Bible: "Free Will"

21 April 2024

No, not an impassioned movement to get Will out of jail.

The ability to choose one’s actions or beliefs has been debated for thousands of years.

Leave aside the ability of a human to “choose God” (and thus contribute to one’s own salvation) as a question too complex to address in a simple letter. See the pillars of the Reformation to begin that conversation. [1,2] Or Augustine, 1000 years before them.

Free will is actually at the root of contemporary ideological struggles.

Personal responsibility has been the basis of civilization since the bronze age. Now, the ideology of the left would like us to believe that humans, be they saints or sinners, have no free will, [3] and hence, no responsibility for their achievements or their crimes.

Hard to say which is more disturbing: that your achievements were not due to your efforts, [4] or that no one is responsible for their misdeeds.

No personal merit, and no guilt. Various popular movements have fully embraced this philosophy, called “Determinism.” The entire Social Justice movement, and the effort to de-criminalize destructive behavior, is based on the idea that every single word and deed is pre-determined; we are slaves to our past. This ideology is hand-in hand with the concept of “My Truth,” which allows proponents to simply deny facts that are contrary to their world view.

Sound crazy? Who could believe such nonsense? Academia and the Left, of course. Just watch the national news.

Loving You,

Grampa Jeff

1. Martin Luther, “The Bondage of the Will.”

2. John Calvin, “The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius.”

3. Robert Sapolsky, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Penguin Press, 2023.

4. President Obama, July 13, 2012, in his famous “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” speech, in which success building a business was purely based on our transportation infrastructures