hardly random, because people are not equal, and not all choices are equally appealing or repulsive to all people. Your character matters, and your character is the sum of all your prior choices and actions, it’s not something that just happens, and your freedom of choice isn’t unconditional or actually free – it’s conditioned by your character, or, more precisely, by the structure of your soul, which is why losers are more likely to lose in every next iteration, while winners are more likely to win.
Is that fair?
Yes.